The threat of travel disruption feels imminent for anyone heading to the airport nowadays, especially with cancellations and delays making headlines repeatedly over the summer. While anger about such disruptions regularly fills social media channels, passengers have come to expect problems.A new report from ground transport provider CMAC, based on a survey of more than 1,000 travelers in the United Kingdom who booked round-trip flights, found that nearly two-thirds of respondents believed that flight disruptions have worsened. And 78% of those surveyed reported having experienced a flight disruption themselves. That’s not terribly surprising, given that 650 million hours of collective passenger time was wasted in 2022 as a result of flight disruptions, according to passenger compensation platform AirHelp. For its report, AirHelp used structured calculation logic to determine the impact of flight disruptions based on data, expert interviews and its internal expertise.
Air Travel Has a Serious Problem That Will Take Years to Fix
22.09.2023 - 14:25 / afar.com / Pete Buttigieg / Robin Hayes
Last week, as weather and airline staffing woes roiled air travel yet again, fliers hoping for a post-summer respite got some unwelcome news: the air traffic controller shortage is so severe that it could hobble airline operations for the next five years—or more, according to industry officials.
How bad is it? As Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg revealed earlier this year, there are some 3,000 unfilled controller positions in a workforce that should number over 14,000 full-time employees. Currently there are around 11,000 controllers, with several thousand at various stages of the training process. And the shortfall hits particularly hard on key regions—including New York City, where the three major airports JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark— have among the worst delays in the country and, it’s often said, are the cause of around half of all delays nationwide.
At a key Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) facility in New York, only 54 percent of available controller positions are filled, which led the agency to request that airlines voluntarily cut back about 10 percent of their flights in the region—initially through September 15. The FAA recently conceded this short-term solution didn’t go far enough, and extended the flight cut program for another year. And it’s unclear how much difference it made, if any, in what for many travelers was another summer-from-hell.
This caused much hand wringing at an aviation confab in Washington last week, where several airline executives said the resulting uncertainty over the system’s capacity could make it difficult to plan schedules. JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes, for example, went so far as to say, “We’re selling flights we know we won’t be able to operate because of ATC (air traffic control) challenges.”
Secretary Buttigieg did have some promising news right after Labor Day, when he announced that 1,500 air traffic controllers had been hired this year after an aggressive recruiting campaign and a raise in starting salary to $127,000 a year. But he cautioned that the flying public shouldn’t expect quick results, noting that with the extensive training it “can take as long as it does to get a law degree”—three years.
And now, a possible government shutdown could throw a wrench in the secretary’s plans to ramp up training; the full-time controllers already on the job wouldn’t be severely affected due to their status as essential safety workers but the training of new hires could grind to a halt (which in fact did happen in the 2019 shutdown.)
For the cause of the current crisis, the answer given by many industry and government experts can be summed up in one word: COVID. Among the effects: a wave of retirements, on top of concerns about COVID spreading around air
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