US Airlines Are Cancelling Thousands of Flights (cnn.com) 84
1,975 flights were cancelled in the U.S. today. 2,919 flights were cancelled Friday. And 28,118 more flights were at least delayed. That's according to the flight tracking site FlightAware, which also showed another 1,248 flights cancelled Thursday, according to CNN.
They note that America's "massive flight cancellations" started Thursday when "thunderstorms pounded major airports on the East Coast." Southwest Airlines canceled 370 flights, or 9% of its Thursday schedule. Southwest delayed another 1,800 flights, 46% of its Thursday schedule. "We are working through a variety of weather-related challenges that are affecting a number of our larger operations across the country this week," Southwest Airlines said in a statement on Friday...
Airlines have been struggling with flight cancellations and delays this summer as they face staffing shortages, severe weather and air traffic control delays. US airlines have been preemptively trimming their schedules to ease air traffic disruptions, with American Airlines the latest to make cuts, particularly at its hub in Philadelphia. American Airlines had canceled more than 200 flights by Friday afternoon. Air traffic disruptions have been bad in Europe, too. London Heathrow and Amsterdam Schiphol airports announced moves this week to curb congestion.
Elsewhere CNN reports that there's a larger ongoing problem. "As global travelers return to the skies in droves after a pandemic-enforced pause, airlines and airports across the world are grappling to match supply with demand." When aviation ground to a halt in the early days of the pandemic, most airlines and airports either furloughed or laid off many ground and air workers. Many carriers operated a skeleton staff for the best part of the last two years. Now, travel demand is back, and the industry is struggling to catch up and rehire....
A spokesperson for Lufthansa said that the aviation industry as a whole is "suffering from bottlenecks and staff shortages, noticeable especially during peak periods." The post-pandemic travel boom was "expected — but not in this intensity," the Lufthansa spokesperson added.
They note that America's "massive flight cancellations" started Thursday when "thunderstorms pounded major airports on the East Coast." Southwest Airlines canceled 370 flights, or 9% of its Thursday schedule. Southwest delayed another 1,800 flights, 46% of its Thursday schedule. "We are working through a variety of weather-related challenges that are affecting a number of our larger operations across the country this week," Southwest Airlines said in a statement on Friday...
Airlines have been struggling with flight cancellations and delays this summer as they face staffing shortages, severe weather and air traffic control delays. US airlines have been preemptively trimming their schedules to ease air traffic disruptions, with American Airlines the latest to make cuts, particularly at its hub in Philadelphia. American Airlines had canceled more than 200 flights by Friday afternoon. Air traffic disruptions have been bad in Europe, too. London Heathrow and Amsterdam Schiphol airports announced moves this week to curb congestion.
Elsewhere CNN reports that there's a larger ongoing problem. "As global travelers return to the skies in droves after a pandemic-enforced pause, airlines and airports across the world are grappling to match supply with demand." When aviation ground to a halt in the early days of the pandemic, most airlines and airports either furloughed or laid off many ground and air workers. Many carriers operated a skeleton staff for the best part of the last two years. Now, travel demand is back, and the industry is struggling to catch up and rehire....
A spokesperson for Lufthansa said that the aviation industry as a whole is "suffering from bottlenecks and staff shortages, noticeable especially during peak periods." The post-pandemic travel boom was "expected — but not in this intensity," the Lufthansa spokesperson added.
Great for the footprint (Score:4, Interesting)
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Hey, if we just flat-out kill people who look as us funny, we'll zero out their carbon footprints completely
One that's a reach for a conclusion. Two, we kill innocent people for way less reasons than carbon footprint. Hell, some folks go off and kill themselves with ignorance and other bad behaviors on a pretty much hourly basis. So I'm not sure your argument is hitting the way you think it should be hitting. Millions die for all kinds of less than noble reasons than carbon footprint and no one bats an eye. Shit, the United States has literal kids being shot and nobody does anything, so I mean, what emotiona
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That's bureaucratic stupidity right there.
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Nope. Each cancellation is 10000L of kero burnt a day later. When your flight is cancelled you don't just go "oh okay" and then decide not to go on holiday, or not go on that business trip.
Better still, a plane still needs to be where it needs to be. It's quite common practice to cancel a flight, and then later fly that plane empty to whatever airport it needs to be at the next day.
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You're saying they will add an extra flight the next day? I didn't know that. I assumed that other flights were now more full. Thanks.
No they will add more fuel to the next flight to cover for the additional weight of another passenger.
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Looks like about 5 kg fuel/1000 km per extra person... not a big deal.
https://aviation.stackexchange... [stackexchange.com]
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It should be obvious that flying more airliners that are partially full consumes more fuel than flying fewer completely full airliners. The empty weight of a 767-400 is 103,000 kg, and the maximum weight of passengers plus luggage (100 kg per passenger) is 59,000 kg (296 passenger configuration). Most of the fuel is used to fly the aircraft structure.
