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Air travel is back. Can the industry keep up? Airlines are increasingly confident that they’ve reached a turning point in their financial recovery, with healthy profits in their future. But staffing shortages threaten to stifle the rebound and rein in ambitions. The threat is greatest for smaller carriers and third-party vendors, but, in an interconnected industry, no one is isolated from those challenges. “The whole infrastructure is not set up to snap back to these rapid growth rates,” Scott Kirby, the CE of United, said on a call with investor analysts and reporters on Thursday. Beyond the airlines’ own work forces, that infrastructure requires sufficient numbers of air traffic controllers, security agents and fuel vendors. “All those constraints get in the way of a reliable schedule,” he said. Kirby and his counterparts at American Airlines and Delta Air Lines say they are seeing vibrant demand for spring and summer travel. But all three airlines have also said they are taking a measured approach to flight scheduling to avoid the frustrations that have arisen over the past two years as limited glitches cascaded into major disruptions affecting some airline networks for days. Story has more. <br/>

Delta and United will allow customers previously barred from flying for failing to wear masks to board flights again, the carriers said on Wednesday evening, after US authorities abruptly stopped enforcing face-covering requirements following a court ruling this week. “With masks now optional, Delta will restore flight privileges for customers on the mask non-compliance no-fly list,” the Atlanta-based carrier said. This would apply to roughly 2,000 banned travellers. United said some customers will be allowed to fly again “on a case-by-case basis” after “ensuring their commitment to follow all crew member instructions on board”. American Airlines CE Robert Isom said on Thursday that banned travellers “will be permitted to resume travel at some point in time” provided that the incident they were involved in had not escalated to a more serious issue such as assault. There have been 1,233 reports of unruly passenger incidents this year, 65% of which were related to face masks, according to the US FAA. Ed Bastian, Delta CE, called for a national no-fly list of unruly passengers as recently as February. Airline CEs had called for the federal government to rescind its mask mandate for public transportation, including air travel, citing the safety of airline staff who had to enforce the rule.<br/>

United acknowledged that the US pilot shortage is real and a problem that won’t be resolved for several years, but the carrier’s management believes the issue will be more damaging to smaller airlines than to airlines its size. Not that United is immune. Regional carriers operating under the United Express brand, mainly to smaller cities, are struggling to hire pilots. This will affect United’s ability to broaden its network to many small and midsized cities as regional airlines scale back their growth. “The pilot shortage is real,” United CEO Scott Kirby told investors on Thursday. “Most airlines will not be able to realize their capacity plans because there simply aren’t enough pilots, at least not for the next five years.” United believes US pilot training schools produce between 5,000-7,000 pilots a year. The airline industry needs to hire 13,000 pilots this year as it plots it post-pandemic growth, mostly to replace pilots who retired or took buyouts during the depths of the pandemic. Although many airlines, like United itself, have set up or partnered with pilot-training academies, it will take years before those schools can produce enough fully trained pilots to meet demand. To fly a commercial aircraft in the US, pilots need 1,500 hours of flight experience, a process that takes years and is expensive to complete.<br/>