May turned out to be a pretty bad month for airlines. The US Department of Transportation (DOT) released… //

the ten marketing network carriers in the US reported 192,412 scheduled domestic flights. This was down from April 2020, which had 331,238 scheduled flights. In May 2019, the ten airlines scheduled 694,331 domestic flights. //

Of those 192,412 flights, 12,261 (or 6.4% of those flights) were canceled. This lead to an all-time monthly low of 180,151 flights in May 2020. This was even lower than April, which saw 194,390 flights operate. The previous low before both of these months was February 1994, with 370,027 flights. That 1994 report only included operating carriers and not codeshare partners, which are now included. //

The overall monthly canceled flight rate was 6.4%. This was much lower than April, which had a canceled flight rate of over 41%. By May, airlines had an idea for how low demand was and consolidated operations, received service exemptions, and parked most of their planes, leading to more stable operations.