Given that this long summer weekend coincides with Father’s Day, this means that there will be many trips.
Friday before June 10th was the most popular air travel day of 2022, according to statistics from the Transport Security Administration. Airports have not been so crowded since Thanksgiving 2021.
TSA officials said they checked about 2,438,784 people at airport checkpoints across the country on Friday, the highest volume of checkpoints since Sunday, Nov. 28, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. That’s also about 100,000 more passengers than the Friday before Remembrance Day weekend.
“Welcome to the juniors’ holiday weekend!” TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein wrote on Twitter.
While the eleventh became an official holiday last year, this is the first year in which the US stock market and banks will close in his honor.
The increase in numbers could not come at a worse time for American airlines. A combination of bad weather, staff shortages and infrastructural challenges have prompted major carriers to struggle with rising travel. Nearly 9,000 flights were delayed in the United States on Friday, and another 1,500 flights were canceled, according to the FlightAware data group. The increase in delays and cancellations comes just one day after Transport Minister Pete Buttigig met with airlines’ chief executives to discuss ways to improve efficiency and forward operations on another expected jump in travel on July 4th. About 2,700 flights were canceled over Remembrance Day weekend. The big airlines are already preventively canceling more flights just when the busy summer season is heating up. Southwest Airlines has cut nearly 20,000 flights between June and Labor Day and is struggling to hire the 10,000 new workers it says are needed to meet demand. “I go through Whataburger drive-thru and pay and get my bag, and a job application is attached to the bag,” Southwest CEO Robert Jordan joked to Dallas Morning News last year about the difficulty of finding job candidates. “That’s it.”
Delta has said it will cancel 100 daily flights to the United States and Latin America from July 1 to August 7. In an open letter to customers, Delta pilots wrote that labor shortages have led them to fly more overtime this year than in all of 2018 and 2019 combined.
“The shortage of pilots for the industry is real and most airlines will simply not be able to implement their capacity plans because there are simply not enough pilots, at least not for the next five years or more,” said United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby. the quarterly conversation about the airline’s profits in April.
Unions representing pilots in Delta, American and Southwest say airlines have entered the current situation by refusing to replace pilots who have retired and taken leave during the pandemic, when air travel dwindled. About 8,000 new commercial pilots have received certificates in the last year, according to pilots’ unions, and they say there should be no shortage. They argue that the current story of service cuts is being used by companies to justify lowering training and safety requirements, which will increase profit margins.
Some U.S. senators are considering. “While some flight cancellations are inevitable, the huge number of delays and cancellations over the weekend has raised questions about airline decision-making,” Senators Richard Blumenthal and Edward Markie wrote in a letter to Butigig earlier this month.
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