300 flights will be canceled this week by American Airlines and American Eagle due to increasing maintenance reports that were filed by crews as well as numerous sick pilots.

249 flights were already canceled this week by Wednesday afternoon which indicates that the estimate of the two airlines might be far below the actual cancelations that will happen this week, with 300 being 1.25 percent of the 24,000 flights that were scheduled by the AMR Corp. owned airlines.

The reason for the cancelation in advance is to avoid inconveniencing passengers, AMR said today. Already earlier this week, American announced that it would cut its schedule by up to 2 percent through the end of October.

The flight-tracking service FlightAware reported that American has canceled more flights than any other U.S. airline each day this week. By late Wednesday afternoon, American and Eagle's 73 canceled flights counted more than the next five airlines combined.

In a note to operations managers, American said it was telling frequent fliers why it's been experiencing cancelations and delays. It is letting customers fly standby for earlier flights at no extra charge, and giving crews more leeway to hand out light snacks to delayed passengers.