"Airmageddon" Aftermath

How Bad Was The Holiday Weekend?

The holiday weekend has come and gone, and, for the most part, so too has the scheduling meltdown at the nation’s airports.

By early Monday afternoon on the East Coast, more than 1,300 U.S. flights had been delayed and nearly 200 canceled, according to FlightAware.

The good news: Those numbers were down sharply from recent days.

“Airmageddon” appears to be ending—for now.

That is cold comfort for the travelers still stranded in airport terminals struggling to get home, or having to make unusual ad hoc flights and connections just to complete what should have been a simple flight. Broadly speaking, however, the numbers do look better for Monday than they did for Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.

Review Of The Numbers

To get a sense of the evolution of this latest airline scheduling screwup, let’s review the base numbers from the weekend:

Friday was the worst day for delays in the US (archival link):

Total delays yesterday: 29,631
Total delays within, into, or out of the United States yesterday: 7,872
Total cancellations yesterday: 3,061
Total cancellations within, into, or out of the United States yesterday: 587

By Saturday, delays were down somewhat, but cancellations were up significantly (archival link):

Total delays yesterday: 24,667
Total delays within, into, or out of the United States yesterday: 5,699
Total cancellations yesterday: 2,439
Total cancellations within, into, or out of the United States yesterday: 654

On Sunday both delays and cancellations were down significantly (archival link):

Total delays yesterday: 23,817
Total delays within, into, or out of the United States yesterday: 4,707
Total cancellations yesterday: 1,776
Total cancellations within, into, or out of the United States yesterday: 312

(Note: Archiving the Sunday stats correctly has proven to be a challenge. The Internet Archive captures the US numbers correctly, but lists the total delays worldwide as zero. I have posted a screen shot of the FlightAware cancellations page to my Minds channel to memorialize the correct numbers.)

By Monday, delays and cancellations for the US were less than half of their peak Friday/Saturday levels (archival link):

Total delays yesterday: 23.366
Total delays within, into, or out of the United States yesterday: 3.616
Total cancellations yesterday: 1.924
Total cancellations within, into, or out of the United States yesterday: 254

The worst two days for travel were Friday and Saturday, with delays and cancellations getting better as the weekend wore on.

A Global Meltdown

While the Fourth of July is very much an American holiday, this weekend’s meltdown was quite demonstrably on a global scale:

• The origin airport with both the worst raw number of flights delayed and percentage of delays on Sunday was Guangzhou Baiyun International, in China (393/60%)

• The ten worst airports for percentage of flights delayed on Sunday included airports in Europe and Asia. North American airports fared somewhat better.

• Only one North American airport was among the five worst airports for raw number of flights delayed on Sunday—Toronto Pearson International (307)—while US airports (Atlanta, Denver, and Dallas-Fort Worth) occupied slots 8, 9, and 10 for delayed flights on Sunday, respectively (217, 214, and 210).

• Six of the ten origin airports with the most cancelled flights were in China. Toronto Pearson was the only North American airport among those ten worst, with 43 flights cancelled.

• United and Delta were the only US carriers among the ten worst carriers for cancelled flights on Sunday, with 55 and 53 respectively, earning them positions 6 and 7 on that list. The two worst carriers were both Chinese airlines, and Canadian airline Jazz ended up in slot 3, with 109 Sunday cancellations (approximately double the number of Sunday cancellations for United and Delta).

As bad as airports were in the US this weekend, they were quite a bit worse in other parts of the world, even where there was not a holiday weekend in effect. This is true even if one factors in that July 1 is “Canada Day”, the commemoration of Canada becoming a self-governing dominion in 1867, and thus is comparable to Independence Day in the United States.

Holidays do not explain China having the worst delays and cancellations, as there are no public holidays for China from early June to mid-September.

The one common thread among all the cancellations (at least those outside of China): reports of “staffing shortages”.

Across Europe strikes and staff shortages are forcing airlines to cancel thousands of flights, causing hours-long queues at major airports, dashing hopes of a first summer holiday for many after COVID lockdowns.

Canadian carrier WestJet is “proactively” reducing its summer flight schedule while it works to increase staffing levels throughout the company.

Our number one priority is our guest’s travel experience and our proactive efforts have included:

• Extensive planning to ensure our aircraft are all flying in peak performance

• Hiring more than 1,000 people across all operational areas including our contact centre with hiring ongoing across multiple departments

Last month, Air Canada was forced to cancel 10% of its flights at Toronto Pearson Airport, citing staffing problems as the reason.

Last week Air Canada announced the cancelation of 15% of its July and August flights, again claiming lack of staff as a primary reason.

“Regrettably, things are not business as usual in our industry globally, and this is affecting our operations and our ability to serve you with our normal standards of care,” chief executive Michael Rousseau said in a message to customers Wednesday night.

“Despite detailed and careful planning, the largest and fastest scale of hiring in our history, as well as investments in aircraft and equipment, it is now clear that Air Canada’s operations too have been disrupted by the industry’s complex and unavoidable challenges.”

Air travel appears to be well and truly broken everywhere.

Not Just A Shortage Of Pilots

As one of my readers pointed out on my last article, the reported staffing shortfalls go well beyond pilots.

Pilots are one part of the issue. There's also going to be a shortage of everyone else that affects whether a plane takes off or is delayed/cancelled. The guy that loads/unloads your bags. The guy who pumps fuel. The people that clean the plane. The people who check you in. The people at the gate. The maintenance people for the planes. The flight crew.

