WASHINGTON DC – The day after Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg met with airline leaders to grill them about widespread flight disruptions, his own flight was canceled and he ended up driving from Washington to New York.
“That’s happening to a lot of people, and that’s exactly why we’re paying a lot of attention here to what can be done and how to make sure airlines comply,” Buttigieg told The Associated Press in an interview on Saturday.
Buttigieg said he’s pushing airlines to test their summer schedules to make sure they can operate all of their planned flights with the employees they have and to add customer service workers. That could put pressure on airlines to make further cuts to their summer schedules.
Buttigieg said his department could take enforcement action against airlines that don’t meet consumer protection standards. But first, he said, she wants to see if there are any major disruptions to flights over the Fourth of July holiday weekend and the rest of the summer.
Enforcement actions can result in fines, although they tend to be small. Air Canada agreed to pay a $2 million penalty last year for slow refunds.
During Thursday’s virtual meeting, airline executives outlined the steps they are taking to prevent a repeat of Memorial Day weekend, when some 2,800 flights were canceled. “Now we’re going to see how those steps compare,” Buttigieg said.
The airline suspended the sale of alcoholic beverages after a series of disturbances between passengers and physical attacks on crew members.
Travel is back. More than 2.4 million people passed through security checkpoints at U.S. airports on Friday, and some 12,500 came within a whisker of breaking the pandemic-era high recorded on the Sunday after Thanksgiving this year. past.
The record would surely have been broken if airlines hadn’t canceled 1,400 flights, many of them because thunderstorms battered parts of the East Coast. A day earlier, airlines canceled more than 1,700 flights, according to tracking service FlightAware.
Weather is always a wild card when it comes to flying in the summer, but airlines have also acknowledged staffing shortages as travel fell back faster than expected from pandemic lows. Airlines are scrambling to hire pilots and other workers to replace employees they encouraged to quit after the pandemic hit.
The announcements came after the airline industry issued a warning about the impact a new type of 5G service would have on flights.
It takes months to hire and train a pilot to meet federal safety standards, but the Department of Transportation sees no reason why airlines can’t immediately add customer service representatives to help passengers navigate. rebook if your flight is cancelled.
The government has its own personnel challenges.
Shortages at the Federal Aviation Administration, part of Buttigieg’s department, have contributed to flight delays in Florida. The FAA promises to increase staff there. The Transportation Security Administration, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, has created a roving force of 1,000 screeners that can be dispatched to airports where lines at checkpoints are too long.
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