Flying home from a European vacation last month provided me with an unexpectedly magical—by now almost mythical—experience: an on-time, half-empty, remarkably pleasant flight. I sipped a glass of bubbly and watched the latest John Wick, sprawling across the empty coach seat next to me, before taking a luxuriously roomy nap.
I’d almost stopped believing such things could exist. This summer, over several trips for work and vacation and a family wedding, I experienced nearly every example of just how terrible it is to fly these days: In June, vague aircraft “mechanical difficulties,” compounded by staff shortages, grounded me for hours in Toronto. In September, daylong weather delays—made worse by, yep, staff shortages—held me hostage at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. Airports were mobbed, and getting a seat in the overcrowded airport lounges that are supposed to make waiting slightly more bearable resembled the vicious fray of The Hunger Games. And with ticket prices spiking earlier this year, I’d paid a small ransom for the privilege of repeatedly throwing myself into the melee.
If you’ve flown during this “hellish” and “nightmare” year for air travel, you’ve probably experienced something similar. Flying has been getting measurably worse for years—we’re paying more fees for smaller seats and increased delays—but with travelers surging back into the post-pandemic skies, the industry’s national breakdown has become impossible to ignore.
Flying is now so bad that the U.S. government literally can’t keep up with all the people complaining about it. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Transportation received more than 77,600 official consumer complaints—up 55% from 2021, and more than five times the pre-pandemic levels of 2019—about delays, cancellations, refunds, boarding, baggage, and a whole host of other air travel problems. This year, more than 38,100 consumers filed complaints during the first five months of 2023, according to the Department of Transportation’s monthly Air Travel Consumer Report—but that’s where the data stops. The federal agency says it’s still struggling to work through the flood of complaints it has received from unhappy airline customers since the end of May.
“It is increasingly clear that consumer complaints are not returning to pre-pandemic levels,” the monthly report says of the data backlog.
So it’s not just our imaginations, or a handful of isolated incidents, or individual bad luck. The air travel system really “is so miserable for so many people—and has real downsides for the country,” says Ganesh Sitaraman, author of the new (and perfectly named!) book Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It. “Everybody has their story.”
And everyone is bracing for more of these flying horror stories. The December holiday travel season is ramping up, that annual national stress test of travel infrastructure, and a record-breaking 7.5 million people are predicted to take to the skies this year. Last year a winter storm over Christmas sparked a catastrophic meltdown for Southwest Airlines—canceling nearly 17,000 Southwest flights, stranding some passengers for days, and costing the airline more than $1.1 billion.
So as Americans head back to the skies for the holidays, can the post-pandemic airline industry finally get its act together? Spoiler alert: It’s probably too late for that.
Even if the big U.S. airlines manage to avoid a poorly timed snowstorm this year, and knuckle through all the other holiday strains on their stretched operations, the industry is fundamentally broken—thanks to decades of decisions by government policymakers and the airlines themselves, Sitaraman argues. The resulting mess hurts all of us: consumers, workers across the air travel system, and a wide swath of Fortune 500 companies and other businesses, who still rely on airlines to send their employees and other stakeholders around the country and the world.
Everybody hurts—including the Big Four
Even the airlines and their investors are dissatisfied with the industry status quo, despite being expected to earn more than $23 billion in global profit this year (more than double the profit forecast in June). Jet fuel costs are eating into revenues, and ticket prices have fallen since the spring as inflation-weary customers pull back on some of the post-COVID vacations and other “revenge travel” spending that fueled this summer’s air travel boom.
Still, the airlines are struggling to keep up with consumer demand, thanks to aging equipment and labor shortages. And airline investors aren’t very satisfied with the business, despite its soaring profits: Shares of the Big Four airlines—Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, American Airlines, and Southwest Airlines—are still trading below their pre-COVID levels, as Fortune’s Shawn Tully noted this fall.
Meanwhile, slightly smaller airlines are trying to merge their way to bigger-company status—despite new regulatory hurdles from the Biden administration, which is trying to prevent more industry consolidation. This month, as JetBlue argued in a federal trial that the U.S. government shouldn’t block its planned $3.8 billion takeover of budget airline Spirit, Alaska Air announced a $1.9 billion deal for Hawaiian Airlines.
Such consolidation is part of what has led to our current woes, argues Sitaraman, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. He traces air travel’s current breakdown back to the 1970s, when Congress passed a law deregulating the airlines—setting off decades of industry consolidation and diminishing services that, he argues, are directly responsible for today’s utter entropy.
By 2015, just four major airlines—Delta, American, United, and Southwest—controlled 80% of the U.S. market for air travel. Customers unhappy with one airline’s prices or service had few alternatives, especially for those who live in smaller cities.
COVID and the staffing crisis it sparked
And then COVID-19 hit. The pandemic ground air travel—and airline profits—to a halt, and sent the companies to Washington to beg for bailouts. As in so many other areas—the cracks in our health care system, our nation’s devastating lack of childcare infrastructure—the pandemic also exposed and exacerbated all of air travel’s long-existing fault lines.
