After two years of being grounded, air travel is
back. The TSA reported passenger volumes could soon
exceed those from 2019.
But growing travel demand has hit a few pockets of
turbulence in the last year due to lack of staff and
increasing bad weather.
We are seeing more intense weather in Florida and we
are seeing snow in Texas in April.
Thunderstorms in Florida led to airlines delaying more
than 9000 flights and canceling over 3000.
And over Memorial Day weekend, 2500 flights were
canceled throughout the US due to storms in New York,
Florida and the mid-Atlantic.
We saw last summer in 2021, Spirit Airlines losing about
$50 million in revenue because of a spate of delays
and cancelations.
Southwest a few months later had one that cost it
about $75 million.
In 2019, the estimated cost of delays in the US for
airlines was $8.3 billion and the cost for passengers
was $18 billion.
The biggest cause for delays in the US is weather.
The challenging days are those thunderstorms, those
pop up summer thunderstorms and severe weather season,
which is between April and September where we have the
bulk of the nation traveling. And that's when
we have the most inclement weather.
Florida has seen a travel boom over the pandemic and
has been particularly affected by delays and
cancelations due to an increase in storms, which
are expected to get worse in the future.
And even though you may have perfect weather at your
departure airport, bad weather in another area can
have a cascading effect on the entire country.
We're operating probably right about 5600 daily
departures. It's very complicated when we're
managing through multiple hubs throughout the country
that all have the opportunity to have
different types of weather and different types of
potential disruptions.
CNBC went to the Federal Aviation Administration's
Air Traffic Control System Command Center in
Warrington, Virginia, to get an inside look at how
the FAA deals with increasingly severe weather
situations that can delay and cancel flights and cost
airlines billions.
The National Airspace System or NAS is a complex,
busy place.
The FAA was created in 1958 to oversee it.
Today, it manages more than 19,000 airports and 45,000
flights daily.
We control 70% of the world's air traffic.
The mission for every air traffic control facility is
to ensure that the flying public reaches their
destination safely and as efficiently as possible.
All right. Good morning, everyone. Looking at the
maps. Morning. We have a cold front off the East
Coast. A few storms out there.
Newark, we're keeping an eye on the demand for this
afternoon, but we expect the conditions are going to
be perfect for secondary arrival. Runways you keep be
able to keep the rates up.
The command center is run 24 seven and is in constant
communication with all participants in the
airspace, which includes airlines, flight operations,
general aviation, the military and the National
Weather Service.
Now, when constraints happen in the Northeast, we
collaborate with those same entities to solve those
issues, be it rocket launches in the airspace,
inclement weather, VIP movement and special events
like, say, for instance, the Masters.
We solve that issue together collaboratively
with traffic management initiatives.
All right. Good morning, everyone. Looking at the
maps. Morning. We have a low pressure developing over
the southern plains with a cold front into Texas.
That's going to be our big system today.
We're expecting quite a bit of development very close to
Dallas this morning.
Probably blocked the traffic between Fort Worth
and Houston.
The problem is Texas right now we do have Texas in the
plan. Dfw and Dallas Love, they just put in place the
north to DFW. So stuff coming from the Chicago area
in the northeast are going to wrap around to the west
side of the weather.
With travel demand coming back in full force, the
airspace is as crowded as ever.
Congestion happens every day, so we get what is known
as spikes in certain times of the day.
Just like anything rush hour, everyone wants to get
to work at a certain time and get home at a certain
time, so we meter that traffic out.
By that I mean we slow slow down the problem.
So the controllers that are working in that airspace
have a chance to to safely maneuver those aircraft
through to their destinations. A special
event on the timeline.
We do have the Formula One race down in south Florida
and we have news of possible ground stops.
The Florida market is really booming.
And as that demand increases, we're bolstering
our staffing to ensure that we meet those rising demands
in the Florida market.
And that's where most of the traffic for leisure is
flowing nowadays.
But Florida has seen an increase in storms leading
to thousands of flights being canceled this past
April. In recent years, storms have gotten more
frequent and severe due to climate variability.
Weather plays a huge factor to any traffic management
initiatives that we're implementing. Today is a
Texas day, so we have thunderstorms ranging in in
Texas market and up into the Memphis market as well.
