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Hawaiian Airlines announces plans to cancel 19 flights this weekend

COURTESY HAWAIIAN AIRLINES
                                Hawaiian Airlines’ interisland flight cancellations caused by a delay in pilot training will continue through the weekend

COURTESY HAWAIIAN AIRLINES

Hawaiian Airlines’ interisland flight cancellations caused by a delay in pilot training will continue through the weekend

Hawaiian Airlines’ interisland flight cancellations caused by a delay in pilot training will continue through the weekend, but operations are expected to begin normalizing next week.

The airlines today said it is expecting 14 cancellations on Saturday and five on Sunday. It had to cancel 32 flights today and 19 on Thursday.

As of now, there are no disrupted flights for Monday.

The cancellations originated with an outage in a flight simulator used to certify pilots who operate the airlines’ neighbor island routes. The outage happened earlier this year, but the simulator has been fully operational for weeks, said Alex Da Silva, director of external communications for Hawaiian Airlines.

“It’s hard to pinpoint a date when the problem is going to be fully solved, but until then … we are training at full capacity,” Da Silva said. “In the meantime, we’re going to continue to utilize larger planes where needed.”

Boeing 717 planes, which seat 128 passengers each, are normally used on interisland routes, but some will be replaced with larger planes: the Airbus A330 and A321neo, which seat 278 and 189 passengers, respectively.

The Airbus models are generally used in Hawaiian Airlines’ trans-Pacific routes, but they will be used to make up for some of the upcoming neighbor island flight cancellations. Larger planes will be used on six flights on Saturday and nine flights on Sunday.

In most cases, and with the assistance of the larger planes, most passengers can be accommodated on later flights if they experience a cancellation, Da Silva said.

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