American Airlines Cancels 922 More Flights

CHICAGO — American Airlines, updating its effort to get the company’s fleet of 300 MD-80 planes flying again, said it had canceled 922 flights so far on Thursday and was making progress inspecting and fixing wiring bundles in the planes’ wheel wells.

Passengers waited in lines at an American Airlines ticket counter at OHare International Airport in Chicago on Wednesday.

The airline said 80 planes were back flying by Thursday morning, compared with 60 in service late Wednesday. By 4 p.m. Thursday, American said it expected to have 120 back in service, or 40 percent of the fleet, which is the airline’s domestic work horse.

And by Friday night, American said it expected to have 180 in service with the entire 300 planes operating by Saturday night.

Dallas/Fort Worth and O’Hare International in Chicago, American’s two biggest hubs, were calmer this morning, apparently a sign the airline and media coverage had informed many people that their flights were canceled, saving them a trip to the airport. The airline canceled 269 flights out of Dallas-Fort Worth and 123 at O’Hare airport in Chicago on Thursday. The airline had canceled a total of 460 flights on Tuesday and 1,094 flights on Wednesday, stranding thousands of travelers and affecting the plans of more than 100,000 people.

Shares of the AMR Corporation, the parent of American Airlines, which closed down $1.15 on Wednesday at $9.17, closed up 70 cents Thursday to $9.87.

In addition to American, Alaska Airlines said it had returned 7 of its 9 MD-80 jetliners to service Thursday after adjusting the spacing of ties, tape and clamps that hold together wiring bundles and attach them to the inside of wheel wells on the planes.

Work is still being done an on eighth MD-80 and the ninth is out of service for maintenance unrelated to wiring bundles.

Alaska canceled 11 flights Thursday, after canceling a total of 31 flights over Tuesday and Wednesday. The airline is in the process of phasing out the MD-80s and converting to an all-Boeing 737 fleet. It has 115 large jets in all.

At O’Hare on Thursday morning, American Airlines employees were stationed throughout the terminal handing out Nutrigrain cereal bars and small plastic cups of orange juice as they directed customers to the proper locations.

The cancellations had tripped up even the savviest business fliers. Liz Valletti, a project manager for I.B.M., knew about the inspections and had chosen American this week because it had already suffered F.A.A.-ordered groundings two weeks ago.

She was surprised to see it happen again.

She was originally scheduled to leave O’Hare at 7:15 p.m. Wednesday to fly home to Tampa, Fla. That flight was canceled. She was rebooked on a Thursday flight at 11:50 a.m. Again, canceled.

Using a travel agent at American Express, she was able to find a 5:57 p.m. Thursday flight to Tampa on United Airlines. Now there might be weather delays, she said as she used her foot to shove her luggage ahead in the ticketing line.

Plenty of people heard about the problems, called American, but were not told their flight would be canceled. Paul Papillon, 52, had taken a day off work at his job as a senior financial analyst for Clarion Health to drive his wife, Marie, her sister and mother to OHare for their 10:25 a.m. flight Thursday to Albuquerque.

He called the airline Wednesday night after he heard the news of the mass cancellations, then called again Thursday morning. The flight was still on, he was told. It was not until the family had driven the hour from their home in Waukegan, Ill., and was standing staring up at the computer screens in the terminal that they learned the flight had been canceled.

The women finally got on another flight, at 7:30 p.m., but fearing it, too, might be canceled. Mr. Papillon was staying close to the airport in case he needed to come get them.

“I’ll be on standby close by in case this one gets canceled,” he said.

Road warriors, even in the worst of airline meltdowns, seem to adjust and find someplace to work.

Last week, Sara Martinez, 43, sat in a St. Louis airport terminal with her Blackberry trying to do work after American canceled her flight back home to San Antonio because of a maintenance problem. She eventually got home later in the day.

On Thursday, she was forced to repeat the experience. Blackberry in hand, she tried to get some work done and make plans for how she would spend an unexpected day in Chicago after the airline again canceled her flight home.

She travels once a week for her job as a director of community relations so she knows the drill. Get to the airport early, stake out a place where she can sit down and make calls before her flight, travel light.

After watching news reports about the mass cancellations, she anticipated her flight might be canceled, but hoped to get on a later flight. Her strategy was to get to the counter early to get a jumpstart on landing a seat on another plane. The best she could find was a 7 p.m. flight on Southwest Airlines out of Midway Airport. So, she was headed back into the city to visit friends before heading across the city to the other airport.

Travelers are having difficulty finding seats on other flights, either on American or on rival carriers, because the airline industry is running more than 80 percent full these days. Phone lines into the American reservation system were overburdened for much of Wednesday and the ticket counters at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport and at O’Hare International in Chicago, the carrier’s two main hubs, were swarmed. The airline posted information about how to obtain compensation for canceled flights on its Web site, www.aa.com.

Contributing reporting were Micheline Maynard from Detroit, Matthew L. Wald from Washington, Colin Moynihan from New York, Crystal Yednak from Chicago and Marina Trahan Martinez from Dallas.

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