The Daily - The Summer of Airline Chaos

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

Across the United States, airline travel this summer has been roiled by canceled flights, overbooked planes, disappointment and desperation.Two and a half years after the pandemic began and with restrictions easing, why is flying still such an unpleasant experience?Guest: Niraj Chokshi, a business reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: The question for many travelers is whether they can trust airlines to get them where they want to go on time. Here is what to know about the air travel mess.Travelers on both sides of the Atlantic have endured long lines, delays or cancellations, and plenty of frustration. Is this the new normal?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Earlier this year, I was supposed to be traveling back home from a work trip in Minneapolis. Five minutes before my Uber arrived, I was scrolling through my emails, and I saw the headline, Your flight was canceled. Here's your new itinerary. No reason given. Oh well. I was like, you know, whatever. At least I still have a flight, right? While I was waiting at the gate, I get another email from Delta, and my flight to Cincinnati was delayed. Again, no reason given. And now I'm really confused because I'm like, wait a minute. How do I catch my flight in Cincinnati at 4.59 if I don't get there until 5.12? You know, am I going to time travel?

And I chose to reroute my flight through Raleigh, North Carolina. We're on the flight. I'm finally going somewhere. We land in Raleigh, and I start getting all the notifications I miss. And among them, I see another headline from Delta. Your flight was canceled. Here's your new itinerary. So I de-board, and I head to the Delta desk. And they say that the flight from Raleigh to New York was canceled due to inclement weather and that there's nothing they can do. This is really the first indication all day, after two canceled flights and a delay, that I actually have a reason why a flight was canceled. It's an act of God.

They blamed God. From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Ketroweth. This is The Daily. My name's Dana. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. My name is James Mason. My name is Sam. My name is Gwen. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. My name is James Mason. My name is Sam. My name is Gwen. Across the country this summer...

I show up to the airport and they're like, oh no, your flight is canceled. The flight's canceled. My flight is canceled. Airline travel has been defined by new depths of inconvenience. And I get up to the front of this line and the employee says, we don't have a ticket for you and this plan is overbooked. It was like this anvil crashed on my head. Disruption. I was definitely going to miss the birthday dinner at that point, so I sent my girlfriend a few apologetic texts and waited. Thankfully, my girlfriend was pretty understanding about the whole situation. And misery. I got to this point of desperation where I realized it just settles on you.

It feels so heavy when you're like, I'm not getting home. Today, my colleague Neeraj Chokshi explains why two and a half years into the pandemic, flying remains such an unpleasant experience. It's Wednesday, August 17th. Neeraj, by now it's a well-established fact that this is the summer of airline hell. And the testimonials from the daily listeners that we played at the top of the show really capture that. The delays, the cancellations, and the maddening explanations for them. It is very bad.

Yeah, it is. I hear from readers. I hear from friends. I have nervously tried to avoid problems myself, but it is really a summer of hell. So we want to talk about the forces behind all of that. How it can be that this long into the pandemic, when it feels like air travel really should be more or less back to normal, it's somehow gotten worse. How did we get here? Well, to understand that, we have to go back to early 2020. COVID was wreaking havoc across the economy. For the airlines, it started in probably February 2020, where we really started to see international flights affected. And by April of 2020,

more than 95% of air traffic has just disappeared. To give you an idea, on March 1st, the TSA was screening about 2.3 million people per day. By mid-April, that's down to fewer than 90,000 people. Wow. So from there, the federal government decided to bail the industry out. They give airlines about $25 billion, and that's just to pay workers, just to keep people employed, to avoid mass layoffs and bankruptcy. And then they eventually increased that to $54 billion. That helps, but the industry still has no sense of how long this is going to last, when traffic will recover. We still didn't have vaccines. They didn't know what was coming next, so they decided to thin their ranks.

And so in the summer of 2020, they turned to their workers and they say, you know, we're willing to give you money to leave in the form of buyouts, in the form of early retirement packages. And tens of thousands of people take advantage of it. Ultimately, at its low point, the industry is about 12 percent smaller than it was just before the pandemic began. And while we're all at home and not flying, that's not something we, as passengers at least, are really paying that much attention to, right? I mean, what's happening in the airline industry is not top of mind at that moment. Right. All this is going on behind the scenes.

