IF YOU’RE GONNA ask me about the debacle at Southwest Airlines, there isn’t much I can tell you that you don’t already know. The normal media has covered the crisis ad nauseam, and has done a fairly good job of it.

In short, it began as an employee shortage during a storm in Denver. Hundreds of apron workers walked off the job after the airline reacted threateningly to a high number of sick calls. This gridlocked the operation in Denver, in turn cascading into a massive number of cancellations systemwide. An outdated IT infrastructure then handicapped attempts to get things restarted. Thousands of crewmmembaers needed to be re-routed, departures re-sequenced, and so on. Southwest’s logistics software couldn’t handle it.

And so on.

The “airline meltdown” has become a recurrent event — a revolving series of on-again off-again fiascos. Every few months, it seems, things at one of the big carriers go haywire for a few days. It happened to American, it happened to Sprit. In fact, isn’t the first time it happened to Southwest. In October of 2021 the airline canceled 2,000 flights over a four-day span after bad weather swept through Florida.

What happened over Christmas was the worst of the disruptions so far (the tab for Southwest is estimated at nearly a billion dollars), but it’s unlikely to be the last. The industry’s new normal, at least for now, is to operate right on the edge of crisis, with little margin for error. Flights are full and the skies are jam-packed with planes, while carriers — together with air traffic control, TSA, and pretty much every other moving part in the air travel machine — remain understaffed and inflexible, still playing post-pandemic catch-up.

Which brings us to something that’s been nagging me for quite some time:

Labor, or lack thereof, appears to be the biggest underlying culprit. People resigned or were let go en masse during the pandemic, and haven’t returned. And so the solution should be no more complicated than re-hiring enough workers to replace them. Indeed, companies are trying, only to be met with a lack of interest and position after position going unfilled. This is the case not only within the myriad businesses supporting air travel, but economy-wide, from convenience stores to restaurants to Uber drivers.

What nobody will explain is where all these workers disappeared to, and why they’re staying there. Are they sitting home playing video games and smoking weed? Did they find better jobs? Service workers and other comparatively unskilled employees have always been an integral part of the workforce, if not the very bedrock of it. Where has this sector been displaced to?

It’s possible I’m misreading things, and clearly this is a bigger and more complex situation than I’m equipped to explore on my own. If someone with expertise in the matter cares to explain, be my guest…

In the meantime, if you’ll permit me a diversion…

As Southwest takes a minute to catch its breath, it should consider a refresh of its ghastly paint job. I recommend something that doesn’t make every Southwest jet look like an amusement park ride.

The livery should better incorporate the carrier’s heart emblem. The heart, along with Southwest’s “LUV” stock ticker, harken to its origins at Love Field, in Dallas. It’s a fairly iconic logo, but one the airline inexplicably works to hide. It appears only as a small decal on the underside of the fuselage. This is a friendly and effective motif that absolutely belongs on the tail, in place of those awful red and yellow stripes.

 

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737 Photo by Nick Morales/Unsplash

November 29, 2022

IS IT JUST ME, or is the entire air travel experience broken right now?

Security lines are endless, terminals are noisier and more crowded than ever, airport lounges have become overcrowded feeding troughs, onboard service isn’t half of what it was pre-pandemic, delays and cancellations are rampant. And so on; it’s across the board.

Initially, as the COVID-19 fiasco wound down, most of the trouble could be blamed on a lack of staffing. Passengers came back faster than expected, and the industry wasn’t ready. The resulting chaos was unpleasant, but was expected to be temporary. Yet here we are on the cusp of 2023, and although things aren’t as dysfunctional as they were six or eight months ago, they still feel badly off-kilter.

What troubles me most is that we seem to be resigning ourselves to it. I fear that we’re plateauing at a sort of “new normal.” Much as I hate that expression, it’s worryingly apropos in this case. The traveling public seems to be shrugging its shoulders and adapting.

It reminds me of what happened in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Initially there were howls of outrage over the establishment of the TSA and the excesses of its policies: the agonizing lines, the illogical rules and hostile enforcement. It simply wasn’t sustainable, people declared. Things would mellow out in time, they said. They would have to.

Except that’s not what happened, really. Instead, we got accustomed to it all. Two decades later, security theater, with all of its extravagant waste, and despite the millions of hours it steals from us each year, is simply taken for granted. We endure it.

Is the same sort of thing happening again? Most people have always hated flying. Now they’ll just hate it a little more?

Where and how things are wrong is easy to see. But let me cherry-pick one example: onboard service. Food, wine, amenities. If you ask me, service hit its nadir somewhere around 2004, in the thick of the post-9/11 industry downturn. The airlines were going bankrupt, one after the other, and inflight offerings were scarce. But then it got better. It was a long, slow climb, but by 2019, in the premium cabins of the US legacy carriers, the levels of luxury and pampering at long last rivaled the better Asian and European carriers.

In fact, air travel by that point had entered a whole new golden age. Service, safety and convenience had reached unprecedented levels, and tickets were as affordable as they’d ever been — an achievement I celebrated in this New York Times article in 2017.

Then came COVID-19, and now the whole bar seems to have been re-set. Today, even on long-haul flights, a first class meal is often slung at you hurriedly on a tray, and they’re giving out champagne in plastic cups. At fares that aren’t any cheaper.

Will it get better this time, as the industry regains its footing? I’m not so sure. I’m sensing this is more of a paradigm shift — a change of expectations — than a simple correlation between profitability and service levels. Customers are more or less happy with things they are, I’m told. At least it’s not 2020, the thinking goes, when they got nothing at all.

