An American Airlines plane on June 16, 2021 at Miami International Airport (AFP / CHANDAN KHANNA)
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American airlines, surprised by airports teeming with new activity in the United States, are busy to avoid a chaotic summer.
To better cope with the unforeseen, American Airlines wants to create room for maneuver and to do this has already canceled 400 flights last weekend, and plans to unschedule about 950 the first half of July.
If the company blamed the bad weather which, since the beginning of June, has disrupted flight plans, it also recognizes that some subcontractors are lacking in manpower.
And faced with an “incredibly fast” acceleration in demand, it has therefore decided to withdraw certain flights “to mitigate (bad) surprises at airports” and reduce the risk of unhappy passengers.
Like other companies, American must also scrutinize its planes to ensure the safety of its flights while some aircraft have remained immobilized in hangars or on the tarmac for several months.
“There is a lot of maintenance” to be done, emphasizes Ian Gendler of the research firm Value Line. And “it doesn’t happen overnight.”
– As before the Covid-19 –
Travelers wait at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City on May 28, 2021 (AFP / Angela Weiss)
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American, which claims to have taken good care of its devices, also “actively” recruits in all sectors, from reservations to customer services through maintenance, explains a spokesperson. All temporarily inactive pilots should have completed their training at the end of June, she said.
Delta, for its part, plans to recruit more than 1,000 pilots by next summer to cope with the resumption of traffic and the addition of destinations, according to an internal memo consulted by AFP.
But accelerated recruitments may not be enough, said Gary Peterson, representing aviation workers in the TWU union, from flight attendants to baggage handlers and mechanics.
Because for the employees newly arrived at the airports, it is necessary to take the fingerprints, to make check – security obliges – the antecedents by government agents, themselves often understaffed and slowed down by the health precautions.
The companies, which had multiplied the plans for early retirement or voluntary departures during the pandemic, “put the planes back into service without necessarily having the manpower to operate them,” laments Mr. Peterson, himself a mechanic at American Airlines.
Most travelers should get there eventually and the situation will gradually improve, he says.
However, the companies “will be faced with problems all summer” if they do not limit flights, warns the union representative.
The number of people passing through an American airport, which is still 25% below its 2019 level, has nevertheless regularly exceeded 2 million visitors since June 11, according to figures from the airport authorities.
The companies have opened many routes to adapt to a clientele more oriented towards tourism than business travel. So that “at the moment, we do not really see the difference with the summers” before the pandemic, assures Chris Riggins, member of the Delta pilots’ union.
– Incivilities –
A Delta Airlines Boeing 737 at Los Cabos International Airport in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico on April 24, 2021 (AFP / Daniel SLIM)
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Even if his company plans to hire, it will take time to upgrade the training of thousands of pilots, from a few days to five weeks if they are assigned to a new type of aircraft, he explains.
As in catering or sales, airports could also be faced, he notes, with a labor shortage among the lowest paid: those responsible for preparing the meal trays, who maintain the premises or work in fast food.
An additional concern for companies already facing an increase in in-flight incivility in recent months: several federations and unions in the sector called on the Minister of Justice on Monday to prosecute more systematically any violent act on board planes.
Undoubtedly to get ahead of its competitors, American Airlines has been particularly ambitious in its flight offer for this summer, notes Burkett Huey, aeronautical analyst at Morningstar.
“Demand is usually quite predictable,” he says. But after the fall in sales of plane tickets in the spring of 2020 and the rapid recovery in traffic as vaccinations progress, “traditional programming models don’t really work anymore”.
However, beyond the risk of finding themselves short of manpower, companies must ensure that the planes are sufficiently filled. “The fixed costs associated with a flight are the same, whether it is full or not,” he recalls.
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