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- Airlines are cutting flights from their fall schedules to prevent mass delays and cancellations.
- But the industry may not fully recover until late 2024, a travel analyst said.
- Hiring and training new employees can take months, making it more difficult to fix problems.
Traveling this summer wasn’t just a nightmare — or a “flying dream” — as many outlets dubbed it a wave of mass flight delays and cancellations.
But it can only go from here, right?
Unfortunately, while delays at some airlines appear to be easing, the industry may not fully recover until late 2024, said Henry Hartevelt, travel analyst and president of Atmospheric Research Group.
Summer is a difficult time to fly thanks to high demand and inclement weather, Adam Gordon, managing director of Boston Consulting Group, told Insider. Add in the ongoing effects of a global pandemic and two-year delayed plans and you have a sure recipe for disaster.
This decline shows if the summer turmoil is a temporary setback as the sprawling industry bounces back from lows — or if there are more systemic problems at play.
“It’s easy to forget how dramatically reduced capacity airlines faced during the first part of the pandemic,” Gordon said. “Growing the operation back is not easy and the operational challenges we’ve seen recently are often not a failure of the airline’s planning or execution, but the result of this complexity.”
It’s no secret that one of the challenges that has kept airlines from fully recovering is recruiting, but it’s not a problem that can be solved simply by sending a letter of advance.
New employees at airlines and airports must undergo training — which can take up to 13 weeks, depending on the position — and stay put, which has proven challenging when many new hires are put on the job for months, Hartvelt said.
Air France pilots work in an Airbus A350 flight simulator, which is used in many airline pilot training courses.
Eric Piermont/AFP via Getty Images
“Every month, the airline industry graduates more pilots, which fills the pilot shortage and recruits, trains, and deploys more personnel,” he said.
United CEO Scott Kirby explained in July that major US carriers are cutting up to 31,000 flights from their November schedules to ensure airlines don’t have too many flights.
“There’s weather and people call in sick, and sometimes the jetbridge breaks and the power goes out for 20 minutes,” he said. “The system doesn’t have any buffers to deal with that. And that’s basically why we downgraded the program — to create more buffers.”
Hartevelt said he expects “2023 to be a better year for the industry than 2022” as US carriers overbook and cut lines.
“But what I’ve heard from a number of people in the airlines is that they believe that things may not return to normal until the end of 2024,” he said.
Airline CEOs are a little more optimistic. Delta’s Ed Bastian said in July that the company aims to return to “100%” by the summer of 2023, but warned that the goal post could move “as we see in the economy”.
Interestingly, Hartvelt told Insider that an economic slowdown could be beneficial to the recovery of airline operations.
“If the U.S. economy experiences material weakness, whether it’s a slowdown or a recession, we could see demand for air travel decline, and that decline in demand could ease the pressure on airlines to keep flying.” He said it would create an opportunity to “play” the industry in hiring.
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