Having recently done some flying, it is apparent that what is happening is that airlines are rebooking their flights so that all flights are full. I have not f
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Doesn't work that way.
You get rebooked on the next flight which has empty seats. win-win!
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Not win-win. Planes have variable fuel depending on passenger load. Planes also often fly empty when cancelled as they and their flight crew are in the wrong place. Also new services do get added all the time. Many airlines have spare slots allocated at airports to do just this.
This isn't a case where a fixed amount of fuel is burnt per day, and if a flight is cancelled everyone can dance in the street for saving the world. It doesn't work *THAT* way.
Rome didn't fall in a day (Score:3)
Let's be aware of what went wrong for them, and how we at times inadvertently emulate their missteps.
Re:Rome didn't fall in a day (Score:4, Funny)
It's "Rome wasn't burnt in a day".
Also, can someone get me up to speed here, is this Biden's fault or Trump's fault?
Re: Rome didn't fall in a day (Score:2)
Re: Rome didn't fall in a day (Score:2)
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you forgot:
Country attempts to do something about those things while dipshits complain and whine about culture war nonsense and obstruct for the sake of obstruction, and shitpost on the Internet about things that have absolutely nothing to do with anything.
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Supply shortage = money (Score:5, Insightful)
When there is collusion, you can make a ton of money by artificially creating a shortage. Since many people are desperate to fly, you can charge them 4 or 5x the normal cost of a ticket, which is many times what your costs are. Think of it like this, when gas prices went up double .. the number of people buying gas didn't halve. It dropped by just a few percent, maybe .. resulting in record profits.
Re:Supply shortage = money (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't spoil the conspiracy theorist circle, we're onto our favorite topic: corporations
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I don't blame the corporations, I blame the government for creating/allowing this situation by failing to ensure competition and placing barriers to the free market. If there was competition, shartages wouldn't happen.
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Duke : The lights are growing dim Otto. I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am.
Otto : That's bullshit. You're a white suburban punk just like me.
Duke : Yeah, but it still hurts.
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I don't blame the corporations, I blame the government for creating/allowing this situation by failing to ensure competition and placing barriers to the free market. If there was competition, shartages wouldn't happen.
A sudden, massive drop in airline revenue can reasonably be expected to be responded to with capacity cuts in a state of competition.
That these capacity cuts can take time to recover after a new, sudden massive jump in revenue, is also true in a state of competition.
You're an obscurantist - using deliberately vague, obscure language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] "(2) deliberate obscurity—a recondite literary or artistic style, characterized by deliberate vagueness."
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Corporations hate competition. They love to be monopolies. Government must constantly strive to prevent monopolies but corporations bribe politicians to gain monopolies.
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I'd venture that's because everyone who has to drive to work, school, drive the kids around, shop, etc., just can't reduce doing those things; whereas most people can reduce air travel they pay for out of pocket.
Re: Supply shortage = money (Score:2)
Given that there are parents on my street who drive their children to the same school that I walk, cycle or scoot my five year old to, thereâ(TM)s plenty of scope for cutting with the benefit of improved health and teaching the next generation better habits. The schoolâ(TM)s 1.2 km away, and cycling is actually faster than driving, go figure.
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If you really want to go that way, then nobody really needs to. Nobody really needs to get to their vacation spot in only a few hours when they can drive there over several days, nobody really needs to be there when a loved one is dying in time for them to die, nobody really needs to go into the office when they can work remotely. If you don't have things like lab equipment, then buy some for your local office instead of moving between offices. We'll just save flying for the sick and dying, i.e. those who w
Re:Supply shortage = money (Score:5, Informative)
How many of those cancelled flights were nearly empty?
It's been probably 10-20 flights since I had a plane that was under 70% capacity. The last several were 100% full. They really like to pack the sardine can these days.
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It's actually the reverse of that. In many cases when a flight is cancelled it results in an aircrew or plane ending up in the wrong place. This is especially important for planes that fly chain destinations rather than just loop back and forth. It's not uncommon for a flight cancellation to result in a need to fly that empty plane somewhere else to prevent knock-on cancellations the day after.
The single worst example of this I've seen was during Schiphol airport's biggest chaos at the start of June where K
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Usually for international destinations you rotate crews with an overnight layover, where you stay the night in a hotel and
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That's not nearly as common as you might think, which is why it's newsworthy when it happens.
That KLM incident was noteworthy because it numbered in the hundreds
Really you need to make up your mind.
Actually it's quite common and not newsworthy. Your second statement was correct. It was newsworthy because they did it to their entire fleet in one go.
