When a CEO abruptly resigns in the second year of a five-year contract, he may explain that he’s resigning to spend more time with family and focus on his health, but that’s not the real reason he’s turning in his resignation.
The real reason is if he doesn’t resign, the board of directors will fire him for being the central figure in a scandal he can’t explain away.
And I think that’s loosely analogous to flight cancellations and the explanations we’re being given for them.
Flights have been and are still being cancelled and delayed at a very high rate – a higher rate than any sustained rate in recent past.
Per FlightAware.com:
From May 1 to June 28,
- American Airlines cancelled 3.2% of flights and 24.8% were delayed
- Delta was at 3.0% and 19.3%
- United was at 2.5% and 22.8%
It’s very possible the numbers are being underreported and/or skewed, but the point is that anybody listening to this podcast commonsensically knows that flights in the last several months have had severe problems in taking off on time – or at all.
But why?
I read articles from four different major news outlets and here are the explanations being given:
- Bad weather
- A surge in demand
- Staff shortages
- COVID-19 outbreaks among airline personnel
I don’t believe that these four bullet points are the real reason that flights are being cancelled and delayed.
Could they be partially true?
Of course.
Just as with the CEO example, the CEO may really want to spend more time with his grandkids and lose some weight.
And when it comes to flight problems, it’s similar. It makes sense that the weather, increased demand, staff shortages, and ongoing COVID outbreaks could disrupt flights – but are these reasons, the real reason?
In this episode, I’ll rebut the presumption put forth by the mainstream media by pointing out gaps in reasoning and asking common sense questions.
Let’s go down the list.
Bad Weather
Bad weather is a constant, but this is a throw-in and not what we’re looking for. We want to know why people everywhere are stuck at the airport.
A Surge in Demand
More people flying this summer is logical, right? Mask mandates in the U.S. were lifted in April 2022. The COVID theater started waning in late 2021. And people are making up for the trips that never were.
But if we accept this as true, how is it that airlines were caught flat-footed when the very predictable and inevitable increase in travel came to be?
How is it that an industry with $248 billion in revenue in 2019 (for the U.S. alone) wasn’t primed to get back to business the second the market demand presented itself?
Any industry worth that much money is constantly running the numbers to determine what’s happening next, and to forecast revenue.
And any industry that’s forecasting would at least have contingencies in place to capture value from the inevitable rise in travel.
There’s no way a mature industry would accept sustained losses over the duration of peak travel season just as it was coming off two consecutive down years – one in which nearly half the revenue was wiped off the books.
COVID wasn’t going to last forever, but it’s as if the airlines were taking the under on travel growth– a bet that, in this case, had limited upside and tremendous downside.
And this is despite the revenue numbers showing a sharp rise. In 2021, U.S. airline revenue was at $193 billion according to Zippia.com. This is up from $130 billion in the year of Covid, 2020.
You didn’t need an advanced forecasting model to tell you this number was going to spike again in 2022.
Staff Shortages
Let’s examine two excerpts from a July 2022 LA Times article by Hugo Martin:
“The federal government approved $54 billion in relief for the airlines on the condition that carriers keep workers on the payroll. But to save cash, many airlines offered pilots, flight attendants and other workers early-retirement packages, which thinned the workforce by thousands.”
The plain meaning of this paragraph indicates the airlines breached the “relief” agreement, but that’s a side story. Let’s continue to excerpt two:
“The overall staffing levels in the U.S. airline industry have rebounded to a level slightly below 2019 numbers. Still, industry experts point out that many recent hires are inexperienced workers who are at the bottom of the learning curve.”
Alright, here is the takeaway from these excerpts:
- Airlines retired a significant portion of the workforce and
- Recent hires are too inexperienced to do the job
So why not bring the retirees back as contractors or even employees?
Qualified individuals to fly, attend, and service planes still exist. Why aren’t these people being called and asked to come back and work?
If they decline, why not entice them with extra money?
According to Mark Baier, from an independent Forbes article by Suzanne Rowan Kelleher, we can’t bring the pilots back because they belong to the baby boomer generation.
“We have a baby boomer generation that’s coming up to retirement, and that is quite a big generation. So the industry is losing a lot of pilots who were, quite frankly, given offers to resign early when flight levels were down.”
“You had a huge number of pilots who were approaching retirement age,” he says. “You cannot fly as a commercial pilot beyond a certain age.”
So now the reason is the pilots that were forced into retirement would have retired within the next few years anyway because they were baby boomers.
It’s a convenient excuse, but I don’t believe that the airline industry hummed along for nine years straight – with revenue increasing almost every year – and then all of a sudden there wasn’t a spare pilot in sight after COVID restrictions lifted.
I’ve linked to a US airline industry revenue graph posted on Zippia.com to illustrate this growth.
How coincidental is it that a lack of pilots due to age has become an insurmountable issue just as travel is going back to pre-COVID levels?
Again, while this trend may certainly be true, would the facts withstand any kind of scrutiny?
Do the facts bear out that exactly at the end of April 2022, almost all of the available pilots who had been sidelined were over 64 years and 11 months old and couldn’t resume piloting because they were too close to the 65-year cut off?
And if all of these pilots are indeed missing from action, how come the reported flight cancellations only top out at 3.2% among major airlines?
Less pilots wouldn’t correlate with more delays, it would mean many more flights are cancelled.
Especially when you consider there’s a hard cap on pilot’s hours.
Per Title 14 – Aeronautics and Space of the CFR § 121.481(d) – Flight time limitations: One or two pilot crews.
“No pilot may fly more than 32 hours during any seven consecutive days, and each pilot must be relieved from all duty for at least 24 consecutive hours at least once during any seven consecutive days.”
