It’s showtime!

Our busiest, most important travel season of the year is days away: summer. Here's a note I shared with our #AATeam earlier today recapping why we're ready and our April results.

Fellow team members,

Summer peak is almost upon us!

Our flying is increasing and, excitingly, we begin service next week between PHL and Nice, France (NCE), one of three new European markets we’re serving this summer . Getting to this point has been a tremendous undertaking for our team members, partners and vendors, both inside and outside of the Operations team.

And, I’m pleased to say: we’re ready.

For many months, we’ve been laser-focused on preparations to ensure this summer goes smoothly. Whether it’s preparing our aircraft with offseason reliability visits, leveraging innovative tools like HEAT to navigate our operation through severe weather and ensuring we’re properly staffed, along with our vendors and partners, it’s been a team effort. And, our Facilities Maintenance team has been hard at work readying the air conditioning systems we use for peak summer demand. I’m particularly excited about the strides we’ve made at DFW to keep our aircraft even cooler during the hot summer months by significantly increasing the number of higher capacity pre-conditioned air units at our gates — a big win for customer and team member comfort and operational reliability.

But before we dive into the summer season, let’s take a brief look back at April, a month of strong operational performance despite a disruptive all-day storm at DFW April 20, which singlehandedly drove many of our total cancellations for the month.

• Minimizing cancellations: Despite the DFW weather — and significant weather in MIA, CLT and other key hubs — we still saw our best-ever April for combined completion factor and controllable completion factor. We ended the month with eight mainline, 11 regional and three combined zero-cancel days.
• Running an on-time operation: Our on-time arrivals (A+14) were 1.3 points better than in April 2023.
• Caring for checked baggage: Our baggage handling performance continues to shine, with last month being our best April mishandled baggage rate (MBR) since 2018. That strong performance extends to many of our hubs: DFW had its best April MBR since 2018, with a 19% year-over-year improvement, while CLT beat its MBR goal by 9%. MIA, ORD and PHL also saw their best ever-April MBR (excluding 2021).

We plan to welcome millions of travelers this summer, many of whom might not be regular travelers. It’s important that we work together to make a strong impression on all of them, from our frequent flyers to those who might be traveling with us for the first time. They are why we fly, and, importantly, key to our collective success as an airline this summer.

If I leave you with one thing before summer, I hope it’s this: Nothing is more important than safety. While I am confident we’ll run both a safe and a reliable operation, if you see something that doesn’t look right, you need to say something, and more importantly, you need to do something.

Stay safe and welcome to summer!

David