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Very few people legitimately *NEED* to fly.
Feel people need to eat meat or anything tasty, so just ban all food except for water and potatoes. Few people need to actually drive, in fact we should ban everyone who successfully work from home from owning a car. We should also ban parks (no need for people to go outside), ban production of new cloths (learn to stitch and patch your cloths), and ban internet shopping, computer games and TV, no one *NEEDs* those either.
When we strip everything down to only what we really *NEED* we'll have achieved that d
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Except there is no collusion, and tickets don't cost 4-5x normal. Airlines also take a significant cost hit as the plane that is cancelled is often required elsewhere and may need to fly empty, or the flight crew is at the wrong airport, to say nothing of the fact that sensible countries have legally mandated compensation to all passengers affected, bonus points for when you pay not only the compensation, but also need to pay for passengers to stay in a hotel.
Your conspiracy theory doesn't make any sense.
Many factors; one is event preparation (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many factors causing the current air travel system delays. One that isn't talked about much is that all the US airlines are being a lot more aggressive about cancelling flights in advance of major disruption events, which are almost always always weather events. Even 10 years ago airlines would fly equipment and crew into locations that were forecasting heavy snow, ice storms, major thunderstorm complexes, etc, and those would often get stuck at that location for a day in the case of thunderstorms (bad enough) to multiple days in the case of blizzards - which wrecked havoc with schedules both directly and indirectly. Now they proactively cancel the flights and send the crews and equipment to clear locations. It makes the day of the event and the one-two days after in the affected zone much worse for ticketed travelers, but it makes the whole system better for the rest of the continent.
Not saying that excuses any of the other 26 reasons for the current state of the industry, but it is one.
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I feel like the airlines deserve it (Score:2)
All that taxpayer money wasted (Score:5, Insightful)
as they face staffing shortages,
Huh. And here I thought the tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money airlines were given was to prevent them from laying off people [yahoo.com]. Guess I was wrong [bbc.com].
Who could have possibly forseen laying off tens of thousands of your experienced people one year would lead to staff shortages the next? It's a complete mystery.
Re:All that taxpayer money wasted (Score:5, Insightful)
Who could have possibly forseen laying off tens of thousands of your experienced people one year would lead to staff shortages the next? It's a complete mystery.
. . . and a great time for employees to strike:
Lufthansa ground staff agree pay deal after strike [reuters.com]
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No you were perfectly right, even the headline in your article will tell you that. The relief ended and staff were no longer able to be paid. tens of billions of dollars was insufficient. Even with the "bailout" airlines the world over made massive losses, and quite a few went bankrupt.
It's like me finding you homeless on the street, throwing you a nickel and then asking you why you're still starving, I did after all just give you a nickel.
They're not paying their flight attendants enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They're not paying their flight attendants enou (Score:5, Informative)
Wait, what?
According to salary.com, median flight attendant pay is $85K per year.
https://www.salary.com/tools/s... [salary.com]
That' not exactly wealthy, but it's a lot better than the median US household income of $54K! https://www.bls.gov/news.relea... [bls.gov]
And airlines pay for flight attendant hotels.
https://executiveflyers.com/do... [executiveflyers.com].
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Don't let facts get in the way of a good rant...
Those statistics are bullshit (Score:2)
If I had to guess (and it's just a guess) the young ones aren't making shit, coupled with some very high salaries in the luxury sector (e.g. the flight attendents on Elon Musk's private jet get counted) skew the numbers.
And it wouldn't take much of a skew when you take the cost of hotels into account. Especially ones near enough to many airports. Plus the cost of food. I know truck drivers who couldn't get the
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It's true, a "median" income means that half of flight attendants make less than 85K, and half make more.
For those who may be "mistreated" by JetBlue, there's Monster.com and Indeed.
Jet Blue is merging with Spirit (Score:2)
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Oh, woe be to us! The whole world is against us and there is nothing we can do about it! And to top it off, the robots are coming for all our jobs!
Nope, not falling for doom and gloom. Jobs and survival have always been a struggle, and it always will be. The pendulum swings one way, and always swings the other. If there are no good flight attendant jobs, there are other kinds good jobs. Maybe you have to move to a different city to find one, but then, which do you value more...familiar surroundings, or a go
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That article is misleading. They're complaining about a $3000/month hotel room near their HOME airport. The airlines pay for accommodations when they are away from home, but not when they are at the airport that is designated as their home. I don't know about Jet Blue, but most airlines will also allow crew free air transportation from/to a non-home airport to/from their home airport if they don't want to live someplace like Newark (can't blame them for not wanting to live in Newark, but there are nice plac
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Yes, we all start out at the low end of the pay scale.
