- Spirit Airlines canceled 51% of its Thursday flights, marking the fifth day of troubles for Spirit.
- The disruptions come despite Spirit's reassurance that cancellations would start falling Thursday.
- Spirit has said it's dealing with issues like "weather, system outages, and staffing shortages."
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Spirit Airlines has barreled into its fifth consecutive day of widespread flight cancellations.
The low-cost carrier canceled more than half of its flight schedule for Thursday, according to FlightAware. In total, 402 of its flights for the day, or 51% of its Thursday schedule, were canceled as of this writing.
The new flight disruptions come despite Spirit's reassurance that cancellations would begin to fall on Thursday. Spirit had told Insider on Wednesday that it was "pleased to share that cancellations will start dropping tomorrow."
Spirit had canceled 343 flights on Wednesday, as of that morning.
"We've dealt with overlapping operational challenges including weather, system outages, and staffing shortages that caused widespread irregularities in our operation and impacted crew scheduling," Spirit told Insider at the time. "These issues were exacerbated by the fact that we are in peak summer travel season with very high industry load factors and more limited options for Guest re-accommodations."
The carrier added: "We've implemented a more thorough reboot of the network, allowing us to reassign our crews more efficiently and restore the network faster."
Spirit canceled 429 flights on Tuesday, roughly 61% of its flight schedule for the day. On Monday, the airline canceled around 275 flights, or 35% of its flights for the day.
Roughly 19% of Spirit's Sunday flights were also canceled, according to The New York Times.
Aside from the cancellations, many more Spirit flights were delayed in the past few days.
The company told Insider on Monday that its issues over the weekend were the result of "weather and operational challenges." Spirit also said at the time that it "needed to make proactive cancellations to some flights across the network."
American Airlines has also suffered many cancellations in recent days. The carrier canceled roughly 15% of its Monday flight schedule, 12% of its Tuesday flight schedule, and 3% and of its Wednesday flight schedule. On Thursday, the company's cancellations fell to just 1% of its flight schedule as of this writing, according to FlightAware.
American told Insider on Monday that its cancellations and delays were "mainly due to weather and ATC [air traffic control] impacts at DFW Airport, including two ramp closures yesterday and a ground stop earlier today related to ongoing weather-recovery efforts."
Spirit Airlines did not respond to Insider's request for comment about Thursday's flight cancellations.
