“It’s certainly not a problem unique to Southwest. Now they’re ramping back up while the demand situation is somewhat uncertain,” Baggaley said. They reduced staffing quite a bit during the pandemic. “The airlines are trying to navigate a difficult period. Those problems won’t be fixed any time soon, predicted Philip Baggaley, chief credit analyst for airlines at Standard & Poor’s And their unions say they are stretched thin and in some cases quitting their jobs due to the alarming number of incidents involving unruly passengers. Flight attendants joined pilots in complaining about the lack of hotel rooms. Unions for flight attendants, mechanics and other employees are also upset about working conditions. “Are they biting off more they can they chew?”Īnd it’s not just the pilots unions complaining that members are at a breaking point due to short staffs and uncertain schedules. “We want that flying to get done, but we don’t want tickets sold that can’t be fulfilled,” he said. Tajer said the union is particularly concerned with how the airlines will handle the surge in passengers during the Thanksgiving and December holiday periods. They were not able to connect the pilots with the airplanes.” “ American had its share of problems this summer. Dennis Tajer, an American Airlines pilot and spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association. They’ve had them across the industry,” said Capt. “Southwest’s problems this weekend are not unique to Southwest. That means that these kinds of service disruptions are likely to occur again. All are now trying to hire new workers, but it has been a slow process. When air travel plunged in early 2020, all the airlines offered buyouts and early retirement packages to trim staff. Its most recent headcount, reported to the Transportation Department in August, was 54,500, down from the nearly 61,300 employees in August 2019. The airline has roughly 7,000 fewer employees today than it did pre-pandemic. “We simply need more staffing cushion for the unexpected in this environment and we are bringing new people onboard every day,” he said. A transcript of the recording was shared with CNN. “We are still not where we want to be with staffing, and in particular with our flight crews,” Chief Operating Officer Mike Van de Ven said in a recorded video to employees. But those hiccups caused only minimal disruptions at other airlines, and Southwest admitted to its employees Monday that things cascaded out of control over the weekend because the airline doesn’t have adequate staffing. Southwest said a number of issues caused the weekend cancellations, including bad weather and a brief problem at the Air Traffic Control center in Jacksonville, Florida. Fixing these problems will be expensive and time-consuming - and are likely to cause further pain for passengers returning to the skies. And they’ll continue well after the airline is back on schedule.Īlthough this weekend’s problems were mainly limited to Southwest, it is by no means the only airline struggling to restore staff and flights that were trimmed during the pandemic. The problems at Southwest Airlines run deeper than the operational meltdown that caused more than 2,000 flight cancellations in recent days.
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