Why are airlines canceling so many flights?

Airlines canceled about 1,200 flights to the United States on Sunday and Monday, leaving passengers stranded and luggage piled up at airports across the country. Thousands more trips were abandoned around the world when the summer travel season began.

Now for the bad news: Airlines analysts say delays and cancellations are likely to persist, and could even get worse.

“We may not have seen the worst of this,” Kit Darby, founder of Kit Darby Aviation Consulting, told CBS MoneyWatch.

July 4th weekend “doesn’t look good”

Darby expects the shortage of pilots and flight crews, as well as aircraft, to continue to cause backups, especially as we approach the end of the month and the pilots reach the maximum number of hours legally allowed to fly. . “Towards the end of the month, and as we move on to the next month, that’s when it’s the worst. July 4th doesn’t look good.”

Airline operations are notoriously fragile and vulnerable to disruptions when there is no additional strain on their services. Now, with scarce airline staff, even a point of bad weather can cause delays and cascading cancellations.

“Right now, when you have normal things like aircraft maintenance or weather, the delays are felt much more severely. There are no additional reserved pilots, planes, flight attendants, and the chain is only good as a weaker link. Darby said.

Many of these problems come from airlines that cut staff at the beginning of the pandemic, when air travel plummeted. Since then, demand has risen faster than airlines have been able to increase recruitment.

“The biggest problem is that they have no capacity. They have not been able to regain full capacity in terms of pilots, TSA checkpoints, airport vendors, baggage handlers, ground staff or flight attendants.” travels the New York Times. editor Amy Virshup told CBS News. “So they’re struggling to increase their hiring again in the face of demand that’s growing faster than expected.”

CBS News Senior Travel Advisor Peter Greenberg said airlines need to be staffed to all departments to avoid further cancellations.

“You can hire so many customer service agents. You mean, ‘I’m sorry,’ but if you don’t fix the root issues, the apology will continue,” Elise Preston of CBS News said. “You have to be able to find pilots. There’s a shortage. You have to be able to find people working under the wing: ground handlers, baggage handlers.”

Cruise for pilots

Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes. Darby focuses the problem primarily on a shortage of pilots, which could take years to resolve. Airlines are on track to hire about 12,000 pilots this year, according to their tally.

“Finding and training pilots is a four-year ordeal,” he said, noting that pilots can take years to gain experience before they are qualified to work. “This is a long-term problem with no probable short-term solution.”

“If you offer more money, no more pilots will be created right away. It may attract people to the career in the future, but right now it only moves pilots if one company pays more than another,” Darby added.

Extending the retirement age for pilots from 65 to 67 would help increase the number of potential candidates to sit in the cockpit.

Allowing new pilots to perform some of the required 1,500 hours of training in flight simulators instead of real planes would also help expand the portfolio of commercial flyers.

“Drivers take longer to train and are the most serious part of the problem,” Darby said.