Airlines want to fly like it’s 2019.
, about how our air travel system got so fragile. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.Jon Ostrower:
In October of 2021, there was a big cascade of thunderstorms that rolled across Florida, and it messed up Southwest Airlines. That was one of the first indications that their IT systems were not ready for major disruption. In Southwest’s network, about 40 percent of their airplanes touch Florida on any given day. The staff were exhausted, and in the pursuit of trying to run the schedule that they had, it was kind of a smaller-scale version of what happened in Christmas 2022.
After massive layoffs, early retirements, and furloughs in 2020, airlines are now hiring like crazy. United was running ads offering $10,000 signing bonuses for ground technicians. But it’s hard to make up for what was lost during the pandemic. One estimate I saw was that there’s a supply gap of pilots of about 18 percent.
economy comes back, the airlines just cannot accommodate that level of demand, including all of the pilots that need to get trained and retrained.It’s really important to point out that there’s a really big difference between qualified and experienced, in terms of pilots. We had a massive loss of experience within the pilot corps—seasoned pilots who have done this day in and day out, for decades, are exiting the system.
We talked about pilots, but they are one part of an incredibly complicated picture. What does the rest of the industry’s drop and surge look like?There’s also the availability of airplanes. Boeing and Airbus both would like to deliver and produce more airplanes to deliver to airlines like United. United has something like 130 737s coming from Boeing this year. That’s what it says in their regulatory filings. Behind the scenes, everyone involved is like, “That’s not going to happen.
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