And, you know, a lot of people probably aren't even noticing that this has gone down. But that starts to change in early 2021. It's one of the more busy weeks airport officials can remember in a while. Flights coming back, signaling the start of the return to normal. That spring, a lot of people start to get vaccinated. They start to feel more comfortable traveling. Our last three weeks in America have been the three strongest weeks for bookings since the pandemic hit, and each week has been stronger than the last.

We see the airline recovery really pick up steam that summer. But as it picks up steam, we also start to see some cracks forming. Spirit Airlines scrubbed even more flights today after a series of cancellations and delays dating back to the weekend. There are various weekend meltdowns for different airlines. The Budget Airline reports it's trying to reboot operations now. At one point, Spirit Airlines lost $50 million over a nearly two-week stretch because of various disruptions. Southwest Airlines says its recent meltdown cost the airline $75 million

and its plan to prevent similar incidents may impact their holiday travel plans. and its plan to prevent similar incidents may impact your holiday travel plans. Later that fall of 2021, Southwest Airlines lost $75 million over a long weekend. And then the Omicron wave started to develop just before the winter holidays. Now those COVID numbers are causing flight cancellations across the country, United and Delta canceling at least 100 each. And that started decimating staffing on the planes. Yeah, I remember so many people had their holiday travel canceled because all these airline crews were getting COVID. Right. And I think that really laid bare that there was a staffing issue here. I mean, obviously, the Omicron wave was really severe, but it also

highlighted that, you know, the airlines don't have a lot of buffer. They're really operating on a razor's edge here. And that was something that needed to be addressed. And to some extent, they were addressing it. They were hiring into winter and they continued to hire. But I think it really made it clear to them that they needed to really accelerate those efforts, especially with the summer of 2022 coming up. So by the spring, the airlines have pretty big ambitions for the summer. It's always the busiest season of every year. And there's a sense that people are getting really excited to travel too. You hear from airlines that the summer is going to be great. This summer is going to see tons of traffic. We're going to be back to normal.

In April of this year, the chief executive of United Airlines, Scott Kirby, said that the demand environment is the strongest that it's been in his 30 years in the industry. Wow. And I think at that point, you start to wonder if demand is going to be back and airlines are still clearly a little nervous that they're going to be able to meet it. You know, what's going to happen? Well, we kind of know what happens. Things obviously do not go smoothly. Right. So Memorial Day weekend kicks off summer travel season. And it was OK.

But then we just start to see delays consistently throughout June and into July. Of all the attractions Michelle saw on her holiday in the UK, the floor of Terminal 5 was not on her list of places to spend a night. It's just as clear that the industry can't get a hold on getting things right and running smoothly. The chaos comes just as airports brace for another flood of travelers July 4th weekend. An anticipated 11 million to pass through airports over the holiday, despite the soaring cost of travel. You're seeing people have flights canceled, and to get to where they're going, they have to pay thousands more than they were originally planning, especially if they're flying with family.

One traveler tweeting, I see London, I see Air France, but I don't see my underpants because they're in my suitcase that you left at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport 11 days ago. People who have plans, events to make, miss them by sometimes days. And for a lot of people, this is their first big trip in two plus years and it's being ruined. So if you are thinking about traveling to Europe this summer, buckle up because it is being described as Armageddon. Yeah, I remember the scenes, at least on TV, of people just freaking out over lost baggage. I remember Heathrow in London just being a mess. I mean, it definitely seemed like things were falling apart in this really dramatic way. Yeah, I mean, they were. And every summer is bad, but this summer clearly stood out.

And we start to really appreciate all these problems kind of coming together from earlier in the pandemic. And of those, the biggest is staffing. We'll be right back. Neeraj, before the break, you said there are a few problems left over from COVID. COVID hangovers, if you will, that are conspiring to make our air travel

miserable this summer, and that staffing is the biggest one. Explain that. Right. There's sort of two flavors here. There's the people who you can hire back, but you're having trouble because this is just a really competitive job market, and it has been for more than a year. Unemployment is at a 50-year low.

