Summer is supposed to be the perfect time to travel. The kids are out of school, and “summer Fridays” and holiday weekends make shorter trips tempting. Unfortunately, this is also the season when airline passengers can expect some of the most frustrating travel experiences.
For those traveling by air, “it’s always a summer of discontent,” Robert W. Mann, a former airline executive and a current aviation-industry consultant, told MarketWatch.
“‘It’s always a summer of discontent.’”
Everything is stretched thin — and that means that the slightest change can have ripple effects that affect flights everywhere.
Here are five things that could turn your dream summer getaway into a nightmare.
1. There’s a thunderstorm at your destination, and the pilots need their mandatory rest
For the average person, a thunderstorm can ruin a barbecue, spoil an afternoon’s activities or frighten pets.
But for airlines, thunderstorms can cause serious headaches.
Last week, severe storms hit the Chicago area, spawning a tornado near O’Hare International Airport, which is the fourth-busiest airport in the U.S. More than 500 flights were delayed and more than 150 were canceled, according to the Associated Press.
A summer thunderstorm shouldn’t surprise airlines. But recently, storms have been “more severe and have been occurring in historically unusual places,” Mann told MarketWatch.
And when bad weather in the Ohio Valley or along the East Coast disrupts flights heading west, passengers might not understand why their flights are being canceled even though the weather where they are looks fine.
“They’re thinking, ‘What’s going on? What’s wrong with this weather?’” Ross Aimer, the CEO of AeroConsultingExperts and a former commercial airline pilot, told MarketWatch.
But delays can cascade. “[Bad weather] could be way on the other side of the country, and the plane that was supposed to pick you up from Denver could be stuck in Minneapolis,” Aimer said.
“‘Because of delays, crew members run out of time … and that creates huge problems for the passengers and everybody else.’”
Weather issues have accounted for 69.7% of all delay minutes so far in 2023, according to data from the Federal Aviation Administration — up nearly 9 percentage points from 2022. In response to anticipated weather delays, the FAA has “activated 169 new routes along the East Coast that are more direct, saving passengers time, airlines fuel and increasing safety,” the agency told MarketWatch via email.
Crew members, meanwhile, are another variable, because they can only remain on duty for a specific number of hours.
One thing that can happen, Aimer said, is when “crews and airplanes are separated due to weather. It means that, because of delays, crew members run out of time” — meaning they have been on duty for too long and need to go back home or to their hotel for a mandatory rest period before they can fly again. And so when a plane arrives at an airport, there’s no one to fly it.
In anticipation of these problems, he said, airlines often cancel large numbers of flights — “and again, that creates huge problems for the passengers and everybody else.”
Opinion: Air travel is a nightmare. Who’s to blame?
2. Your plane is too heavy, and you — or your bags — get left behind
Even when there are no thunderstorms, if it’s hot and humid, some passengers may be in for a surprise when they are not allowed to board their plane.
Hotter days make planes less efficient, because higher temperatures mean the air is less dense. In order to take off on a hot day, a plane needs either a longer runway or a lighter load. The runway can’t change its length, so airlines remove weight by taking passengers or their luggage off the plane.
That happened in July, when 20 passengers were asked to leave an easyJet
ESYJY,
flight heading from Spain to England, according to reports. The pilot cited unfavorable winds and a 7,874-foot runway — only slightly longer than the notoriously short runways at LaGuardia Airport in New York City and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
Experts say this was an exception and not the rule, however.
“I haven’t had any situations where we were forced to reduce passenger count because of the weather,” Patrick Smith, a pilot and the author of “Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel,” told MarketWatch. “But it potentially can happen. It depends on the type of plane, the route being flown and the weather.”
Both Mann and Smith pointed to Phoenix — a hub for American Airlines
AAL,
— as a potential pain point for summer travel. “If I’m at a hub in Phoenix and it’s going to be 130 degrees out, now there are red flags,” Smith said.
American Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Smaller planes may be the most affected, Mann said. They’re often being pushed to their range limits, often in place of larger jets, and every drop of fuel becomes important. As temperatures rise, “there will be days that you have flights that cannot operate,” Mann said, noting that takeoff-performance charts supplied by aircraft manufacturers may not cover temperatures that high.
As Smith wrote in his book: “Some aircraft have absolute temperature limits set by the manufacturer. These limits tend to be quite high, at around 122 degrees F, but every once in a while, it does get that hot, and flights are grounded outright.”
Where is it too hot? U.S. Southwest has been sweltering for weeks; forecasters warn it’s not cooling soon
3. The Northeast is one massive air traffic jam
The New York metropolitan area is home to three of the busiest airports in the nation — LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy International in Queens and Newark Liberty International in New Jersey. The two Queens airports are just eight miles apart, and Newark is less than 20 miles from its neighbors.
All three airports are also major hubs — Newark is dominated by United Airlines
UAL,
while JetBlue’s
JBLU,
original hub was at JFK. Delta Air Lines
DAL,
and American Airlines both have a significant number of flights out of JFK and LaGuardia.
And the three New York airports are part of a larger area of congestion that stretches from Boston to Washington, D.C. That area includes Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport in Providence; Bradley International Airport in Hartford, Conn.; Philadelphia International Airport, which is another hub for American Airlines; Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport; and Dulles International Airport in Virginia, which is also a United Airlines hub.
The area is also home to smaller airports such as White Plains Airport in New York and two New Jersey airports: Trenton-Mercer near Philadelphia and Teterboro, which handles business jets and is located just a few miles north of Newark. These are key airports for passengers coming from all over the U.S. to connect with flights bound for Europe each afternoon and evening.
All that means there are a lot of planes flying in and out of airports within a few hundred miles of each other — and sometimes a few dozen miles of each other.
“‘On a perfect-weather day with no wrinkles, things work pretty well. But a line of thunderstorms, and the whole system collapses.’ ”
“A plane is a plane, and they have to be spaced apart — whether it’s a business jet or a Boeing
BA,
777,” Smith said. “There are too many airplanes in New York and it’s a system that can’t handle it. You have a large number of very busy airports, and you don’t have that anywhere else in the world.”
Even when things are going well, choreography plays a role in air traffic at all altitudes, Smith said, and that dance can be disrupted when the weather is even slightly bad. “On a perfect-weather day with no wrinkles, things work pretty well. But a line of thunderstorms, and the whole system collapses.”
All of these airports — and all of these flights — make the Northeast one of the most important airspaces in the U.S., Mann said. “If a delay happens here, it propagates throughout the system. You’ll find that as the business day goes on, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., the number of delays rises and the number of cancellations rises because the delays are so great the airlines decide to cancel.”
In other words, even if you’re trying to go from Minneapolis to Madison, you may want to keep an eye on what is happening over the skies of Manhattan.
4. Airline consolidation can turn a problem into a meltdown
Changes to the aviation industry over the past few decades have made for more frustrating experiences for passengers.
“The networks — of airlines, their code-share partners and regional affiliates — erected this moat around their operations and would not let people cross that moat,” Mann said. Airlines, after shifting largely to a hub-and-spoke system, are now competing with each other in a new way. In essence, they’ve created fiefdoms.
In 2015, the Wall Street Journal wrote that the consolidation of airlines meant that “while airline service and prices have changed little across the country’s major gateways as a whole, carriers have cut flights and raised fares at many smaller and medium-size airports.”
It is all part of a wave of consolation that has been going on since 2000, when “as many as 20 airlines [filed] for bankruptcy protection,” management-consulting firm Oliver Wyman wrote in 2018. “As a result, the industry shrank from 10 major carriers to four.”
Large hubs gave way to superhubs — and problems turned into meltdowns.
“These hubs are so huge that even one of them going down causes huge disruptions. To a certain degree, you can bypass Chicago by going to Denver, for example. But it’s not enough,” Aimer said.
Prior to that wave of consolation, airlines were a lot more willing to work with each other, Mann said. He noted that, when he was an executive, he could ask other airlines to transport passengers who were stranded when his company’s flights were canceled. But that doesn’t happen anymore.
