A vital lesson about any fall and winter travel plans you may be planning: Don't count your flights before they depart.

Your Seat 2B columnist speaks from experience. A couple of weeks back, I proclaimed myself one of the winners in the FAA budget battle because I scored two tax-free business-class tickets to Europe for the New Year. Just days later, however, the airline canceled my flights because they decided to drop the route for the winter.

Welcome to the post-Labor Day reality, fellow travelers. Smarting from stubbornly high jet-fuel prices, slack demand from business flyers who book the premium classes, and real pushback on fares from leisure travelers considering a holiday, airlines are hastily beating a schedule retreat. They'd already planned a significant post-summer decrease in routes, frequencies, and capacity. But recent discouraging news about the nation's economy has the carriers in a tizzy. They are scouring their networks looking for more flights to dump, and they hope to cut enough capacity to conserve cash and limit losses during the traditionally slow late fall and winter travel seasons.

"The outlook for demand is alarming," an executive for a major U.S. carrier told me on Monday afternoon. "It's much worse than we expected. We were always looking to hefty cuts for the fall schedule, [but now] the pressure is on to find any possible place to eliminate a flight that won't perform. We just can't afford the losses."

My New Year's travel plans are a perfect example of the newest "new normal" in the shriveled, post-summer airline world. When my wife and I decided on a Roman holiday, we knew the reality. One competitor on the New York-Rome route, American Airlines, long ago declared it wouldn't operate the service during the late fall and winter. Continental Airlines traditionally reduces winter frequencies on its Newark-Rome route. We settled on Delta Air Lines, which was due to continue its daily Rome flights from John F. Kennedy Airport, even though it had announced an approximate 10 percent cut in its international winter schedule.

When I booked several weeks ago, I couldn't help but notice the ugly reality: All of Delta's New York-Rome flights were nearly empty. Even by "off season" winter standards, the lack of advance bookings was startling. So I wasn't shocked when Delta called a few days ago with the bad news: The airline had decided to cancel the route for the winter.

As a businessperson who constantly criticizes the carriers for idiotic economic decisions, I can't fault an airline for wisely dumping flights that aren't selling. And in fairness to Delta and despite a little more bureaucracy than was comfortable, the carrier's phone agents rebooked us on Alitalia, Delta's SkyTeam Alliance and code-share partner.

(Alitalia tells me winter loads on its twice-daily JFK-Rome flights "have been pretty decent." But that's not necessarily a ringing endorsement when you consider two of its competitors are sidelined and the third is only competing part-time.)

Lest you think this is a tale of one isolated route, consider some of the other winter cuts:

• Besides its previously announced international cutback, Delta last week reduced flights on five international routes from Atlanta. Its SkyTeam partner Air France is trimming capacity on flights to Paris. Delta is also slashing service at its Salt Lake City hub by 10 percent in the coming weeks. It has been reducing its Cincinnati hub for years and has begun hacking away at its Memphis hub, which has lost service to 18 cities in the last year.
• United and Continental Airlines, which merged last year, are reducing their flights by about five percent this fall atop a "route rationalization" that is aimed at eliminating redundant post-merger service.
• Southwest Airlines, in the process of integrating AirTran Airways, the carrier it purchased last year, is cutting all over its route map. It is retreating in Philadelphia, where it has battled US Airways. About a dozen more routes are going in January, when the airlines begin their harmonized schedules.
• American Airlines has been trying to shrink its way to profitability for several years and recently announced it would sell or spin off its American Eagle commuter division.