United Airlines to Reduce Flight Schedule at Newark Airport

On the heels of already reducing its summer schedule at Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR), United Airlines is cutting back on the number of flights from its largest East Coast hub.

How severe are the cuts? It depends on how you look at it.

United normally runs about 430 flights per day out of Newark. In March, United and other airlines were asked by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to cut back their summer schedules to help combat the pilot and air traffic controller shortages.

United complied and cut back its schedule from about 430 daily flights to 409. Now the airline has further trimmed its schedule to 390 flights per day in the month of August.

“We’ve already started to improve the work experience for our people and the travel experience for our customers,” United CEO Scott Kirby said during Thursday’s Q2 earnings call.

United, by the way, made more than $1 billion in profits in the second quarter. It might have been even higher if not for an operational meltdown at Newark in the last week of June that saw United cancel or delay almost 73 percent of its flights.

It is not known if the cutbacks will last into the fall. Many experts suspect that it will take United several months to marry up its capacity with that of the confines of the airport.

United’s senior vice president of global network Patrick Quayle said that the carrier is not rethinking its international network from Newark but left unsaid whether or not United will cut its domestic routes from the airport.

United has six more gates to use at Newark, so it will be interesting to see whether those gates are utilized for domestic flights or international.