Patrick Smith is a writer for Ask ThePilot.com.
Have you been to the airport recently? Delays are out of control and planes are over booked.
I have been working a lot over the last few months.
I wrote back in May that travel is back. I wasn't sure we'd get here, so I'm happy to see a little chaos again at the airport. Things have reached a breaking point but I said what I said. What is it like? I have been flying for 30 years and have never seen anything like this.
Staffing is the main issue. The media keeps talking about a pilot shortage, and certainly, that is a factor, but the crisis extends across the industry: at the airlines and their various contractors, at air traffic control, security, airport retail, and so on.
It goes back to how things were handled when thousands of employees were laid off and a failure to adequately re-staff as things returned to normal. The airlines and their partners look stupid, but maybe it isn't that simple. The environment was at its lowest point during the downturn. The industry was desperate to stay alive.
There was no way of predicting when, or to what extent, flyers would return. Travel restrictions and border closings changed week to week, and absolutely nothing was certain. Almost nobody predicted a return to 2019 numbers so soon. The expectation, so much as there was one, was of a gradual, incremental return over a period of years.
When the world has flipped upside-down, air travel logistics are no different. They did what they thought was the best thing to do when it came to aligning their fleets. Some people guessed better. It was a bit of a guessing game.
So here we are. It is not just the US. The security and check-in lines are long. The lines for immigration preclearance snaked all the way to the second floor when I flew out of Dublin. The luggage system at London-Heathrow malfunctioned, leaving passengers without their bags for several days.
There are two shortages that are related to the pilot shortage. There is a short-term and pandemic related one. The second is more long term.
Every month, carriers take on hundreds of new pilots. There are long delays for classroom time, simulator slots, line certification flights, and other things because of this. It can take several weeks for new-hire training to start, as can moving from one aircraft type to another. pilots are waiting for their turn A training system overload is less of a problem than a shortage of pilots.
We have another shortage. This is a bigger problem at the regional carriers than it is at the majors. All of the legacy airlines are currently hiring, and although they have no difficulty filling their slots, those pilots have to come from somewhere. The industry is being affected by this. The regional sector has reinvented itself in a plea for new hires, offering salary and benefits packages previously unseen for entry level airline pilots.
The salaries and working conditions at regional carriers were not good for a long time. In some cases pilots were asked to pay their own training costs in order to make enough money to live. A career at a regional meant an entire career at a regional. The shortage we have today can be traced back to fewer and fewer pilots getting into the business. To entice new-hire pilots and to retain the ones they already have, these companies need to significantly improve their pay scales and benefits. They didn't need to have a shortage in the first place.
Overall passenger numbers are still off about 15 percent from 2019. The problem is, the 85 percent who are back are being crammed into an infrastructure that can’t handle them.
The issue of airspace and runway saturation isn't being talked about. It wasn't good enough before the pandemic. Several upstart carriers are increasing the number of airplanes in their systems. It is particularly bad in the eastern half of the U.S. when the weather is bad.
Taxiways at airports like Newark or La Guardia can take hours to travel through. In order to reduce congestion airlines need to rationalize their schedules. The short-haul widebody jet is a concept that has a chance of coming back.
The madness will come to an end. Is it going to end? I am worried that we are being set up for a kind of new normal in which chaos is taken for granted. The traveling public has a discouraging ability to adapt to almost anything, no matter how absurd or inconvenient.
The crisis is not permanent. If you bring something to the airport this summer, have it be patience?
Patrick Smith is a writer for Ask ThePilot.com.
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