American Airlines adds hundreds of cargo-only flights in September to make up for lost revenue

American Airlines plans to more than double its cargo-only flights in September, putting some of its underutilized planes to use during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fort Worth-based American said it will increase to 32 cargo-only routes during the month totaling more than 1,000 flights. American has been steadily increasing its cargo-only deliveries since March, when it launched the flights for the first time in decades. So far, the company has moved about 45 million tons of goods, often to overseas destinations such as Shanghai and Frankfurt, Germany reported the Dallas Morning News.

Combined with passenger flights on widebody jets that carry cargo, American will fly about 2,200 cargo flights in September.

“We didn’t have a playbook. We’d never done this before,” said Maulin Vakil, American’s director of cargo customer care, in a statement. “We began to explore how much cargo we could take if we couldn’t transport passengers.”

Before the pandemic, American Airlines hadn’t run a cargo-only flight since 1984.

The increase in cargo-only flights includes daily trips from DFW International Airport to foreign destinations such as Beijing, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris and Madrid. There are also cargo-only flights from DFW to Rome and Dublin, Ireland, that operate twice a week.

Source: Dallas Morning News