United Airlines on Thursday shared more information about its plans to fix its Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) hub. The airport saw a rash of cancellations at the end of June amid an operational meltdown following severe weather.
Speaking during the airline’s second-quarter earnings conference call, CEO Scott Kirby said the airline was doing “more than ever” to mitigate the “very real operating constraints that exist” at the airport regardless of the weather.
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The airline will follow four “new initiatives” to improve the New York operation, airline president Brett Hart said. It will reduce the total number of flights and move some scheduled flights to off-peak hours; open six new gates in Terminal A; adjust aircraft schedules to have more aircraft operate “out and back” instead of following a line of flying on a given day, thus avoiding a cascade of disruptions throughout the rest of its network; and start “increasing our resources” in crew scheduling and accelerating the introduction of various automated and tech-based tools.
The airline is also continuing to lobby for a Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that “equips the FAA with the resources, tools and funding they need,” Hart said. He was referring partly to an ongoing air traffic controller shortage that has slowed the airspace around New York City this summer.
Executives were otherwise fairly quiet on details. However, they noted that while a typical summer sees 435 flights per day from Newark, it plans to get that down to about 390 by August.
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United’s Newark hub has long existed in a difficult balance, with airspace restrictions, a geographic vulnerability to certain types of storms and limited space to operate frequently leading to delays.
Hart said three-quarters of the airline’s total cancelations during the second quarter could be attributed to 25 different days of severe weather, including at other hubs.
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Nevertheless, the airline has doubled down in Newark, citing it as a prime location for an international gateway; it benefits from both local demand in and around the New York City region, and from connecting flights from elsewhere across the country.
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Even with the changes to how it operates in Newark, the airline does not plan to reduce the status of that hub, executives said. Instead, it plans to continue its “United Next” plan. Among other things, this would see the airline operate fewer flights on some short-haul routes but with bigger planes, carrying the same number of passengers or more.
“United Next always contemplated that the only way to grow in Newark was upgrading from regional to mainline flying,” chief commercial officer Andrew Nocella said. “While we need to cut departures more than planned, we don’t believe these changes will impact our long-term capacity at Newark due to the use of larger aircraft.”
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During the weeklong period from June 24 to July 4, United canceled nearly 3,400 mainline flights — 15.7% of those scheduled, according to FlightAware. It delayed 8,771 — nearly half — even as competitors were able to quickly recover from sporadic but intense storms that socked the Northeast during the last weekend of June.