American Airlines announced that it will fundamentally change the way it operates at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), its largest hub.
More than 30 percent of all daily connecting customers and daily connecting checked bags travel through the airline’s hometown airport. Now the airline is investing millions of dollars to fortify DFW.
For more than a decade, American’s schedule at DFW has been concentrated across nine banks, or large clusters of flights across the operating day. Like with other airlines’ schedules, this times large groups of flights together, coordinating arrivals and departures, and allowing for quick and seamless connections.
Beginning in April, and visible in the airline’s schedules starting December 27, American’s DFW operation is evolving to a 13-bank structure, providing more certainty to the airline’s average 100,000 peak daily customers traveling on the more than 930 average peak DFW daily departing flights.
“As the operating environment and our customers’ expectations have evolved in the last 10 years, our approach at our largest and most impactful hub must also evolve,” said Jim Moses, SVP of DFW Operations. “We’re making this significant shift while maintaining the same breadth, depth and schedule quality our customers expect and depend on. That means good things for American’s customers, our team members and just about everyone who depends on the airline.”
With this structural schedule change, customers will have improved early-morning departure times. They will also experience more departure options in highly desired time windows and fewer early morning departures to DFW.
These changes are on top of a number of other investments in American’s Flagship hub, including Terminal A and C Pier extensions adding nine incremental gates; expanding the airline’s DFW footprint with the addition of Terminal F; streamlining the airport security experience; and reimagining traffic flow.
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