US transportation chief squarely blames airlines for last summer’s operational meltdown

US transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg is insisting that airlines, not the FAA, are primarily responsible for last summer’s US air travel meltdown, saying airlines scheduled more flights than they could staff. Buttigieg, speaking to The Washington Post on 18 October, also expressed frustration that airlines were short staffed after taking billions of dollars in pandemic aid specifically intended to keep workers on the job. Following a summer heavy with delays and cancellations, some airline executives deflected blame to the FAA, saying it had too few controllers to handle traffic. “The issue that we’ve had this summer… is air traffic control staffing,” United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby said in September. US DOT secretary Buttigieg shot down that assertion on 18 October. “Certainty not,” he says. “The majority of [delays and cancellations] are not the result of air traffic control staffing”. US airline flight cancellation rates typically hover around 1%. That rate shot to 4% on some weekends last summer – a swing that made “all the difference in the world in terms of whether the system is able to catch up and keep up”, Buttigieg says. He attributes the problem to “unrealistic” flight scheduling by airlines at a time of rapidly rebounding demand for air travel following Covid-induced travel restrictions. Those same restrictions led carriers to significantly reduce their workforces, and in recent months many US airlines have said they have too few pilots. Last summer, Buttigieg says, carriers scheduled more flights than they could operate. “Certainly, [airlines] need to be prepared to service the tickets they sell. We didn’t see that.”<br/>