This is indeed reported to be the case, as Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants, confirmed to CNN.

Sara Nelson, International President, Association of Flight Attendants, said the airlines are not doing enough to hire the additional staff they need, from front-line workers such as pilots, mechanics and flight attendants to the support staff, including those who handle scheduling.

“Crews are waiting for one, two, three, four hours to get in touch with a crew scheduler,” Nelson told CNN’s Christine Romans on Monday. She said that means some crew members reach the end of the hours they’re allowed to work without being put on another flight.

Ironically, lack of staff is cited as a significant contributing factor to so-called “weather delays”, as the lack of staff makes the airlines more sensitive to the impacts of sudden bursts of inclement weather—which have not been more frequent in 2022 than before the pandemic.

Cancellations are becoming the norm because of the staffing situation, said Kathleen Bangs, a former airline pilot now working for FlightAware.

“Weather has always impacted aviation, but the weather so far this summer hasn’t been any worse than normal,” she said. “When we see severe weather, it is taking airlines longer to scramble and recover. They don’t have the deep bench of pilots to call in. It really seems to be more of a systemwide staffing issue, trickling down to FAA in terms of air traffic control system.”

Reports show that claims of staffing problems are a truly global phenomenon. Pilots and cabin crews for Brussels Airline recently went on strike to protest working conditions, saying work pressures were “too high”.

Pilot and cabin crew unions of Brussels Airlines held a three-day strike last month, after complaining that the pressure of work was too high and that the company had been aware of the situation for around a year but failed to alleviate it.

While staffing is a reported concern for carriers around the world, it is a particularly bad public-relations situation for American carriers, as they received $54 billion in federal aid specifically to keep staffs on payroll for when the pandemic at last eased, only to trim headcount through early retirement and voluntary buyouts.

But the problems are getting more attention in the United States, especially since US airlines received $54 billion in federal assistance to help them weather the drop in traffic during the pandemic. The money was used to keep staff in place so they would have enough workers once air traffic returned. But just about all the airlines used voluntary buyouts and early retirement packages to still trim staff during the downturn, leading into the staffing shortage.

Your tax dollars not at work…literally!

For whatever reason, airlines around the world do not seem to have the staff they require to deliver flights on time.

What Staffing Shortage?

The key word in grasping the reported staffing shortages, however, is the word “reported.” While the airlines have long claimed such shortages as a primary driver for scheduling difficulties, and while the corporate media has duly carried that narrative, the data does not tell the same story.

Domestically, at least, the US air travel industry has, by and large, already recovered, at least according to Bureau of Transportation Statistics data.

• Domestic air travel in March of this year moved 64,515,346 passengers, which is comparable to November of 2019, and more than 10 million below the peak month for air travel pre-pandemic (July, 2019, at 75,281,916).

  

• Domestic carriers logged 71,908,413 available seat miles in March of this year, also comparable to end of 2019 right before the pandemic, and well below the July, 2019, .peak of 80,120,972

  

• Load factors through the first quarter of 2022 are comparable to the pre-pandemic period, especially for domestic travel.

  

At the same time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people employed in the air travel industry exceeds pre-pandemic levels.

Air travel employment peaked pre-pandemic at 518,100 people in March, 2020, and that level of employment was exceeded in January of this year. Headcount was reduced in the industry, but in aggregate that headcount has already been restored, at least within the US.

Somehow, an industry that is employing more people than before the pandemic is less able to deliver the same level of service.

To call the air travel industry “broken” would be something of an understatement!

At a minimum, the “staffing shortage” narrative should be taken with a grain of salt. The BLS data indicates airlines have the staff they need at least for US operations (whether the same can be said internationally goes beyond the scope of the BLS data set), which makes the recurring and generally accepted claim of staffing shortages intrinsically implausible.

It’s Broke, So Fix It

However, while the BLS data raises new questions as to why flights are delayed more often than before the pandemic, and cancelled more often, one reality is unaffected by the data: the obligation of carriers to deliver the flights for which they have sold tickets to passengers.

At every level of staffing, the airlines know how much staff they have, and presumably should know how much staff they need. The basic principles of cost accounting demand that they know this.

The airlines must also know how many spare widgets and gadgets they need to maintain their aircraft. The FAA has an entire bureaucracy devoted to developing and disseminating aircraft maintenance regulations and best practices—the Aircraft Maintenance Division. Given that the laws of physics have not changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, it follows that aircraft wear and tear from normal operations also have not changed during the pandemic. Consequently, regardless of whatever supply chain headaches airlines may be experiencing as regards sourcing components for servicing aircraft, the airlines still know what they need, even if there should be challenges in getting those components (although it must be noted that parts shortages have not been mentioned in the corporate media as a primary driver of flight delays and cancellations).

Given all of this, the airlines have no good defense for scheduling flights that exceed their available resources. Yet that is what has been happening—and what the airlines have essentially claimed is happening—since air travel began its road to recovery after the pandemic lockdowns. That they appear to have the labor resources they need only makes their seeming inability to deliver timely flights even at current scheduling levels to their customers that much more bizarre and that much more inexcusable.

The airlines’ scheduling systems are unquestionably broken. Their top priority at this juncture must be to fix those systems. Their legal and ethical obligations to their paying customers demand nothing less—and so should passengers.