November 17, 2025
Effective today, the FAA has stopped requiring airlines to reduce flight schedules and United has resumed our regular schedule and will operate at full capacity. Thank you to our customers for your patience as all airlines worked through these recent reductions.
When this started, we knew that it would create challenges and uncertainty for our customers and our crews. So we decided at the very beginning to do everything we possibly could to give you as much certainty as possible. That meant canceling flights in advance (in most cases, three days ahead), communicating quickly and transparently, and offering anyone traveling during the shutdown a full refund if they wanted, even if their flight was not canceled. Our goal was to do right by each of you, but just as importantly, we believed that our actions would be a concrete demonstration to our frontline employees that at United ‘Good Leads the Way’ and they should feel empowered to take care of you.
I’m just so proud of the entire United team. This shutdown and subsequent mandatory flight cancelations were unprecedented (and to be clear, we are 100% supportive of the FAA’s actions). But they also lead to the statistic that I’m most proud of at United this entire year: November 8 and 9 set all-time staffing shortage driven cancelations and delays at the FAA, but United’s customer satisfaction scores that you gave us on those two days were the fourth and fifth highest of the year. In fact, month-to-date customer satisfaction scores are at an all-time high for November. Thank you.
FAA-related staffing challenges have improved (there were zero FAA staffing related delay programs this past Saturday and Sunday), which means long taxi times and delays have decreased. Every metric we analyze about our operation has shown improvement since it became clear the shutdown was ending. And most notably, excluding FAA-mandated cancels, less than .4% of United flights canceled over the last six days and on-time performance is better than this time last year. That means, with a busy Thanksgiving and holiday season approaching, you can book and travel confidently with United. We have a terrific team ready to welcome you. Thanks again for your trust in United and a special note of appreciation to all federal workers in aviation – especially air traffic controllers and TSA employees – who contributed to maintaining a safe environment throughout the shutdown.