American Airlines cancels 933 flights

More flight cancellations are expected as inspections continue.

DALLAS (AP) — American Airlines canceled more than 900 flights Thursday to fix faulty wiring in hundreds of jets, marking the third straight day of mass groundings as company executives offered profuse apologies and travel vouchers to calm angry customers.

A spokesman said the cancellations would go into Saturday.

Other carriers operating similar aircraft also left passengers scrambling for alternatives as they also grounded flights to inspect the wire bundles at the heart of a renewed safety crackdown by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Alaska Airlines canceled 11 more flights early Thursday as it continued to inspect its nine MD-80 jets. Spokeswoman Caroline Boren in Seattle said that follows 28 cancellations on Wednesday and three on Tuesday. The airline was working to accommodate affected passengers, she said.

Midwest Airlines canceled at least 10 flights Thursday after it grounded all of its 13 MD-80 planes to deal with the same issue. Spokesman Mike Brophy said federal regulators cleared the planes to fly, but airline executives decided they should be re-inspected by Midwest personnel.

Delta Air Lines was likely to ground “a handful of flights” Thursday but was expecting “minimal cancellations and minimal customer impact,” spokeswoman Betsy Talton said. The carrier operates 117 MD-80 series planes.

The problems could be just beginning. The latest checks are part of a second phase of audits being carried out by the FAA, which came under pressure from lawmakers after its inspectors were found to be too lax with Southwest Airlines Co. last year. That round of inspections runs through June 30.

American, the nation’s largest carrier, said Thursday it had cancelled 933 flights for the day. The airline has now scrubbed nearly 2,500 flights since Tuesday, when federal regulators warned that nearly half its planes could violate a safety regulation designed to prevent fires. That’s more than one in three flights canceled over the last three days.

American estimates that more than 100 passengers would have been on each of those canceled flights. That means a quarter-million people have been inconvenienced this week.

Tim Wagner, a spokesman for American, said the cancellations would extend into Saturday, but said it was too soon to know how many flights would be dropped today or Saturday.

A return to normal operations depends on how quickly mechanics can inspect and fix the wire bundles.

American’s executive vice president Daniel Garton apologized for the snafu and vowed that the airline would fix the problem this time.

“We simply cannot put our customers through this again,” he said.

Garton added that for American, “this certainly couldn’t have come at a worse time.” The Fort Worth-based airline faces record fuel prices and fear of a recession, and analysts forecast that its parent, AMR Corp., lost more than $300 million in the first three months of the year.

American declined to say how much it would spend on $500 travel vouchers and hotel rooms for stranded travelers and overtime for mechanics, or how much revenue it would lose by putting some displaced customers on other airlines. But Garton said it would be “significant.”