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Also you've got to remember the long term unionised staff. They're on a different pay scale to those who joined later, even if they're unionised (hence airlines have been trying to get rid of the old battle-axes, also
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That's not how median works. "Median" means that exactly half of flight attendants make more, and half make less. The skewing by a small number of high earners that you describe, is a characteristic of "mean" (average). Median is not skewed by this type of small set of outliers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Based on the link you provided, Indeed's numbers are based on a sample of about 150 self-reported submissions, not exactly representative.
I've known flight attendants who loved their job, but it's tr
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There's been multiple reports of flight attendants not able to afford a place to stay in between flights
Flight attendants do not pay for their accommodation between flights. No idea where you got that idea from. Maybe they can't afford their own homes in their own country? Is that what you're confused with?
During covid they used contractor shenanigans (Score:2)
Since America doesn't have anything boring on a safety net and the government only handed out a few thousand dollars and for a lot of people that's one month's rent those people couldn't wait around until the airlines decided they wanted them back. So they went out and got jobs at Target and it turns out
Just add bullet trains (Score:2)
...with stations at airports so if your airport is closed due to weather, just hop on a train to the nearest airport that isn't, and fly out from there.
Or maybe your destination is close enough (up to about 500 miles) that you don't need to take a flight at all.
Re: Just add bullet trains (Score:2)
Let's run the tracks through black neighborhoods! They won't mind.
So weather forecasts have gotton worse? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or is it just they are overselling seats when they know they don't have enough people to man the flights?
Seats are usually sold months in advance. That's not as obvious of a problem to predict as you may think. Additionally many cancellations are not occurring due to flight staff. In many cases airport related logistics are causing issues as well as airports are attempting to reduce slots to cope with their own ground staff shortages.
Just claim you're seeking asylum, (Score:2)
TX Gov. Abbott will then bus you for free.
Re: Just claim you're seeking asylum, (Score:2)
Naw...then he'll just dump you in a blue state.
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Seems that's where everybody wants to go, based on population and housing prices.
All this millennial attitude is ruining our econom (Score:1)
ignoring supply and demand ? (Score:1)
The situation seems really odd.
The airlines purposely got rid of staff. Now they don't have enough , and they _know_ they don't have enough.
so they are overworking already overworked staff.
couldn't they simply maintain a reasonable service level, and charge more ? now flights aren't cancelled, luggage isn't lost (as mine was recently), and the airlines should make the same and very probably even more money.
WTF is going on ?
also, i look forward to the clawbacks of that taxpayer money.
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Stop bailing out the airlines and let them figure out a working business model. Even if flights cost 3x more to do that, just do it.
As a whole? (Score:2)
"A spokesperson for Lufthansa said that the aviation industry as a whole is "suffering from bottlenecks and staff shortages, noticeable especially during peak periods."
There are countries who didn't fire the airport personnel but transferred them to track&trace during the pandemic and those airports do just fine.
The staff recruitment problem (Score:3)
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It's not just airline staff. In the UK, some establishments put out chalkboard signs that say things like, "All Americans must be accompanied by an adult." Other countries have their fair share of Karens & their male equivalents but the USA really tops the charts. I've read 3 articles so far where journalists have interviewed former hospitality workers & they say they'd rather take a lower wage or be unemployed than go back to dealing with Karens every day. Employers need to step up & provide better job security & stability, stop the wage theft (it's rampant in the hospitality sector), & do a better job of defending their employees against the onslaughts of aggressive & unreasonable patrons/passengers/guests.
Chalkboard? My wordy wordington, you've never been to the UK, we call them blackboards (or whiteboards if they're the white kind.
Jokes aside, I agree with you that cabin crew tend to get really shit treatment even though they're typically better paid than equivalently skilled sectors. Long hours, physically demanding, training and certs to keep up and that's all before the arseholes who treat them like wait staff. Point in short, be nice to your cabin crew, they really do appreciate just a little kindnes
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Chalkboard? My wordy wordington, you've never been to the UK, we call them blackboards (or whiteboards if they're the white kind.
One has to phrase it in terms that our dear cousins across the Atlantic can understand.
It's their own fault (Score:1)
Kill Bill (Score:2)
The airlines lost a shitload of money due to the pandemic. They are trying to recover, and that requires charging people money to fly. Do not kill the golden goose. Yeah, I hate flying. Doesn't change the economic reality, though.
Re: Kill Bill (Score:2)
I hate flying because I don't like someone with the Official Captain Crunch Sea and Air Police badge physically deep violating me "for security reasons". And the TSA in the back stealing cameras and breaking guitars "for security reasons". And then the possibility of a kid screaming high pitched ear destroying screams and nothing is done about it while sealed in that tin can at 30,000 feet. A steam ship is starting to look like the better option for flights off continent.
Airlines and air traffic control need to improve (Score:1)