I mean, it's just really hard to hire people, no matter what you're hiring them for. The other piece of this is something that is both current and longstanding, and that's the pilot and mechanic shortage. For years, you've had this shortage looming. And suddenly, airlines are really desperate to hire pilots and to build up their mechanics. And there just aren't any. The military was a huge source of pilots for a long time, but the military has seen fewer pilots in recent years too. And so that pipeline has thinned out. The other problem is that in the 2000s, the industry went through a lot of bankruptcies. And in that process, pilots lost some benefits. The job became a little bit more of a grind and

it sort of lost a little bit of its luster. And so we end up in this position where there's just not enough people in the pipeline and suddenly the industry needs a ton of them. And so we end up in this position where there's just not enough people in the pipeline. And suddenly the industry needs a ton of them. And so you start to just see airlines desperately doing what they can. They're announcing pilot academies. They're poaching pilots from smaller carriers. And then once you hire all those pilots, you got to train them. Training has its own bottlenecks. You can only get retrained on certain aircraft in certain places. So you have to find time to make it to the training center. There has to be class instruction. And with COVID, those classes are smaller. And so there's just this hiring bottleneck, and then there's this training bottleneck. And they're still working

through that part of it. So I get that there's a lot of people on airplanes that need to be highly trained. I'm wondering, are there other problems outside of the plane itself that are making this worse? Yeah, and that's the second type of labor shortage I mentioned. And this one is affecting airlines, airports, the whole system. Maybe it's helpful to think about what your typical experience at an airport is. Imagine you show up at an airport, you have a bag, let's say you want to check that bag. You go up to a ticketing agent for your airline, you hand them the bag, they eventually get the bag into the hands of a baggage handler, and that person gets your bag on the plane. While they're doing that, you go to security, and you get screened by a TSA

officer. That's another person in this chain. Once you get through there, hopefully it's quick, you get to your gate and there's a gate agent who might be available to help you if you have any issues. Now, while you're sort of waiting to port your plane, you've got caterers, cleaners, mechanics, people on the tarmac, all getting your plane ready for you. And then after all of that,

the pilot has to get clearance from air traffic control. So you can imagine that if at any point along that chain, if they have trouble staffing up, it's going to reverberate and you're going to be late. A lot of these jobs are low wage and it's a competitive market for those workers. If you don't feel like working long hours at the airport or you're getting yelled at by travelers, isn't your idea fun? You've got other options. So we're seeing the same labor issues afflicting other industries at play here. But if staffing is lower at a restaurant, you don't get your meal on time.

The stakes are obviously so much higher for the airline industry. Right, exactly. I mean, if your pizza's not going to be ready on time or if they tell you that it's going to be an hour wait, guess what? You can walk down the street to another restaurant. You don't have the same option at an airport. You've already paid. It may be too late to cancel. It may be too frustrating to try to figure out, can you get on a different airline? And so, yeah, stakes are way higher. you get on a different airline. And so, yeah, stakes are way higher. Yeah. I mean, just as an example, if your flight gets messed up because of, say, a hurricane, and then you're stuck for hours, seven hours, maybe at an airport because there aren't any pilots that could get you out of town, you may find yourself spending those seven precious hours of your life studying your seatmates' wedding photos from like 40 years ago. That sounds awfully specific, Natalie. It is. It is specifically about me.

Yeah, I mean, joking aside, you mentioned hurricanes, and that actually makes me think of the last major problem that the industry is dealing with. And this one also came out of the pandemic, and that's that travel behavior has changed. Take Florida, for example. It's always been really busy. And Florida deals with a lot of storms. People every summer travel to Miami, to Orlando, but it's only become busier throughout the pandemic because it was one of the few places that you could go where you could stay outside and still feel like you're actually on vacation. And it continues to be a really popular destination. And what you see is people are flying to different places than they were before the pandemic. They're flying for different durations. They're flying on different days. And that's placed more of an

emphasis on things working right in those places that they're going to. And when they don't, like when there's a hurricane in Florida, it creates a problem that can reverberate throughout the system. And the industry has to deal with that. And what they've done is something that makes a lot of economic sense, but it also sort of complicates the problem, right? They basically said, we realize we stretch ourselves too thin, we're going to actually not offer as many flights as we had hoped, and as the demand supports. And in one way, that's great. It means that they have extra pilots, extra planes, extra flight attendants, et cetera, to deal with any problems. But on the other hand, it means that if there are problems, there aren't a lot of options for customers to rebook or to kind of look elsewhere. And so it's a little bit of a catch-22. What you're saying is in order to

solve this problem of delays and cancellations, the airline's main strategy has been to cut back on flights. That does strike me as kind of counterproductive. Yeah, but I mean, in the short term, it's the move that's serving the industry best. But if you're a passenger, flights are more expensive, there are fewer options, and you're left wondering who to blame. flights are more expensive, there are fewer options, and you're left wondering who to blame. Naraj, you've laid out the reasons behind the nightmare that so many of us have experienced. But didn't we kind of pay to fix this already as taxpayers with that bailout? Shouldn't that have bought us a more functional summer of travel? Yeah, and I think a lot of people would argue that it did.

