With recent flight cancellations, staffing snafus and other problems plaguing the airlines lately, there’s real concern the coming holiday weekend could become a chaotic mess for many Americans. Congress is starting to ask how, exactly, the companies have used the $50 billion in pandemic relief funding the taxpayers gave them over the past two years to ensure smooth operation — given that smooth operation is the opposite of what some carriers have been providing lately. It’s a valid question.
The airlines were hit especially hard by the pandemic, as it decimated daily travel numbers and necessitated cutting back flights. The airlines shed tens of thousands of employees last year mainly through voluntary furloughs and early retirement incentives. Those were necessary moves to weather the coronavirus storm. Predicting when and how quickly those travel numbers would come back up was always going to be an educated guess. And the reluctance of many employees (including pilots) to return to the job is a phenomenon that few could have predicted.
But the chaos surrounding Southwest and American Airlines flights last month was nonetheless a shock. A few isolated weather events caused canceled flights in Texas and Florida, but then the cancellations rippled throughout the country and into the following week. Right-wing trolls like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, baselessly alleged that vaccine mandates were behind the staffing problems. In fact, the main problem appears to be that the companies were still too short-staffed from their pandemic cuts last year to quickly adjust to the changed schedules.
