Rehiring staff has taken longer than planned.ĭelayed travelers sleep under the flight display screens at United Airlines' terminal in Newark International Airport on Wednesday. Many also permanently grounded older, less efficient aircraft. They were not allowed to involuntarily layoff staff but they did offer buyouts and early retirement packages. The US air travel system is unable to recover quickly from widespread weather problems because it doesn’t have the bodies to deal with the disruptions.ĭespite $54 billion of taxpayer funds funneled into airlines to keep them alive during the pandemic, most airlines greatly reduced staff during the first year of the pandemic when air travel, and fares, plunged. Storms in the Boston area caused a groundstop there early Wednesday and New York’s LaGuardia and Newark airports had a groundstop in the afternoon, keeping planes destined for those locations at the gate or parked on the tarmac at airports around the country.Īlthough that’s better than the 2,200 canceled flights in each of the last two days, or the more than 16,000 delayed flights between Monday and Tuesday, it’s hardly a smooth-running operation. As of 2:44 pm ET, FlightAware tracking service reported there were nearly 850 flights canceled and another 3,500 delays. The situation at US airports was only slightly better Wednesday. Staffing shortages, at both US airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control operations, took a bad situation and made it worse. But storms were only one factor behind the travel nightmare. Hundreds of thousands of US airline customers were stranded this week as severe weather grounded planes and led to canceled flights.

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