The outlook for air travel continues to improve.
Late Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration announced it would reduce the number of flights airlines would have to cancel at the country’s busiest hubs.
Starting Saturday morning, airlines will only have to cut 3% of departures in 40 major airports cross country.
To be clear, that will probably mean a few hundred daily flight cancellations this weekend.
But it’s a big improvement over the 6% of flights that airlines were supposed to cancel on Friday, and the 10% of flights that airlines would have had to cut if the government had shut down. It had not come to an end.
During the last week of the shutdown, the FAA implemented mandatory flight cancellations to ease the burden on air traffic control facilities, which struggled with staffing shortages as controllers went weeks without pay.
But staffing (and the number of flights) improved dramatically this week, especially when the government officially reopened Wednesday night.
On Thursday, the FAA reported only four so-called “personnel triggers” at air traffic facilities, the FAA said. Last Saturday there were 81, on what turned out to be a day of Mass chaos at airports.
The Trump administration said it would monitor staffing and flight performance over the weekend before potentially allowing airlines to operate their full schedules next week.
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It’s an encouraging sign with just a week left until the unofficial start of the peak Thanksgiving travel season, which airlines had projected would break records.
Read more: Government reopens: Can air travel recover in time for Thanksgiving?
We should note: While airlines were technically supposed to cut 6% of flights at 40 major airports on Friday, FlightAware data shows cancellation rates were actually much lower.
According to FlightAware, airlines canceled approximately 2% to 3% of departures at large hubs such as Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD), Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), and Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), among many others.
Flight delays on Friday were also just a fraction of what we saw last weekend.
Most airlines cIt continued to offer flexible travel exemptions. while FAA restrictions were in effect. Airlines are likely to reinstate more normal ticket policies once restrictions end.
Airlines seemed to anticipate that the FAA would relax its restrictions somewhat. As of 5:30 p.m. EST, airlines had only canceled about 160 flights for Saturday, according to FlightAware.
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