Deciphering how holiday-season flying was such a nightmare
January usually means fewer people flying, and that will be even more true in 2022 because many business travelers haven’t returned to the skies.
The lighter crowds should buy airlines time to prepare for the next big onslaught, around spring break. That, however, won’t help the hundreds of thousands of flyers whose Christmas and New Year’s plans were scrambled by airline staffing shortages and wintry weather.
Here’s a look at the factors that snarled flights for so many people during holiday season, and what the next few weeks are likely to bring.
What happened?
Airlines were prohibited from furloughing employees as a condition of receiving $54 billion in federal pandemic aid from taxpayers. But that didn’t stop them from encouraging tens of thousands of workers to quit or take long-term leaves of absence.
Airlines that got caught with shortages of pilots, flight attendants and other workers last summer and fall thought they had time to beef up for the winter holidays, going on hiring sprees.
That wasn’t enough, though, when the highly contagious omicron variant of COVID-19 struck, knocking out flight crews just as holiday crowds began to pack airports. United and Delta were among the first to get hit just before Christmas, blaming canceled flights on a lack of crew members because of the surging virus.
Then storms packing snow and high winds lashed the Pacific Northwest, the Rockies, the Midwest and finally the mid-atlantic region.
When will things improve?
Judging from early numbers, Tuesday might prove to be the turning point. After more than 3,200 U.S. flight cancellations on Monday, the number for Tuesday was down to 1,400 at midday — better, although still very high.
Airlines should get a break, with January and February usually being slow months for travel. Willis Orlando, senior flight expert at Scott’s Cheap Flights, said airlines should have more ability to trim routes, reassign pilots and tap reserve staff.
Also, airline crews can return to work sooner after catching the coronavirus. Last week, U.S. health officials changed their guidance and cut in half — to five days — the time they recommend that people should quarantine if they catch the virus but have no symptoms. Delta and Jetblue had lobbied for the change, although the largest flight attendants’ union criticized the move, saying it compromised the health of cabin crews.
Should airlines have had more staff?
Although Congress did forbid airlines from laying off workers, lawmakers did nothing to prevent the large-scale staffing cuts that airlines made by paying people incentives to quit after travel collapsed in early 2020.
That left airlines short-staffed when travel recovered more quickly than expected during summer 2021. It takes time to retrain pilots and bring them back from longterm leave. Compounding the labor shortage, airlines like Southwest and American added flights to bring in more revenue.
Kurt Ebenhoch, an airline-consumer advocate and former airline employee, says travelers would still be seeing canceled flights now even if carriers had avoided those mistakes, “but not in this high of a number.”
Airlines are trying to match staffing levels to passenger numbers, and travel has not fully recovered as the pandemic drags on. In December, the number of people going through airport checkpoints in the U.S. was 16 percent lower than during the same month of 2019.
Could airlines have prevented this?
Even critics of the industry give the airlines some slack, noting that scope and speed of omicron’s spread was a shock to just about everyone. Other industries were also affected by employees contracting the virus and needing to isolate.
Paul Hudson, president of the consumer-advocacy group Flyersrights.org, said airlines should have planned better and the federal Transportation Department should have required the airlines to have ready reserves of people and equipment, “but the omicron variant high infection rate is primarily to blame in the holiday season disruptions.”