“Between the three network airlines and Southwest Airlines
LUV,
you have 80% of the traffic,” Mann said, and those airlines want to hold on to their market share. “And consolidation means circling the wagons around the biggest station.”
“‘If any of these [superhub] airports are affected by weather, you have hundreds of flights that affect the rest of the country’”
“Because of their competitive nature, some airlines don’t want to cooperate,” Aimer said. “Southwest, for example, has no agreement with anybody. That’s the way they’ve operated. So when something happens to Southwest, they can’t send you as a passenger to XYZ airline and say, ‘We’re stuck in Texas because of the weather, please take our passengers to so-and-so place.’”
A spokesperson for Southwest told MarketWatch that the airline’s policy is to “rebook the traveler on the next available Southwest Airlines flight to their destination.”
But Smith sees a different problem. Airplanes, he noted, are getting smaller.
“In the old days, you had mainline planes and commuter planes, which flew at low altitudes and connected major hubs with outlying cities,” Smith said. “You didn’t have regional jets with fewer than 100 seats flying hub to hub or from Newark to Detroit.” Instead, there were bigger planes — 150-seat jets for shorter flights and 200-seat planes with two aisles to handle cross-country traffic.
But smaller planes meant that airlines could fill flights more easily and offer more frequent flights.
More frequent flights on smaller planes is a great idea when things are going well. But when things go wrong, there is no slack in the system. Until the mid-2010s, American Airlines flew wide-body aircraft that could carry more than 200 passengers on its premium transcontinental routes — New York to Los Angeles, for example. Those planes were replaced by a specialized narrow-body fleet that had a capacity of just 102 passengers. So now, when a flight is canceled, there are fewer seats on remaining flights that can be filled by displaced passengers.
That problem has not gone unnoticed. In March, the FAA said that it “expects airlines to take actions minimizing impacts on passengers, including operating larger aircraft to transport more passengers and making sure passengers are fully informed about any possible disruptions.”
Aimer noted that United has superhubs in Newark, Denver, San Francisco, Houston, Washington and Chicago. “If any of these airports are affected by weather, you have hundreds of flights that affect the rest of the country,” he said. “No one has been able to overcome all these issues when there’s a weather delay anywhere in the country.”
5. Staffing shortages have airline workers and air-traffic controllers stressed to the limit
In May, after United Airlines canceled thousands of flights, Chief Executive Scott Kirby explained the situation to NPR: “When Denver had that reduction in arrival rates, that doesn’t just impact those flights. Those are airplanes that are scheduled to keep flying around the whole country for the rest of the day.” Kirby blamed a lot of the airline’s problems on short-staffing by air-traffic controllers and the FAA.
United Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As Kirby told NPR, “We have fewer air-traffic controllers today than we had 30 years ago.” He added that the problem has been decades in the making.
“Air-traffic controllers are leaving in droves,” Aimer said. “Air-traffic controllers have to retire at age 56, which is ridiculous. It takes a long time to train an air-traffic controller. At a major airport, like Kennedy, Denver International Airport or Los Angeles International Airport, it can take longer to train [a controller] than it would take to train an airline pilot.”
The FAA’s certification process for new air-traffic controllers can take up to two years.
Data from the FAA, however, show that delays caused by air-traffic-control staffing issues decreased significantly through July 9, 2023, compared with the same time frame last year. In 2022, 11.9% of delay minutes were attributed to “other/ATC staffing,” while only 2.7% of delay minutes were caused by that issue in 2023.
“We hire controllers annually and have for decades,” the FAA told MarketWatch. “This year, we will hire 1,500 and next year we will hire 1,800. We have recently completed a comprehensive review of the distribution of controllers, which was included in the Controller Workforce Plan submitted to Congress on May 5, 2023. Additionally, we are implementing the Air Traffic Operations Management System (ATOMS), a comprehensive system that will track controller timekeeping and various work assignments.”
The FAA also warned Congress in a letter earlier this year that mandated spending cuts would “halt controller training and new hiring,” hurting air-traffic-control efforts down the line.