If airlines didn't get that money, they would have been allowed to make much deeper cuts, and some could have even risked bankruptcy. And so this might just be the best summer we could have hoped for. That is dark. It is, but maybe looking at the numbers will make you feel a little bit better. So, look, this summer is bad.

Flight cancellations, flight delays are both up by about a third from the summer of 2019. But if you look at the actual hard numbers, in 2019, just under two out of every 100 flights was canceled. This time around, it's just over two. That's still a pretty small share. When it comes to delays, about 19% of flights are delayed in 2019. This year, it's up to about 24%. So it is worse.

But, you know, this is kind of looking like a bad summer, but not a drastically bad summer. But why does it feel so much worse then? To some extent, it might be perception. I mean, a lot of us haven't been on any big trips throughout the pandemic, right? I mean, I went to Sweden last month, and I put so much pressure on that trip because I'd been really missing traveling abroad. And it was such an opportunity. And I was lucky.

It wasn't too bad. I had one missed connection, but it only delayed me by a few hours. But, you know, in some cases, it can be one, two days. I mean, you can miss a wedding. You know, after a pandemic where you've been sort of locked into your local area, there's a lot riding on these. You're saying, in one sense, the problem is that our expectations might just be too high, which I get, but is also a hard pill to swallow just because I'm paying so much more for flights. You're right. It is more expensive. Fares are up double-digit percentage from 2019.

And, you know, on one hand, the biggest airlines just reported record revenue in this last quarter. But they've also spent a lot of that money. And so if you look at profits, what they've actually kept, they've reported profits, which is great coming out of the pandemic. That hasn't happened for a while. But they've been spending a lot of money on jet fuel, a lot of money on everything from food to, as we've discussed, labor. Naraj, you said you were going to make me feel better, but I am not feeling better right now. How does this interminable mess of it all end? Well, so there are a few ways.

Lawmakers have proposed a bill that would make it harder for airlines to offer a schedule that they can't staff. So if they know they don't have the staffing, they just wouldn't be allowed to put it out there. At the same time, the transportation department is looking to kind of harden the rules around consumer protections. They want to make it easier for you to get a refund, harder for airlines to push you towards taking credit for a refund. And then the other thing is that the summer's winding down. Fall is always a slower season. So airlines might have a little bit of breathing room soon to sort things out. You're saying we're already maybe through the worst of this? Yeah, July was a really busy month, but we're halfway through August.

And, you know, kids are going to go back to school. People are going to get back to work. And, you know, fewer people are going to fly. There's a light at the end of the tunnel here. A single on-time flight in our future? Yeah, it's hard to predict, but it's possible that we see a return to normal next summer. But keep in mind that normal isn't always that great.

You know, still means delays, still means canceled flights, but it could at least be better than this summer. Neeraj, thank you so much. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Tonight, Harriet Hageman has received the most votes in this primary. She won. I called her to concede the race. This primary election is over. Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who alienated both her Republican colleagues and her

constituents by demanding that Donald Trump be held accountable for his role in the January 6th attack on the Capitol, was defeated on Tuesday in a Republican primary. Cheney was beaten by an opponent, Harriet Hageman, who falsely claims that the 2020 election was rigged, and who was endorsed by Trump. Cheney was widely expected to lose after bucking her party's leadership, first by voting to impeach Trump in 2021, and then by becoming an outspoken member of the House committee investigating January 6th. She becomes the latest House Republican

to pay a political price for crossing Trump. So far, of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him over January 6th, eight have either lost re-election or said they would resign. Two years ago, I won this primary with 73% of the vote. I could easily have done the same again.

The path was clear. But it would have required that I go along with President Trump's lie about the 2020 election. It would have required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic. That was a path I could not and would not take. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Luke Vander Ploeg, and Sydney Harper.

It was edited by John Ketchum and M.J. Davis-Linn. Contains original music by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, and was engineered by Corey Schreppel. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kittroweth. See you tomorrow.