So this dispels any idea that pilots can be stretched to meet pressing demands for more flights. Pilots can only fly 32 hours a week and that’s it.
So, again, if a pilot shortage is indeed a major problem, this wouldn’t result in delays.
But there’s another aspect to staff surges. Let’s look at one more excerpt from the LA Times article:
“…industry insiders put much of the blame on airline executives who scheduled thousands of additional flights to cash in on the demand this summer. With the workforce awash with new inexperienced staff and plagued by COVID outbreaks, the result has been ugly.”
So is the story now that airline executives did anticipate the demand, but they didn’t think about how they were going to meet it?
Did the airline executives think, hey let’s take this extra cash up front, but then completely fail on our service and:
- Have to issue refunds and credits
- Damage our reputation
- Push our existing workforce to the brink
- Pay overtime to staff
Again, this doesn’t make sense and now we have an inconsistency. The LA Times article actually predates the CBS News and CNET articles I read which make no reference to airline executives anticipating demand. Rather, the mainstream media stories lead us to believe there was an incredible spike in travel for the Spring and Summer of 2022 and airlines didn’t see it coming.
COVID-19 Outbreaks
It’s quite possible COVID-19 outbreaks amongst airline personnel have caused disruptions, but this is not the primary reason cited by major media outlets (staffing is).
Also, as time has passed it is now clear that COVID-19 is not the harbinger of calamity that it was made out to be by the media, government, and CDC.
Moreover, most other industries have been able to revert back to normal working production.
Back to Normal
So when are going back to normal?
The CNET article I read gives to different visions.
One excerpt says this fall.
““Analysts don’t expect schedules will get back to normal until at least the fall, when demand settles down and new hires have had time to be trained up.”
And another excerpt implies not for five-plus years.
“Most airlines are simply not going to be able to realize their capacity plans because there simply aren’t enough pilots, at least not for the next five-plus years,” United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said in a quarterly earnings call back in April, NBC News reported.”
A quote from Mark Baier in the Forbes piece agrees:
“Unfortunately, the traveling public is going to have to get used to some frustrations and challenges and higher prices for a while.”
Fall sounds like the lull to sleep answer.
The more realistic answer is that flights will be difficult for the foreseeable future. This is one of the few messages I’m inclined to believe.
Do you remember when you were in school and your teacher told you to pay very close attention?
This is one of those times. Pay very close attention to the messaging around pilot shortages.
We’re witnessing a taylor fitted excuse being crafted right before our eyes.
Equipment Shortage
Another quote from the Forbes piece makes mention of an equipment shortage problem which I had not seen elsewhere.
It’s worth noting that the Forbes article does not appear to be written by in-house staff, but by an independent contributor.
Continuing on, here’s another quote from Mark Baier.
“We’re essentially seeing a strain on a system that’s trying to quickly spool back up to pre-Covid travel levels. Airlines had retired or mothballed some equipment, so we’re seeing an equipment shortage right now.”
What exactly does this mean?
Why would you retire equipment for COVID – does the equipment no longer work, is the technology too old?
Does this mean the equipment is in storage and that airlines can’t manage to get to it?
This explanation is flimsy and not found in the mainstream. I’m disgarding it.
The Research Note
Before I wrap up, one other side note that I want to mention is how difficult it was to get straightforward answers to my question:
Why are flights being cancelled?
I purposefully used Google to get mainstream media point of view, but quality of results returned were very poor and lacked depth, specificity, and material derived from original sources.
The articles I browsed were incomplete, quick pieces without any substance.
The LA Times article I’ve referenced in this episode was by far the best journalism I encountered – and that’s because it was written by a real person.
This is a good reminder that many of the articles you read are written by AI robots – and, yes, this happens at almost all of the major media outlets.
These articles are written without an investigative or even inquisitive light.
Another big reason clean results were so difficult to get was because of something called Google search intent or Google user intent.
Per Google.com, “Our systems also try to understand what type of information you are looking for.”
I’ll have a separate episode dedicated to search intent, but the anecdote relevant to this episode is Google would return many results didn’t answer the question.
For example, for my original question:
Why are flights being cancelled?
Results from the first page of Google were:
- US airlines cancel another 1,500 flights Friday
- More than 4000 flights canceled since Thursday
- Flight Canceled or Delayed? Know Your Rights
- Nearly 950 flights cancelled, 7,700 delayed Sunday
- Live Airline Flight Cancellations Info & Statistics – FlightAware
This means literally half of the organic results from the first page of Google didn’t even match my query.
Not only is the information skewed, but it’s difficult to get a hold of the skewed information.
Summary
We’re being given a story to follow for why traveling is now more difficult, but the story doesn’t add up.
The beautiful part about a story for the storyteller is they can insert seemingly logical explanations for why everything fits together – and the explanations can even be true – but there can be more to the story that is being left on the cutting room floor.
And in the case of flight cancellations and delays, I think there’s something much bigger at play.
The main message we’re being given is that airlines are short staffed and that a lack of pilots is the biggest problem.
Okay, but what about all of those pilots that were flying planes in 2019?
Why can’t they be offered more money to come back and help meet demand?
What about all of those pilots that were on the verge of being licensed to fly commercial airlines?
Capable pilots didn’t just stop existing.
We don’t know the real reason that flights are being cancelled and delayed.
But what we do know is the effect that the cancellations and delays are having. They have acted as a deterrent to traveling and traveling, in effect, has become restricted. Less people are flying now.
And the story why doesn’t add up.
Links to all resources cited to in this podcast are in the show notes.
You can learn more about The In-Between Game at InBetweenGame.com.