Airlines canceled thousands of flights last week, blaming uncharacteristically strong summer storms in Texas. However, airline worker advocates say storms are far from the only problem causing air-travel turmoil. Staffing shortages amongst pilots and flight attendants are being exacerbated by skyrocketing passenger disruptions from fliers often enraged by pandemic restrictions.
Last week, American Airlines (NASDAQ: AAL) canceled a whopping 563 flights on Monday followed by another 367 on Tuesday, 12% of their scheduled flights for that day, while daily delayed flights topped 600. Smaller airlines had it even worse: Spirit Airlines (NYSE: SAVE) reportedly canceled 42% of its Monday flights and 60% of its Tuesday flights. It blamed the storm as well as operational issues, saying it was canceling flights in order to "reset our operations".
"We're working around the clock to mitigate the travel disruptions caused by overlapping operational challenges including weather, system outages and staffing shortages in some areas of the operation,'' Spirit spokesperson Field Sutton said in a statement.
It's those operational issues that insiders say are the real cause of the huge number of cancellations.
"Weather hits and it hits everybody, and it's how you recover that you are measured as a reliable operation,'' Dennis Tajer, spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, told USA Today. "American has had this problem every summer.''
The Allied Pilots Association is currently in contract negotiations with American Airlines. According to the association's spokesperson, Dennis Tajer, the pilot shortages the company is facing is of its own making: pilots available to fly during a crisis hesitate to do so because of limits placed on their hours, but those hours often include long delays and detours.
"We have pilots that are ready to fly, but their schedules are locked down,'' Tajer said.
Of course, shortages aren't the only thing making life hard for airline employees.
By now, most of us have seen at least a few seconds of the now-infamous video of an unruly passenger being taped to his seat on a Frontier Airlines (NASDAQ: ULCC) flight, but the truth is that scenes like that are becoming all too common. In fact, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), this incident is just one of nearly four thousand reported passenger disruptions so far this year.
Last week's cancellations don't even come close to explaining the poor behavior shown by air travelers so far this year. According to the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), 85% of its members have experienced an unruly passenger so far this year, with nearly one out of every five of them saying they'd encountered a violent passenger.
Part of the reason for the chaos is the staffing shortages, but the pandemic also plays a role. Like front-line workers last year, each flight attendant has been given the thankless job of social-distance enforcer. The anti-maskers of the grocery store have simply become the anti-maskers of the airlines.
On the other hand, recovering from a pandemic is stressful, and anti-maskers aren't the only ones causing issues. Alcohol consumption seems to be at least as much of an issue, and alcohol was involved in the Frontier Airlines incident. Federal Aviation Administration chief Stephen Dickson is currently recommending airports limit alcohol consumption by passengers.