Short connections are often challenging for passengers. At a massive airport like DFW those challenges are further magnified; getting between gates can be a challenge. American Airlines aims to reduce that stress from April 2026 as it adjusts its DFW operations in a major way.
As the operating environment and our customers’ expectations have evolved in the last 10 years, our approach at our largest and most impactful hub must also evolve. We’re making this significant shift while maintaining the same breadth, depth and schedule quality our customers expect and depend on.
– Jim Moses, Senior Vice President of DFW Operations
When every hour has a bank of departing flights is an airport really still running with a banked schedule?
DFW operates nine departure banks today, covering departures from 5a to 11p. Starting next spring the carrier will shift to 13 departure banks across the same timeframe.
A traveler today might connect at DFW, arriving in a wave that touches down just after 9a. Assuming everything goes well, they pass in and out of the terminal in under an hour. It is a massive flow of people, and it usually mostly works. But it is not easy, nor is recovery when something goes awry.
The old schedule has a mind-boggling 110 departures scheduled in the 9am hour and a similar number of arrivals. That drops to 52 in the new plan. At the same time, previously underutilized hours (11a, 1p, 3p, 5p, 9p) with fewer than a dozen scheduled departures will now each see more than 40 flights under the new schedule.
The company promises “more departure options in highly desired time windows and fewer early morning departures to DFW.” The move will also shift connection times in many scenarios.
American acknowledges that many of its connections are tight, perhaps too tight for most travelers. It will still offer many of the tight connections, providing “flexibility…when time matters” for business travelers. But more of those connections will span across the flight banks.
Which raises the question of whether they’re even really flight banks at all anymore. Which probably does not matter too much, so long as customers are making their connections and still booking the trips.
American also hopes the increased connection times help checked bags move through its network more efficiently. The carrier routinely carries more bags than its competitors, and also routinely sees more of those bags not arrive on the same flight as the traveler (more than 50% worse than Delta and Southwest, with comparable numbers of checked bags, in the September 2025 data (p39), the most recent available).
Fewer super-short connections means more bags at least have a chance to get to the next gate before the plane pulls away.
And the changes come against the backdrop of the company’s efforts to reduce taxi times and other delays in their operations over the past couple years. Adjusting the banking should also help on that front.
Bulking Up Block Times
The second major change coming at DFW is a shift in block times for flights. American describes it as “a bold and unprecedented investment in block time for flights to and from DFW and across the airline’s network.”
What this translates to is most markets now being booked as a longer trip than before. A review of Cirium data* from before and after the schedule change shows 145 markets where the block time is now longer, averaging six minutes. Charlotte is now 17 minutes longer on average, while DCA flights allow for an extra 10 minutes. Miami adds nine minutes per trip while Philadelphia adds six and Phoenix adds three.
Another 54 markets get shorter, averaging a 4 minute shift. Among these is the DFW-LAX route, trimming two minutes from its average block time.
This is hardly American’s first go at tweaking block times. They shift frequently. A review of the past 30 years suggests they invariably get longer (though some have recovered recently).
And American is not alone in that trend. Growing airspace congestion, ATC limitations, and other challenges all contribute to the situation, and block times have generally grown across the industry. American’s goal with these moves is not to fix the underlying problem, but to mitigate it, making schedules more reliable for passengers.
On average these few minutes of shifted schedule are barely enough for most travelers to notice. Typically it means better on-time performance and happier travelers. But is also comes with very real operational and crew costs to the carrier.
This is a significant expense in the name of “bolstering its ability to get its customers and their bags where they’re going and on time.” And maybe driving increased revenue as a result, though the link between on-time performance and revenue is a tenuous one at best, at least in the short term.
Still probably a smarter business strategy than killing off the corporate booking channel, a prior move American is still working to recover from.
*All data is from the published schedule for 27 April 2026, as of 28 December 2025 and 21 December 2025. Historical block times also include data from BTS, queried for 27 April of the respective years.
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