SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Northwest Airlines Corp. cancelled as many as 200 flights over the weekend, pointing to empty cockpits as the culprit.
At the peak of the summer travel season, Northwest said it is seeing a big jump in absenteeism among the crews that fly its narrow-bodied jets, which means the shortage is hurting mainly domestic rather than international flights.
The result is thousands of stranded passengers at airports across the country.
"Friday morning we saw a sharp spike in pilot absenteeism. We flew about 93% of our scheduled flights on Friday and about the same yesterday. We expect that to go to about 91% today," Northwest spokesman Roman Blahoski told MarketWatch.
The problem stems from over-scheduling. And it's not new. Northwest saw the problem flare up in late June, when the number of pilots staying at home jumped 80% from a year earlier.
Pilots are allowed to fly just so many hours during the course of a month. At Northwest, the maximum number of hours the airline scheduled for flight crews in June was 88 to 90. That was apparently too much.
To help ease the problem, Northwest whittled down their July flight schedule, a move they are again taking in August, further reducing the amount of time pilots are to be in the cockpit to 86 hours. The net impact on Northwest's schedule will be about a 4% reduction next month in domestic flights.
Northwest would not disclose the number of flights it cancelled over the weekend, but the Web site FlightStats.com reported the carrier scrubbed 166 flights on Saturday.
Northwest said it has about 1,300 flights scheduled for Sunday. If it only expects to complete 91%, that translates to about 117 cancellations. While some are due to weather or air traffic control, the vast majority are due to the pilot shortage, Lahaska said.
Northwest (NWA17.98, -1.01, -5.3% ) , which emerged from bankruptcy at the end of May, has about 5,000 active pilots on its payroll.
The Air Line Pilots Association, which has a long history of tangling with Northwest management, has earlier accused the Egan, Minn.-based carrier of setting an unrealistic schedule given the number of pilots it employs. 
Jim Jelter is Industrials Editor for MarketWatch in San Francisco.
JULY 17--NFL star Michael Vick was indicted today on a federal conspiracy charge for his alleged role in a dog fighting venture that operated from a Virginia property owned by the Atlanta Falcons quarterback. A copy of the indictment, filed today in U.S. District Court in Richmond, can be found below. The 27-year-old Vick, whose nickname is listed as "Ookie" in the indictment, allegedly established the Bad Newz Kennels in early-2001 in Smithfield, Virginia. It was this property, for which Vick paid $34,000, that the star athlete and his codefendants used as the "main staging area for housing and training the pit bulls involved in the dog fighting venture and hosting dog fights." According to prosecutors, Vick and his cohorts began purchasing pit bull puppies in late-2001 and would eventually "sponsor" individual dog fights with purses as high as $26,000. In the indictment's most harrowing parts, federal investigators describe what happened to some Bad Newz Kennels dogs that either lost matches or did not perform well in test fights. After a March 2003 loss by a female pit bull, codefendant Purnell Peace, "after consulting with Vick," 
