Employee strikes, staff shortages, and in some cases weather forced airlines to delay or cancel tens of thousands of flights in Europe, in the US, and around the world. This summer It had a ripple effect across the aviation industry.
Long queues of unhappy, stranded passengers throughout European airports have become a common sight. Backlog at airports increased the turn-up for check-in from 2 up to 5 hours prior to the flight departure.
No one could have predicted that after loosening the COVID restrictions passenger capacity would increase to almost pre-pandemic levels. However, staffing did not keep up.
Airlines and airports struggle to hire people they once laid off during the peak of the pandemic. The main reason: people fear another lockdown and they may be without a job once again. What’s more, unattractive pay and work conditions don’t seem to be in favor of rehiring.
As a result, airports have told airlines to decrease the number of passengers they carry to ease up the pressure on the ground.
With fewer passengers, we see more canceled flights as domestic being hit the hardest.
According to data from the aviation analysis company Cirium, it seems that in North America flights for the month of August 2022 have already been cut quite a lot. Recently only 2885 flights were removed from the flight schedule. Of those flights, 1757 were on United Airlines (UA).
Europe is in the grip
Europe suffered the most. Further, 15788 flights, or 2% of the continent’s overall flight schedule have been removed in addition to what already has been done.
Recently major airlines like Lufthansa Airlines, KLM, British Airways, and easyJet have said they will be canceling even more flights.
According to Cirium, Turkish Airlines has the highest number of canceled flights. The airline already announced it is canceling 4408 flights for August half of which are from their hub in Istanbul.
British Airways is removing 3600 flights, easyJet 2045, Lufthansa Airlines 1888, and Wizz Air 1256.
And if you plan on traveling via London’s Heathrow just don’t. The airports told airlines to stop selling flight tickets to and from this destination as the UK’s biggest and one of Europe’s busiest airports struggles to cope with the resurgence of air traffic.
The airport is limiting the number of passengers that can depart each day during the peak summer months to 100000 which is 4000 fewer than currently planned. The passenger limit will be in effect until September 11, 2022.
The number of flights for the month of August around the world continues to fall. Last week another 25378 flights were canceled as a precaution, making an average of 818 per day. Now the total number of scheduled flights is 3.014 million worldwide.
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