“We have a kind of boom-and-bust cycle in the airline industry, where there are years where the airlines do extremely well and make a lot of money. And then you have these big demand shocks where people don't fly for a period of time, like after 9/11 or COVID,” Sitaraman says. “When things are good, the airlines do well, and when things are bad, the people suffer.”
In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, airlines encouraged workers to take buyouts or to retire early; cut service to dozens of smaller airports; and permanently grounded some of their older aircraft. And, predictably, when the pandemic eased and Americans started rushing back to the skies, airlines didn’t have the workers or the capacity to start to meet the demand.
They still don’t. Take the widespread staff shortages affecting pilots, flight attendants, baggage handlers, airport security agents, and air traffic controllers. Some of these gaps, including the national shortage of government-employed controllers and its destabilizing and dangerous effects on the entire air travel system, are beyond the immediate control of airlines.
But some are directly a result of their business decisions: After taking $54 billion in U.S. taxpayer-funded bailouts and agreeing not to lay off workers, airlines still encouraged many to leave voluntarily. Some 10,000 pilots left the field in the three years since the start of the pandemic, according to one analyst estimate. But after the pandemic eased and Americans surged back onto airplanes, carriers haven’t been able to hire back enough workers fast enough. The U.S. will have more than 16,000 annual job openings each for pilots and for flight attendants—for every year through 2032—according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Experienced pilots have a specialized skill set that requires years to develop and is hard to find at short notice. Even workers whose roles require less training or specialized knowledge, such as baggage handlers, require background checks that can take months to process.
It starts with the weather—and then it just snowballs
One of the most frustrating aspects of my flight delays this summer was the lack of specific information about what caused them. “It started with the weather, and then it all snowballed,” multiple empathetic but eerily on-message employees told me during my O’Hare limbo this September.
I started to suspect that these answers were a corporate-mandated talking point, carefully workshopped to avoid taking any company responsibility—or, horrors, having to pay passengers any sort of compensation. (Not that they would: While Canada and the European Union both require airlines to pay passengers for flight delays within the companies’ control, and President Biden has proposed doing so, the United States does not currently mandate such payments.)
There was probably some truth in the bare-bones mantra I heard again and again: Climate change is increasing extreme and destructive weather, adding to turbulence in the skies and delays and cancellations on the ground. When you add in widespread staff shortages, reduced capacity, increased demand, and aging aircraft—well, a simple thunderstorm or snowstorm can spark a national meltdown, as Southwest discovered last Christmas.
All of this, of course, has the worst impact on already-underserved markets. Despite my travel nightmares this summer, I was relatively lucky—I was just trying to get back to New York City, with its three airports and plenty of daily flights. People who live in smaller cities, which have to rely on fewer flights from an airline’s main “hubs,” have many fewer options. Airlines have reduced service to (and in some cases completely abandoned) cities and regions including Cincinnati, St. Louis, Memphis, Duluth, and dozens of others.
These decisions often hurt other businesses and entrepreneurs, who sometimes decamp for bigger, better-served regions, and therefore the cities themselves. For example, airlines cut hundreds of daily flights to Cincinnati in the late 2000s. By 2011, the banana company Chiquita Brands International had moved its headquarters out of Cincinnati to Charlotte, N.C.—causing Ohio to lose a company with about $3 billion in annual revenue at the time. Chiquita’s CEO specifically cited its new city’s greater number of international flights as a reason for the move.
So flying is miserable. Can we fix it?
As the second part of his book title proclaims, Sitaraman is optimistic that “we can fix” this broken system. He outlines several proposals for how regulators and policymakers could address our current problems, from the extreme and unlikely (such as nationalizing the airlines) to smaller, if still industry-shaking, interventions (requiring every major airline to serve a set of smaller cities, at regulated prices, for example; or requiring carriers to create "rainy day" funds that would reduce the need for taxpayer bailouts during the next crisis). The ultimate goal, he argues, should be to create an air travel system that serves the whole country, with no bailouts or bankruptcies and more transparent pricing.
It is worth noting that Sitaraman is a former longtime advisor to progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren, so his recommendations are likely to be met with skepticism, at best, in the business community. And any big policy fix to this decades-in-development problem will have to survive a dysfunctional and highly partisan Washington that’s entering a contentious presidential election cycle—one in which any sort of call for stronger regulations is likely to be painted as automatically antibusiness. (The airline industry’s lobby is already resisting President Biden’s attempt to crack down on “junk fees,” including the $6.7 billion in baggage fees airlines collected last year, the Washington Post reported last month.)
But however skeptical the broader business community may be about his proposals, Sitaraman argues that reregulating the airline industry isn’t a partisan issue—or an antibusiness one. After all, both Republicans and Democrats live in places that coastal elites dismiss as “flyover country.” And businesses as well as consumers are hurt by the airlines’ shrinking ability to ferry their employees and customers around the country efficiently.
“Who wants to start a Fortune 500 company in a city that doesn't have an airport, or that doesn't have much airline service?” Sitaraman says. “That's a real downside for economic growth and vibrancy and opportunity in lots of different places.”
So he's optimistic that we really can fix flying eventually. But in the meantime, I’m not pressing my luck for Christmas. I’m taking the train.
