Insight: The Airline Staffing Crisis and Flight Cancellations

Both Spirit and American Airlines had multiple challenges resulting in flight cancellations over the last few days as monthly staffing schedules changed over. Combined with weather delays, this created a logistics nightmare resulting in multiple flight cancellations as crews became unavailable for their new schedule destinations. There have been some unconfirmed reports that a crew scheduling system may have been involved in the hiccups at both airlines. History tells us what happens when there is an error in such a system. Apparently, many crew members went over their daily time limits, thereby exacerbating the problems. Almost all US carriers are short of staff today as the industry ramps up to accommodate additional demand. Despite a significant number of flight cancellations on Monday, the industry set another post-pandemic record for passengers screened. Demand will soon outstrip supply, as airlines will have additional difficulties adding to their schedules given staffing constraints and the time it takes to return aircraft to service. This is, of course, to be expected after the major industry trauma that the pandemic caused. While federal programs kept pilots and flight attendants on the payroll, pilots require recurrent training and flight activity to remain “current” for operations. Training and operational flying were both constrained during the pandemic, and remain constrained today. But ramp-ups and flight cancellations do have an impact. The impact is stranded passengers and unfavorable press, and that impact is multiplied in today’s era of fewer empty seats on a flight. The highlight on the national news will be a montage of displaced passengers camped out at the airport, unable to get home. With load factors near 85% today, it requires about six to seven additional flights to accommodate displaced passengers for each flight that is cancelled. A couple of decades ago, when load factors were in the 65% range, it would take three flights to accommodate a cancellation. As a result, waits for re-accommodation are much longer. Today, if a flight cancels, a passenger may need to wait an additional day or two before re-accommodation is possible for a single cancellation. But when multiple flights are cancelled, passengers can be stranded for more than a week. With massive cancellations over the last 3 days at Spirit, it is likely that some passengers will be stuck at their locations for quite some time. Adding additional flights to an existing schedule is quite difficult, as aircraft tend to be utilized from early morning until close to midnight for most carriers. For some routes, red-eye flights increase aircraft utilization to include overnight hours as well, making additional flights impossible for those aircraft. The end result from weather and operational problems will be passengers stranded for days at the airport, making news headlines and fueling speculation about the fiscal health of the carriers involved. The root cause may be something not quite that dramatic, likely an error in crew scheduling. But this crisis does emphasize the importance of getting things done quickly when something goes wrong. Otherwise, the backlog of angry stranded passengers at airports will be associated daily with your brand on the national news until the problems are fixed. That type of publicity no airline needs.

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