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Who to blame for airline canceled flights

2022-01-06T03:43:55.395Z


In the last two weeks, there have been 20,000 canceled flights in the United States, but it is not all the fault of the winter storms.


1,400 US flights canceled due to covid-19 and 1:06 storm

New York (CNN Business) - 

Rising COVID-19 cases and severe winter storms made the travel season dire for hundreds of thousands of stranded airline passengers.

But airline staff cuts were also to blame for the 20,000 American flights canceled in the past two weeks.


Airlines entered their busiest travel period of the past two years with significantly fewer employees than they had before the pandemic began in early 2020.

That made staff overstretched and left airlines unable to adjust when large numbers of employees tested positive for COVID-19 and bad winter weather hit major airports, from Denver to Washington.

USA: more flight cancellations due to covid-19 and snow 0:45

So it shouldn't have been a surprise that travel has been a hassle this holiday season.

In fact, some industry experts predicted it.

"It is true that the omicron wave was a surprise. However, it was compounded by not having planned any mishaps, weather or viral," said Dennis Tajer, American Airlines 737 pilot and spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, the union of the largest airline in the country. "In summary, the management sold tickets that it could not fulfill without constraint. It does not seem that they have put their plan of operations to the test."

All airlines said they were doing their best to accommodate passengers in the face of widespread problems.

Many of the flights were canceled in advance to give passengers as much notice as possible.

For example, nearly 300 US flights originally scheduled for Wednesday have already been canceled.

And all the airlines say they are doing their best to recruit the necessary personnel so that they do not run into problems in the future.

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But these widespread problems are becoming more prevalent, with airline employees complaining that they are on edge because of difficult working conditions.

How airlines cut staff

Airlines agreed early in the pandemic that they would not inadvertently lay off staff in exchange for $ 54 billion in federal aid.

However, the top four airlines responded to the massive losses caused by falling demand for air travel by offering voluntary severance pay and early retirement plans for staff.

This reduced the number of airline employees by thousands.

Airlines were delighted when they managed to get through Thanksgiving week with a very low cancellation rate.

But the day after Thanksgiving, the world learned of the omicron variant, which would wreak havoc on staffing levels by the end of the year.

And it's a problem that won't go away, not even when the snow stops falling and the holiday travelers end up coming home.

"The real storm is omicron, which could peak in late January. Snowstorms are minor problems in comparison," said Brian Kelly, founder and CEO of The Points Guy, an airline travel site.

Kelly said that regardless of the preparations the airlines made, the surge in COVID cases caused by the highly contagious omicron variant was going to cause problems.

"No one could have foreseen the omicron. It's the curveball of curveballs," he said.

"I applaud the industry for trying to plan as much as possible."

But Kelly said it's also clear that airlines cut staff too much in 2020.

"We are at a breaking point," Kelly said.

"Where we are today is not sustainable. They need to hire more, to have more staff to call upon."

All airlines say they are hiring, but with certification rules and regulations, it takes much longer to hire new staff than it does with other employers, in some cases a year or more.

And given the uncertainty about the return of passenger traffic, airlines have yet to regain pre-pandemic employment levels.

The workforce of the four main airlines that handle an overwhelming majority of passengers in the United States, American, Delta, United and Southwest, were reduced between 10% and 11% as of September 30, compared to the situation of December 31 of 2019.

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Deliberate decision to cut staff

Part of that downsizing was due to a deliberate decision by the airlines, which for years have struggled to offer more flights, and carry more passengers, with a reduced number of employees.

"We had 20,000 casualties," said Delta CEO Ed Bastian in a presentation to investors in December.

And while the airline has so far only filled 9,000 of those vacancies, "our workforce is exactly where I want it to be," he said.

The additional hires will come as the company tries to expand its capacity beyond where it was before the pandemic.

While airlines claim that they are receiving the candidates they need to fill the positions, they also admit that they are receiving fewer applicants per vacancy than in the past.

And even some of the staff who took unpaid leave have been slower to return than the airlines expected.

Airline executives have admitted it was more difficult to fill the positions than they expected a year ago.

"I figured we'd call them and say, 'Okay, it's time to go back,' and they'd show up, and everything would be as before," Southwest CEO Gary Kelly said in a speech to investors in October.

However, he said the call-up of workers has not been so easy, as many employees who had been on leave decided they did not want to return.

"I think everything will smooth out, both with the current employees that we are trying to reinstate and with the new hires," he said.

"But it's not going to come in the fourth quarter. It's going to take a while."

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And without such depth in staffing, when problems do arise it can take a long time to recover.

That's what happened in several service crashes in early 2020 at Southwest and American airlines.

And it's one of the reasons more than 1,200 flights were canceled on Wednesday, even though the bad weather is over.

"It's going to take a long time, up to a week, to get the pilots and the planes (on the level) where they need to be," said Kerry Tan, a business professor at Loyola University of Maryland and an airline expert.

Another knock-on effect: As the big airlines hire new staff, they are removing much-needed staff from the lowest-paid regional airlines that fly many of the connecting flights booked under the American, United and Delta brands.

"These are the airlines that have the worst of it," Tan said. One of the major regional carriers, Skywest, "has canceled nearly a quarter of its scheduled flights," he said.

Staff shortage problems are not new: Airlines have been taking steps for years to try to serve more and more passengers with fewer and fewer employees.

In 2002, US passenger airlines had 520,000 employees serving 613 million passengers.

That's one employee for every 1,200 passengers roughly throughout the year.

In 2019, the number of employees had fallen to 485,000, but passenger traffic increased by more than 50%, to a record 926 million, or more than 2,000 passengers per employee.

"We estimate that we can fly 10% more itinerary than in 2019 with the same number of employees that we needed in 2019," United Chief Financial Officer Gerald Laderman said in a call with investors in October.

- CNN's Gregory Wallace contributed to this report.

Cancellation trips

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2022-01-06

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