US airlines plot a course away from another costly summer of chaos

The past two summers saw air travel nightmares across the US as airlines struggled to restore operations brutally curtailed by a global pandemic. With much to prove, industry executives are promising that this time will be different.

A quarter of US flights were cancelled or delayed last summer, leaving travellers fuming in airports across the country. The chaos has prompted the White House and some legislators to call for tighter regulation to minimise fees and disruptions.

As the big US airlines prepare for peak season, American Airlines chief operating officer David Seymour told the Financial Times the carrier had been working since autumn to build “resilience” into its summer schedule to be ready for commercial flying’s unexpected challenges.

After determining how many people it could reasonably expect to hire and train, he said, “we built a schedule that we knew we could fly”.

Delta Air Lines has trimmed its flight plans by 2 per cent to preserve operational reliability, while United Airlines’ head of operations said the company had “already done that” and was “ahead of the curve”. All three carriers have cut some New York flights because there are too few air traffic controllers to manage the region’s congested airspace.

“The stakes are always high in the summer,” Seymour said. “People want to get back to travel, and they don’t want to have another experience [like] they had last summer.”

Summer tests operations at US airlines because it combines higher volumes of flights and passengers with the possibility of thunderstorms, wildfires, hurricanes and extreme heat. The season, said United chief operating officer Torbjorn “Toby” Enqvist, “is our Super Bowl”.

The tough conditions mean airlines need slack in the system to recover when bad weather strikes. That slack, whether it takes the form of extra crew on standby, emptier planes or longer times to complete a flight, drives up costs, either leading to higher fares or hurting profits.

Airlines must balance the need to operate smoothly against the need to cut costs, said Citi analyst Stephen Trent. The risk lies in cutting too far.

A meltdown is expensive, too. Southwest Airlines put the cost of December’s holiday cancellations of nearly 17,000 flights at $1bn. The US Department of Transportation is investigating whether the airline scheduled more flights than it could operate, which Southwest denies.

Southwest claimed the worst record last summer among the four largest US carriers, with 32 per cent of flights cancelled or delayed, according to flight tracking site FlightAware. At American it was 30 per cent.

Airlines can improve reliability in several ways, including allowing themselves more time to fly between destinations. American increased by 1.5 per cent the scheduled time for flights between 11 US cities in July 2023 compared to what it allotted for the same month in 2022, according to aviation consultancy Cirium.

Delta increased the scheduled flying time by 1 per cent for the same routes. There was no change for United, while Southwest cut the scheduled time by 2.1 per cent.

The change was not a buffer, Seymour said. Instead, it reflects the reality that certain routes take longer than they used to: growth at New York’s major airports, for example, has forced planes to spend more time taxiing.

“If you didn’t add time, particularly operating from large airports that have seen significant growth, you’re going to fall short,” he said.

Delta, too, has made changes. Known for its operational reliability, the airline cancelled or delayed 21 per cent of flights in the first quarter — still better than rivals, but four percentage points worse than its performance a year earlier. It took too long to recover from storms during the quarter, said Glen Hauenstein, Delta’s president, so the airline took “just a bit of a step back” on second quarter capacity.

Delta is also trying to reduce the time aircraft are out of service for maintenance. The industry is facing a shortage of jets due to supply chain problems at rival plane-makers Boeing and Airbus, making it critical for airlines to keep as many jets in the air as possible. Jefferies Research analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu found that Delta and United together spent $1.2bn on aircraft maintenance in the first quarter, 34 per cent higher than the same period in 2019.

The latest aviation hiccup occurred on Tuesday, when a firewall failure at Southwest forced the airline to halt all departures nationwide. Though normal operations resumed quickly, industry analyst Brett Snyder, who runs the website Cranky Flier, said it would be harder to recover from a similar stumble during the summer, when flights are fuller and more travellers need to make connections.

The airlines “are certainly prepared to operate in a good weather environment”, he said. “Depending upon what Mother Nature throws at them, that’s when we’ll figure out how tested they are.”