“‘Each day the demand grows. Airlines are playing catch-up. They need airplanes. They need crews. They need ground staff.’”
Airline executives should also shoulder some of the responsibility, according to Aimer, who flew for United. “Crews could not get ahold of schedulers. [United] just didn’t have enough schedulers to help staff,” he said. “For example, a captain whose flight was canceled was trying to get a hold of dispatch or crew personnel to change his flight. They couldn’t get ahold of anybody for hours and hours. Flight attendants being displaced in the superhubs couldn’t get ahold of anybody.”
Over the past few years, experts say, airlines have been trying to do more but have been stretching themselves thin.
“The number of flights these days — they’ve doubled and tripled and quadrupled from the old days,” Aimer said. “And each day the demand grows. Airlines are playing catch-up. They need airplanes. They need crews. They need ground staff. United, for example, has huge expansion plans, and the only thing that keeps them from achieving those plans is having personnel and aircraft.”
Hannah Walden, a spokesperson for Airlines for America, a lobbying group that represents the airline industry — specifically passenger airlines Alaska, American, Delta, Hawaiian, JetBlue, Southwest and United — said that airlines have “adjusted their staffing models to account for the time it takes to hire and train new employees and have reduced their schedules to reflect current operating realities (including air traffic controller shortages).”
Walden pointed to data showing that airlines increased the number of mainline pilots between 2019 and 2022.
“Today, 800,000 people work for U.S. airlines — which is more workers than prepandemic and the most in 20 years,” she said.
But no matter how many workers there are, there is little that frontline employees — from pilots to gate agents to customer-service representatives — can do when problems happen.
“Airlines are so heavily compartmentalized — so many departments with their own vocabulary, their own protocols — and they don’t always communicate with each other on the level they should,” Smith said, adding that it’s a customer-service problem the airlines need to figure out for themselves. “Employees aren’t empowered to make decisions that could go a long way toward helping customers, but there’s a lot of fear involved. People are afraid to make the wrong decision and get in trouble, so they make the wrong decision. There’s a reluctance to improvise or think outside the box to solve a problem.”
This summer of woe won’t be the last, but a reckoning is coming
Disruptions caused by passengers can go viral — like when one caused a trans-Atlantic flight to divert because they didn’t get their preferred meal — but unruly passengers don’t appear to be a major issue.
“Personally, I haven’t experienced an uptick in disruptive passengers, and I’m not hearing it from colleagues,” Smith said. “I think these incidents are by and large outlier incidents.”
According to data from the FAA, the past 12 months have seen the number of unruly passengers level off at between 130 and 170 per month. On average, that comes out to between 1.5 and 2.5 incidents per 10,000 flights.
A stretched-thin flight network that is facing more complex challenges than ever is the real issue, experts say, and is unsustainable in the long run.
“Hopefully, when airlines lose a lot of money in these meltdowns, they will realize they need to staff properly and be more prepared to combat situations like this,” Aimer said. “We’re thinking of going to Mars, so we’re going to have to learn how to deal with … these weather patterns. They’re here to stay and we better learn, not to overcome them — because that may be impossible — but at least deal with them the best we can.”
Smith said he is cautiously optimistic. “Precedent tells me to be cynical. However, I also feel like maybe, hopefully, we’ve reached a breaking point where things have to be addressed and fixed.”
For now, what passengers can do is to anticipate delays and other headaches. Don’t plan to arrive at your destination on the same day that you need to leave on a cruise, for example, or attend a wedding or other can’t-miss event. Schedule your arrival for a day or so in advance to give you some wiggle room should there be a meltdown. And if you’re trying to connect through the East Coast, opt for a long layover.
“If you miss a flight to Europe or Asia, you don’t hop on another one a few hours later,” Smith said, adding that a canceled flight “can ruin vacations and mess up business plans. The repercussions are big and expensive.”
As for Mann, he gives the same advice every summer: “Be the best-informed customer you can be. Know what the alternatives are, and be flexible.”
And pack a lot of patience.
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