3000 cancelled flights and growing: US Air under siege

3000 flights of American Airlines were cancelled this week – 570 on Friday!  Alaska Airlines, Midwest Airlines and Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines joined the wave, each canceling a small number of flights on MD-80 aircraft on Thursday.

The CEOs must be happy!  See, they can’t make profits anyways.. so now they have someone to blame for it and take their millions of dollars of bonuses while everyone (passengers, shareholders, tax payers) lose!  Here is Mr. Arpey preparing ground for it:

American CEO Gerard Arpey said Thursday that the cancellations will cost the airline “in the tens of millions of dollars.” Analysts say the toll could easily be that, and perhaps much more.

In an already useless airlines, the losses would be terrible!

Besides lost revenue from the canceled flights, American also was giving $500 travel vouchers to an unspecified number of inconvenienced passengers and putting some travelers up in hotels. There also could be transportation costs to and from hotels, extra overtime for employees and the long-term costs of losing goodwill among customers.

Do they give those things any more when the flights get delayed normally?