Thus the benchmark, it seems, is the pandemic-panic realm of two years ago, rather than the golden age of 2019. By this logic, even the crappiest experience is a win. The bar has been re-set because expectations have been re-set.

We can look at this situation more broadly, too. It’s a decline, I think, that extends beyond flying.

This is a nitpicky example, but why do so many hotels, even five-star places, still not stock their rooms with cups or drinking glasses? Apparently guests are supposed to stick their faces under the faucet when brushing their teeth? I was in a Hyatt recently. No glasses, anywhere. So I call the front desk. “Would you like us to bring you some glasses?”

Hell, why not skip the pillows and sheets as well. If guests want them, they can always call.

I’d also like my Uber drivers to stop canceling at the last minute, and otherwise charging me double the normal fare. And don’t get me started with the hellishness of QR menus in restaurants.

And we should probably stop there. This is trending in a rather whiny direction.

These are, I realize, first-world complaints of a selfish, perhaps even gluttonous order. The world is spinning into ecological collapse, the specter of war looms large, and so on. I understand that. But everything has its context. And it’s possible that my gripes are symptoms, warning signs, of something more consequential gone rotten.

Welcome to post-pandemic America, 2022. The land where everything seems to be settling into a half-assed, slightly shittier, and more expensive version of what we had before.

Or, I’m just impatient. I’m known to be, and you’re free to judge my dooming and glooming as unfair.

Hopefully it is, and, at the risk of sounding manic, I’ll close with something more positive, and maybe more rational:

Flying remains, if nothing else, affordable and astonishingly safe. The business just went through the most traumatic two years of its existence, racking up tens of billions in debt. Recovery, which was never a sure thing in the first place, remains a long-term work in progress.

I, indeed all of us, should probably be thrilled with things as they are. It could’ve turned out a lot, lot worse.

And so, give it time.

 

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Airline cabin photo: Hanson Lu/Unsplash.
Hotel room photo by the author.

AIRLINES are understaffed, employees are overworked, passenger volumes are back to pre-pandemic levels, masks are off. And here come the three busiest travel months of the year. We’re already at the ragged edge of the envelope; just wait until those midsummer thunderstorms start barreling in. It’s going to be messy. If you bring one thing to the airport this summer, have it be this: patience.

I’m not the only one sounding the alarm. The major media, along with all the travel blogs, have been putting out their warnings as well. I like to believe that precisely because there’s so much hype, chances are things won’t turn out as bad as everyone says. So think of this post as a kind of reverse jinx. I’ll be traveling a lot in the next few months, and would prefer to keep my frazzle levels low.

Part of the mess is due to an ongoing pilot shortage, as I’m sure you’ve heard. In fact there are two pilot shortages, the effects of which are overlapping. One is short-term and mostly the result of poor planning. The second is more systemic and longer term.

When I say “poor planning,” I’m talking about the industry’s failure to adequately re-staff as things swung back to normal. However, while on the surface the airlines look pretty stupid, it’s not that simple: Consider the environment at the height of COVOD-19 downturn. The industry had never faced anything like this, and was desperate to stay alive. There was no way of predicting when, or to what extent, flyers would return. As the virus ebbed and surged, travel restrictions and border closings changed week to week; absolutely nothing was certain, and almost nobody predicted a return to 2019 numbers so soon. The expectation, so much as there was one, was of a gradual, incremental return.

Air travel logistics are challenging enough in normal times, never mind when the entire world has flipped upside-down. When it came to aligning their fleets and staffing, they did what they calculated was the smartest thing to do. Some guessed better than others — and that’s what it was to a big degree: guesswork.

Airlines are now taking on hundreds of new-hire pilots every month. This, combined with the lingering effects of the pandemic reshuffling, finds training departments overwhelmed, with long backlogs for classroom time, simulator slots, line certification flights, and so on. Many pilots are sitting at home, waiting their turn. Thus, it’s less a dearth of pilots than a training system overload.

Then we have the other, more systemic shortage. As I talked about in this older article, this is a significantly bigger problem at the regional carrier level than at the majors. All of the biggest airlines are currently hiring, and although they’re having no trouble filling their openings, those pilots have to come from somewhere, with high requisite levels of skill and experience. This is causing a ripple effect downward through the industry. The regional sector has all but reinvented itself in a plea for pilots, offering salary and benefits packages heretofore unheard of for entry-level airline pilots.

What nobody is talking about, meanwhile, is the issue of airspace and runway saturation. This is an even bigger factor than anything related to labor. Airlines continue adding planes into a system already at maximum capacity, especially in the eastern half of the U.S. It was bad enough pre-pandemic. Now, several upstart carriers are pumping even more airplanes into the sky.

Things run fairly smoothly when the weather is good, but the minute a storm develops, blocking off air routes, the delays and cancellations start to cascade. There’s no slack, no logistical breathing room. Even on clear-weather days, the taxiway queues at airports like Newark or La Guardia can be hours long.

It’s hard to say to what impact all of this will have on the summer of 2022. Pilots are just one of the moving parts.

Things might get messy, no doubt. But try to look at the bright side: People are out and about. Borders and attractions are (mostly) open. Travel is back. I wasn’t sure we’d get here, so count me among those who are happy to see a little chaos again at the airport.

 

“Here Comes the Summer” is a horrible song by the Undertones. Here’s a better one.

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