American Airlines is fundamentally changing the way it does business at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), the airline’s largest hub. Customers will soon benefit from those changes in a meaningful way.
DFW has an outsized impact on the rest of the airline’s operation and on the journeys of the nearly 700,000 customers the airline serves every day across its global network. More customers and more bags travel and connect through DFW every day than any other airport in American’s network—with more than 30 percent of all daily connecting customers and daily connecting checked bags traveling through the airline’s hometown airport. When DFW runs well, American runs well. That impact demands continued focus and investment, and both are already well underway. The airline is investing millions of dollars to fortify DFW, delivering smoother, seamless airport experiences; greater certainty to schedules and connections; and improved resilience when weather or other disruptions hit.
For more than a decade, American’s schedule at DFW has been concentrated across nine banks, or large clusters of flights across the operating day. As all airline bank structures do, this times large groups of flights together, coordinating arrivals and departures, and ultimately, coordinating quick and seamless connections.
Beginning in April—and visible in the airline’s schedules starting December 27—American’s DFW operation is evolving to a 13-bank structure, providing more certainty to the airline’s average 100,000 peak daily customers traveling on the more than 930 average peak DFW daily departing flights.
With this structural schedule change, customers will also benefit from more improved early-morning departure times compared to 2025. Specifically, they will experience more departure options in highly desired time windows and fewer early morning departures to DFW, which is especially good news for customers making morning connections through DFW.
In addition to the airline’s DFW schedule, American is making a bold investment in block time for flights to and from DFW and across the airline’s network. Block time—the total scheduled time between pushback from the departure gate to arrival at the destination gate—determines how long a customer’s trip feels.
With this investment in American’s customers, the airline is ensuring more on-time departures that lead to more on-time arrivals and fewer delays, all creating an overall smoother and improved travel experience. In short, American is bolstering its ability to get its customers and their bags where they’re going and on time.
Maximizing connections, minimizing disruptions
- Improved customer connection times: American is making it easier to connect through DFW. While customers will still have the flexibility to book tight connections when time matters—especially for business travelers—the schedule enhancements provide more options for a stress-free experience. American’s new structure at DFW reduces the concentration of very short connection times, creating more balance that offers customers greater confidence when planning their journey.
- More connection opportunities: The new bank structure keeps nearly all existing connection opportunities in addition to creating new opportunities across the airline’s most-connected hub airport.
- It’s great for bags, too: Just as customer connections will improve, so, too, will checked bag connections. That means even more bags arriving with customers, and in many cases, arriving ahead of customers. American has doubled down on checked bag management over the past few years, and this fundamental shift at DFW further strengthens the work already being experienced by customers.
- Airspace efficiency: What’s good on the ground is also good in the air. By reflowing American’s DFW schedule, the airline is helping make the airspace around the DFW metroplex even more efficient, meaning fewer air traffic delays and more on-time departures and arrivals for customers.
Improved overall airport experience
The airline is also spreading out customer volume, including everything from local customers arriving in parking garages, checking in at lobbies and clearing security to connecting customers making their way through American’s terminals to their next flights.
These changes are on top of a number of other critical investments to further enhance the customer experience when traveling through American’s Flagship hub, and importantly, enabling future growth, which means more flight and destination options for customers. This includes:
- Modernizing American’s facilities and airport terminals, including Terminal A and C Pier extensions adding nine incremental gates.
- Expanding American’s DFW footprint with the addition of Terminal F. When completed in 2030, the airline will operate all 31 new gates in the terminal with increased widebody capacity, state of the art baggage technology and dedicated premium lounges, Flagship check-in and a new U.S. Customs facility.
- Streamlining the airport security experience through new and innovative programs in partnership with the Transportation Security Administration and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. TSA PreCheck Touchless ID is allowing customers at DFW (and 16 other locations across American’s broad U.S. network) to use facial recognition technology for more secure and efficient identity verification. And with Enhanced Passenger Processing and One Stop Security—of which, American was the first U.S. airline to roll out—customers arriving into and connecting through DFW from international travel are experiencing record fast U.S. immigration processing times along with a much-improved connection to their next flight.
- Reimagining traffic flow, in coordination with DFW Airport, to provide a seamless travel experience pre- and post-flight. Critical updates to the vehicle traffic flow went live right ahead of the winter holiday travel season.
Weather management
With all the benefits DFW brings, it has also recently experienced a disproportionate amount of bad weather, particularly thunderstorms that can require the entire airport to be paused until the conditions clear. When that happens in the future, this new schedule structure will provide far greater resilience and less adverse impact, allowing American to recover even quicker and get customers on their way as soon as the weather clears.
At DFW, American is investing millions of dollars in additional remote deplaning capability (everything from equipment and bussing to staffing) that allows the airline to most importantly, divert fewer flights away from DFW.
For more information, visit www.aa.com.
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