Air travel is back. Now the airlines have to keep up.

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/>