As air travel starts to trend upwards, following record lows due to the coronavirus pandemic, many airlines have been left scrambling with the uptick in passengers.
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The airline industry lost billions of dollars in 2020, with the top six losing a combined $35 billion. The top three U.S. airlines, American, Southwest, JetBlue, reported a combined loss of $14 billion, Forbes reported in January.
When it came to job loss, the airlines expected a total of 400,000 jobs being lost in July of 2020, Bloomberg reported.
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Now with restrictions being eased across the world and travel starting to return to normal, the airline industry has not been able to keep up with demand, putting strain on the workers who remain. This has resulted in travelers being forced to deal with the worst parts of flying more now than in the past.
One passenger spoke with NPR about the delays that he experienced returning to Chicago from Tampa on a business trip.
"It was a heck of a trip," Dirk Fletcher said in O'hare Airport to NPR.
Fletcher's flight didn't go as expected after he dealt with multiple hurdles returning home.
"I was supposed to come home at 7 o'clock yesterday in Tampa, and the incoming flight was delayed," he said. "That flight kept getting pushed and pushed. They finally put me up and had me on an 8 o'clock flight this morning that kept getting delayed and delayed."
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More than 18 hours after initially scheduled, Fletcher returned home from his trip, having dealt with some of the worst travel he ever has.
"It seems more than it was before in terms of just the chaoticness," he said.
In recent months American Airlines added thousands of flights back to its schedules, but it has been slow to bring back pilots who took voluntary leaves of absence or were furloughed.
Those who have returned to work have been thrown into the chaos and forced to hit the ground running.
This has been an issue for many pilots, as returning to the cockpit isn't as easy as it seems. Several pilots reported making mistakes or forgetting certain processes after spending several months grounded, The New York Times reported.
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A former charter pilot for Titan Airways, Joe Townshend, said to The New York Times, "It's not quite like riding a bike."
Southwest CEO Gary Kelly said during an earnings call that while they are doing everything they can, it has been a bumpy road returning to normal.
"I blame it on the pandemic; it's messy, it's messy coming in, it's certainly messy coming out," Kelly said.