Nearly 1,400 canceled flights and more than 15,000 delays disrupt traffic worldwide. The airlines haven’t got back the workers they laid off during the pandemic
The pandemic has given way to a tourism ‘buzz’, with levels in July at 88% of pre-pandemic levels. All indications are that August will far surpass that recovery, as fears of taking advantage of the time lost before the next crisis do not abate. What is missing are pilots, airlines, personnel and even airplanes. The major airlines got rid of the workforce when the world stopped and, between variant and variant, they have been in no rush to re-enlist. As a result, the world faced another wave of delays and cancellations over the weekend.
The United States, origin and destination of many of the world’s flights, has been the epicenter of this chaos, with nearly 1,400 flights canceled and more than 15,000 delays, just between Saturday and Sunday, according to FlightAware data. The website shows “the map of misery” that last month Spanish government vice president Yolanda Díaz was stranded at a Washington airport until her team rented a car to get to New York at 2 a.m. to arrive after she missed meetings that afternoon.
As a regional conglomerate, New York and Washington registered the highest number of cancellations this weekend, but as an individual airport, Chicago O’Hare took the lead, with 12% of canceled flights and 40% delays.
It is, as the FlightAware map indicates, a summer of misery for travelers. The New York Times has renamed it “Air Crash Summer” and added the record number of lost luggage. In addition to easing payroll, airlines are also cutting investments in baggage handling technology and machinery. The GPS trackers that some passengers put in their bags do not solve the problem. “Go get it,” a Cleveland, Ohio, airport employee responded to a passenger who returned from a week in Vienna without ever receiving her suitcase. The device showed her in Paris.
“The system is overwhelmed,” an analyst with the American Economic Liberties Project told the New York newspaper. This weekend alone, United Express, second in delays and cancellations after Southwest Airlines, canceled 25% of its flights, while JetBlue experienced delays on 41% of its flights. Experts believe it could take years to restore the reliability we’re used to. Air Canada has already listed “staff shortages” as one of the factors preventing it from compensating passengers, something the US Federal Aviation Administration wants to fight. Lufthansa, for its part, has announced that it will hire 10,000 employees next year.
Source: La Verdad
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