Another day, another horrible milestone in terms of oil prices as the price of a barrel of crude shot up today more than $5 a barrel. In intraday trading the price hit $140.39, but when the markets closed here in the U.S., oil futures closed at $139.64, up a whopping $5.09 for the day.
The news comes as we hear of 8% cuts in management employees at American Airlines, in addition to flight cuts at both American Airlines and United Airlines.
And not too long after these cuts were announced, Southwest Airlines came out and said it had modified their fall schedule — picking up a lot of the pieces that were just discarded by the legacy airline pair.
American said Wednesday that it plans to eliminate 62 flights at Chicago O’Hare: 28 departures on mainline American Airlines flights and 34 flights on American Eagle.
By November, American’s presence at Chicago O’Hare will be down 13%, year over year.
The airline is also pulling back flights out of St. Louis, Dallas-Ft.Worth, and New York’s LaGuardia.
American is ending service completely to Albany, N.Y.; Providence, R.I.; Harrisburg, Pa.; San Luis Obispo, Calif.; Samana, Dominican Republic; and Barranquilla, Colombia.
Meanwhile, United announced that it was ending service to Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.
Today, Southwest Airlines followed-up on these announcements by announcing that it will eliminate 31 flights from its existing schedule and add 40 flights to growth markets. This will see the airline not retiring two aircraft that it had said previously it was going to retire.
Big winners in the new schedule? Denver and ….Ft. Lauderdale.