Northwest Airlines said Tuesday it is trimming its domestic flight capacity by an additional 1 percent in August to reduce the number of hours pilots must fly and prevent another surge in flight cancellations like that experienced at the end of June.
The Eagan-based carrier, which canceled more than 1,000 flights in the last week of June, announced earlier that it would cut its August capacity by 3 percent.
Chief Executive Doug Steenland said in a letter to employees that domestic pilots will fly a maximum of 86 hours next month, compared to 88 or 90 hours in June.
Here's a letter from Doug Steenland that was posted on NWA's employee website yesterday:
July 24, 2007
Dear Colleague:
In response to the operational difficulties we experienced during the latter part of June, I sent a note to all of you on June 29, describing the problem and outlining the initial steps Northwest was taking in response so that our customers would receive the reliable service they expect and deserve.
In this letter, I would like to tell you of the additional measures we are taking to provide more assurance that NWA will operate reliably in the months ahead. Also, I again would like to express my gratitude to you for your professionalism, hard work and commitment to meeting our customers’ needs.
Here is an update on our efforts:
• As previously announced, we have canceled our 757 second Detroit-Frankfurt frequency, effective July 18. Our opportunity to further change the July schedule was limited by the fact that this month’s flights had been bid by pilots and flight attendants when operational difficulties became apparent in the latter part of June. However, we did some thinning of the July schedule and provided advance notice of schedule changes to our passengers.
• Regarding our experience in July, the operation in July is running better than June. For the period July 1 to July 23, as we will report to the U.S. DOT, Northwest completed 97.9 percent of its scheduled mainline domestic flights. Including regional carrier flights, Northwest completed 98.2 percent of scheduled domestic flights. Internationally, on trans-Atlantic flights, we completed 99.6 percent of our scheduled flights; in the trans-Pacific, the completion factor was 98.9.
• As you know, over the last weekend, we had an increase in cancellations from our July-to-date experience with 51 flights canceled on Saturday and 58 canceled on Sunday. Of these cancellations, 20 on Saturday and 16 on Sunday were related to aircraft out of service for maintenance. Unfortunately, we had one of those unpredictable spikes in aircraft out of service. Our Tech Ops team has been working hard to get the number of aircraft out of service back within normal parameters. For more information on pilot staffing, please see the letter that Tim Campbell, VP – Flight Operations, sent to pilots last Friday. (Click here or visit http://www.corp.nwa.com/NewsCenter/HomePag..._All_Pilots.pdf to view the letter.)
• For August, we previously had announced a reduction of 3 percent of domestic mainline capacity. To create additional reserves and reduce the maximum number of hours that our narrowbody pilots will be asked to fly during August, we further reduced the month’s schedule by an additional 1 percent. The maximum hours for all narrowbody aircraft pilots in August will be 86, as compared to 88 or 90 hours in June.
• Beginning in August, we are reducing the number of long trips in certain fleet types and changing the way we build trips to and from large East Coast cities. This will minimize the impact on the entire system when delays occur due to bad weather and air-traffic control congestion.
• We are using spare international widebody aircraft on domestic routes. This brings additional capacity into our domestic network.
• As of Aug. 1, all furloughed pilots wishing to return to Northwest will have received their official training date. Our training facility for recalled pilots is operating at capacity. The recall activity, coupled with the reduced schedule, has produced some of the highest numbers of reserve pilots in recent history.
• Once we have recalled all the eligible pilots from furlough, we will begin hiring new pilots. We are already in the process of updating our Careers Web site and increasing the efficiency of our pilot-hiring process. Our Web site is now inviting interested pilot candidates to submit an online profile, the first step in the application process.
• We have improved processes and technology to make customers aware of flight changes as far in advance as possible. For example, our automatic messaging technology can now contact up to 5,000 passengers per hour. By the end of this week, thanks to these automated tools and the work of our reservations employees, all passengers affected by schedule changes through the end of August will have been rebooked and notified.
• During periods of heavy passenger re-accommodation, we have frozen any technology changes that might impact the operation, and we have increased the processing and storage capacity of our systems that handle passenger re-accommodation, crew systems and nwa.com, ensuring that those systems can deal with the increased volumes.
The senior management team and I are focused on doing our best to make the operation reliable. Again, I thank you for your hard work and dedication, and for your continued focus on delivering excellent service to our customers.
