American Airlines, slow off the dime in its moves to protect its business compared to United and Delta, already began major capacity cuts in response to the administration's ban on non-U.S. residents entering the country if they've been to Schengen Area countries of Europe within the past 14 days.
With the government extending that restriction to the U.K. and Ireland, and with demanding drying up more and more each day, they've now taken things a step further. They are reduce international capacity by 75% year-over-year. Ostensibly this will apply March 16 to May 6, but many of these cuts will almost certainly last longer.
The airline had already announced plans to accelerate retirements of its Boeing 767 and 757 fleets. There won't be a reason now to extend the life of Embraer E-190s that had been planned for retirement. And in the past few days they had been sending other planes - such as Airbus A330s - out to storage.
Now they'll be parking a majority of their widebody jets and they've announced there will be only three long haul international routes left in their system.
American's short haul international routes, to "Canada, Mexico, Caribbean, Central America and certain markets in the northern part of South America" will continue (for now).
Domestic service will reduce 20% in April and 30% in May, though here too I wouldn't be surprised to see additional cuts.
Internationally these changes mean American is suspending Sydney and Auckland (just 12 days before it was scheduled to end seasonal service anyway) on Monday.
It means suspending London flying from New York JFK, Boston, Chicago O'Hare and LAX over the course of the next week (they had already eliminated other London flights). Europe flights to Charlotte, Philadelphia and Phoenix are all gone because these airports aren't approved to receive flights - the U.S. government was supposed to be checking passengers on arrival although instead they've been pursuing an unintentional herd immunity strategy. Final Eastbound flights are Sunday, and final Westbound flights Monday.
Other Europe routes are gone, and seasonal routes are delayed ""through early May, or later."
Also on Monday American is suspending:
And if slot waivers relaxing rules that require an airline to operate their routes or give up the right to do so later are granted then we will see even more cuts.
Here's the detail American is providing on their international schedule changes. You can see the full changes filed so far by American, including its domestic network, and by other airlines here.
This will not be the end of the route cutbacks. There almost certainly will be employee furloughs unless circumstances change. My sympathy goes out to everyone that's affected.