The airline industry is struggling to return to normal operations as pandemic restrictions ease. Just in the last week, there have been hundreds of flights cancelled and thousands of flights delayed - airline companies say it’s due to insufficient staffing. With the holiday travel season afoot more delays are expected, and right now 40 percent of TSA employees are not fully vaccinated ahead of the federally mandated Monday before Thanksgiving deadline. I spoke with Henry Harteveldt, Travel Industry Analyst for Atmosphere Research Group, about why the airline industry isn’t quite ready to take off.
With a shortage of flight staff and an influx of travelers - is this the perfect storm for the airline industry?
Some of us may remember the phrase ‘getting there is half the fun,...’ right now, air travel can be half the misery. The industry certainly took more than its fair share of hits during the COVID pandemic in 2020. Coming back, there certainly was strong demand, but the airlines were not well-prepared for it.
I think the airline industry has done an abysmal job of communicating their problems.
It seems as though they are just talking around the issue, and not talking to the issue itself.
These airliners could’ve been better with communication… I think that what happened was that the management offices of various airlines were not communicating with the people who schedule the flights. They’re told to schedule every airplane they possibly can to make as much money as possible, but the folks who oversee the pilot and flight attendant work groups were saying ‘don't be that aggressive, we may not have enough people,’ and they were ignored.
Were the airline companies coddling the pilots and airline workers’ unions as more flights were scheduled and air travel ramped up?
The unions were very vocal in saying that airlines were scheduling more flights than could be reliably operated. I think there certainly was a disagreement on perspectives between management, which wanted to paint the rosiest of pictures primarily for their investors, and the unions, which were trying to be a bit more realistic. It takes time to get a pilot re-trained - there are only so many flight simulators and training rooms, and the same goes for flight attendants. The airlines just did not correctly anticipate the massive increase in travel that people wanted. They saw demand far exceed their expectations, but they weren't prepared for it.
When do you think this situation smooths out?
Hopefully, early in the first quarter of next year we will see the airlines get back to full staffing of pilots and flight attendants. If business travel begins to return, that means more flights become available, because the airlines will add more flights, both domestically and internationally. So I'm hoping we are getting through the worst of it. I believe 2022 should be a more reliable year for air travel, both for passengers and the airlines.
