Spirit Airlines FIFTH Straight Day Of Flight Cancellations

Spirit Airlines cancellations are poised to enter FIFTH straight day after the budget airline canned more than 449 of its flights on Thursday

Beleaguered budget airline Spirit is poised to enter its fifth day of mass cancelations Friday after axing more than half of its flights Thursday. The airline cancelled 449 or 56 percent of its scheduled flights Thursday and has already cancelled 179 or 23 percent of its total flights for Friday, according to Flight Aware. Overall the airline has cancelled more than 1,700 flights since Sunday, as the airline struggles to overcome what its CEO said has been a problem that had been building for some time. In a call with reporters Thursday night Spirit CEO Ted Christie said that a combination of factors, including staffing shortages and bad weather had led to chronic delays throughout July, which had in turn led to crews timing out, or reaching the maximum amount of time they could legally work per day. We couldn't get in front of it,' he said, according to CNBC, and he estimated the cancellations likely affected tens of thousands of Spirit customers. He said it was too early to tell how it might affect the company financially 'When we reach this level of disruption, being able to recover does require a lot of resources, we're not built to deal with this level of disruption and I think there's some learning in there about how we might create more variability in staffing so that a we can deal with it,' he said in an interview with ABC. 'When we started canceling our crew got dislocated throughout the system. They were in the wrong places at the wrong time. And we needed to start to build that puzzle back together again. And unfortunately that takes our group a lot of time to do.' Source