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American Airlines canceling hundreds of flights through mid-July in part due to labor shortages
American Airlines is canceling hundreds of flights through at least mid-July as the company strives to maintain service in the midst of massively increasing travel demand while the coronavirus pandemic continues to recede in the United States, according to a spokesperson from the airline. (www.cnn.com) More...
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American worked around the requirement of their Pandemic buyout of not letting go of staff by pushing early retirement and early exits for many of their staff. Now they find themselves short of staff. There was reason for that loan requirement. Shortage of staff is entirely on the can't think past their nose management.
I am wondering if the shortage is due to recurrent training requirements and limited simulator capacity (or check airmen)
Or weather that actually hasn't happened yet.
last night on one of the news programs they went into a little more detail on the problem and the "shortage"..as it turns out, american had a lot more pilots,flight crews,ground personnel and baggage handlers,take early buyouts,leaves of absence, or retirements than they had anticipated..its not that they "overshot the runway" so to speak with adding flights,its that the passenger traffic picked up much more quickly than had been expected..hiring new flight crews takes a lot of time,with scheduling interviews,scheduling training and making sure those accepted have the right qualifications..hiring ground personnel still takes training,4-6 weeks for ticketing etcetera,and a lot less for baggage handlers..with all of the recent events surrounding the "abuse" of airline personnel,i dont think there will be people waiting in the wings to either be "rehired", or come on as a "newbie"..these are not the days gone by of applying and applying to actually get and interview for an airline position of any kind,where the pay was really good, the health and other benefits were really good,and the competiton was stiff!!
They also need to stop treating clients like cattle and they may have better-behaved passengers. I remember flying as a passenger in the 80s, when I was treated like I was important. Now I'm treated like an annoyance.
Mary - thanks for your info from other sources than the article about the number of people issues; this I did not see reading the article. Also, given your estimates for 4 - 6 weeks for various training time (after a person is hired) vs. the time AA in advance AA added scheduled flights (I do not know how far in advance they add flights, but I am guessing at least 3 - 6 months in advance) I would think AA could still have anticipated the need to hire or get vendor contracts established. Full understand about pilot training (both new and existing) and this is also something AA (and other airline) should be able to anticipate pretty clearly in advance as well; i.e. via example: 1 simulator trains 2 pilots per day max; need 100 pilots trained to fly flights scheduled in 30 days; can this be done with the 1 and only simulator available? ... This case 40 pilots short. Yes, maybe example changes by expect 2nd simulator 5 days from today... but this is still pretty simple demand planning for any business. Granted, the airline business has different choke points across its operations. Maybe the simplest thought here is AA OVER promised and is UNDER delivering and the other airlines are doing a better job, for the most part so far.
