Nearly 1,400 canceled flights and more than 15,000 delays disrupt traffic globally. The airlines have not recovered the workers they laid off during the pandemic
The pandemic has given way to a tourist ‘boom’, with July levels at 88% of pre-pandemic levels. Everything indicates that August will far exceed that recovery, because the anxiety of taking advantage of the lost time before the next crisis does not subside. What is missing are pilots, air operators, personnel and even planes. The big airlines got rid of the workforce when the world stopped and, between variant and variant, they have not been in a hurry to rehire. As a result, the world suffered this past weekend another wave of delays and cancellations.
The United States, origin and destination of many of the world’s flights, was the epicenter of this chaos, with nearly 1,400 canceled flights and more than 15,000 delays, only between Saturday and Sunday, according to FlightAware data. The website shows “the map of misery” that last month had the vice president of the Spanish government, Yolanda Díaz, stranded in a Washington airport until her team rented a car to arrive in New York at 2 in the morning , having missed the meetings that afternoon.
As a regional conglomerate, New York and Washington registered the highest number of cancellations this weekend, but as an individual airport it was Chicago O’Hare that took the cake, with 12% of flights canceled and 40% delayed.
Lost luggage record
It is, as the FlightAware map indicates, a summer of misery for travelers. The New York Times has baptized it as the ‘Air Crash Summer’, adding the record numbers of lost luggage. In addition to lightening payroll, airlines also cut any investment in baggage-handling technology and machinery. The GPS trackers that some passengers put in their bags don’t solve the problem. “Go get him,” a Cleveland (Ohio) airport employee responded to a female passenger returning from a week in Vienna without ever having received her suitcase. Her device showed her in Paris.
“The system is overwhelmed,” an analyst from 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 suffered delays in 41% of its flights. Experts believe that it can take years to restore the level of reliability that we are used to. Air Canada has already included “crew shortages” as one of the factors that will allow it not to compensate passengers, something the US Federal Aviation Administration plans to fight against. Lufthansa, for its part, has announced that it will hire 10,000 workers next year.
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