DOT Sec. Pete Buttigieg tells TPG why air travel worked better in 2023
04.01.2024 - 20:34
/ thepointsguy.com
/ Pete Buttigieg
Fewer U.S. commercial flights were canceled in 2023 than at any point in at least the past decade, the Department of Transportation said this week.
Despite a few scattered rough patches over the course of the year, airline reliability surged following several bumpy years of pandemic recovery in what the Transportation Security Administration said was the busiest-ever year for air travel.
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Of roughly 16.3 million scheduled flights throughout the country, fewer than 1.2% were canceled, DOT said. The average cancellation rate since 2013 is 1.7%.
Holiday performance was especially successful, the DOT said, with 0.8% of flights canceled between Sunday, Dec. 17 and Monday, Jan. 1. That number was especially stark compared to the 2022 holidays, when a severe snowstorm and related operational meltdown at Southwest drove the cancellation rate to 8.2%.
"We've put more and more pressure on the airlines to prove the realism of their schedules, the level of staffing, anything else that could have led to controllable delays, and I think that work has really paid off," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told TPG in a phone interview on Thursday.
"I think that reflects the response of the airlines to the pressure that we put on them," he added, "as well as some work that we've been doing within the [DOT]," such as opening up new routings for aircraft to fly up and down the East Coast and working with the military to mitigate the impact of routine flight operations in Florida.
Buttigieg pointed to the record $140 million fine the DOT recently issued to Southwest for the 2022 episode, noting that the agency was "chang[ing] the economics that might create some reason for airlines to think that they would benefit from delaying important investments."
Related: Southwest has a plan to get back on track after holiday meltdown. Here's what execs tell TPG
The unrealistic scheduling practices Buttigieg referenced include planning flights that the airlines weren't prepared to fully operate, he said, including "for reasons of gaining market share or other anti-competitive reasons."
"We have active investigations right now, and are calling on airlines to do the right thing in the first place and not allow there to be reason for suspicion that they are knowingly scheduling flights that they're not prepared to adequately serve," he said.
The airlines also worked effectively to firm up their operations following the first post-pandemic years, Buttigieg said.
"When they were short on staffing, a number of airlines responded with better pay for these high-demand positions," he said. Buttigieg cited higher pay rates for pilots at regional airlines as