The outlook for air travel keeps improving.
Late Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration announced it would reduce the number of flights airlines would have to cancel at the nation’s busiest hubs.
Starting Saturday morning, airlines will only have to trim 3% of departures at 40 major airports across the country.
To be clear, that will still likely mean a few hundred daily flight cancellations this weekend.
But it’s a big improvement from the 6% of flights that carriers were supposed to scrap on Friday — and the 10% of flights airlines would’ve had to cut if the government shutdown hadn’t come to an end.
During the final week of the shutdown, the FAA implemented mandatory flight cancellations to alleviate the burden on air traffic control facilities, which battled short staffing as controllers went weeks without pay.
But staffing — and flight numbers — got dramatically better this week, especially as the government officially reopened on Wednesday night.
On Thursday, the FAA reported just four so-called “staffing 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.
It’s an encouraging sign with just a week to go until the unofficial start of the Thanksgiving travel rush, which airlines had projected to be a record-breaker.
Read more: Government reopens: Can air travel recover in time for Thanksgiving?
We should point out: while airlines were technically supposed to cut 6% of flights at 40 major airports on Friday, FlightAware data shows the cancellation rates were actually far lower.
According to FlightAware, airlines canceled roughly 2% to 3% of departures at big hubs like Chicago’s 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 continued to offer flexible travel waivers while the FAA's restrictions were in place. It's likely carriers will restore more normal ticket policies once the restrictions end.
Airlines seemed to anticipate the FAA would relax its restrictions a bit. As of 5:30 p.m. EST, carriers had only canceled around 160 flights for Saturday, per FlightAware.
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