If you look at overall cancelations, weather and
air traffic control issues that drive the bulk of the
cancelations that airlines are impacted by, we say air
traffic control. It's because of the limitations
that weather puts on air traffic control that
constrains where aircraft can fly.
Meteorologists play an important role within the
air traffic system and have a team on staff at the FAA
control center.
A huge part of what we do is based upon coordination and
collaboration with meteorologists in the
airline industry.
And so while we here are providing that informative
piece, that forecast for decision maker here, there
are meteorologists within the airlines that are doing
the same for their stakeholders.
And together as part of this enterprise, we're
collaborating to make sure that we're on the same page,
that we're kind of speaking with one forecast voice.
Here in the US, the southern Great Plains have some of
the strongest storms on earth, and while some
weather events are more predictable and schedules
can be rearranged around them, others must be
avoided.
Certainly, as as hazards go, you want to avoid a tornado,
you don't want to be close to those storms.
There's no safe way to fly around a tornado.
When you're looking at a winter storm or you're
looking at a hurricane, in many instances, you're going
to have two or three days of lead time before that
storm is going to impact a congested corridor or a high
impact terminal.
But thunderstorms can be especially tricky to predict
ahead of time.
There are some days where you can provide a forecast.
You see those thunderstorms coming.
There's other times where it's a very fast process to
build up and to fall apart.
And that is a big challenge, I think, for
meteorologist is you want to get that timing and
location of that thunderstorm information.
Right. And they can move those airplanes and keep
people safe.
There are roughly 100,000 thunderstorms in the US
every year. Thunderstorms can create a few dangerous
weather elements like rain, hail and lightning.
It will fry your components if you hit a lightning
strike from an aircraft. So we try to avoid those areas.
We want to ensure that we go around those and not
through those.
Meteorologists at the control center monitor
multiple types of radar maps that can identify
lightning and the height of storms in relation to the
altitudes of aircraft.
The white boxes that you see are denoting the top of the
thunderstorm. So if you've got thunderstorms that have
their tops around, say, 37 or 38,000 feet, you know,
that's at the level that your commercial airliners
are flying. And so you don't want to fly through
those. You've got to be able to fly around them
safely and see, right now, a lot of these airplanes are
moving in and trying to get in through these
thunderstorm gaps and get into Fort Worth.
But even if you go around a storm, it can still cause
problems around thunderstorms.
You're dealing with ineffectively induced
turbulence. And one of the things that can be sinister,
if you will, is that it may not necessarily impact
aircraft right around the thunderstorm.
It may impact aircraft that are 100 or 150 miles away
from that thunderstorm.
As that turbulence propagates out, away from
the center of the storm.
Unusual weather events have also been happening in
different parts of the country.
If you never anticipated having a snowstorm in
Atlanta, you don't have the same sorts of snow fighting
and deicing capabilities that you have in Detroit.
So on that basis, when you do have a snowstorm in
Atlanta, it's a pretty serious problem.
And the first thing that we are never going to
compromise is safety.
When you have weather and impacts that are out there,
we can't fly through that and we're not going to
jeopardize the operation in any way, shape or form.
While the FAA is making sure planes are safely passing
through the airspace efficiently, the airlines
are the ones dealing with the repercussions of delays,
which include weather but also airport congestion.
Late arriving passengers and crew and mechanical
issues.
When there's weather events in there, I think most
customers are understanding of the fact that there are
going to be delays.
They're less understanding sometimes about I can't get
to my destination with full flights.
I might not be able to get to my destination for a
couple of days, which obviously can ruin the
experience.
Once we get into delays, we get into internal airline
mechanics where combination of practical availability of
crews and then in some cases, contractual
limitations or FAA limitations cause the
originally scheduled crew members not to be available
to fly a flight.
And of course, if that's the light that last flight
of the night and no further reserves, well, that's it
for the day. Unfortunately, those customers are going to
be overnighting at an airport. Okay.
We still have Dallas 11 for the possible ground stop
GDP. We'll keep that in it for now.
We'll see how the demand comes up just in case.
When an airport has a ground stop, inbound flights
are held at their origin airport until weather or
other disruptions ease.
There were 939 ground stops in the US in 2021.
One thing that airlines try to be careful about doing is
not delaying endlessly.
So if they're keeping their crews from getting to their
destination, let's say that they're not sure when the
flight is going to take off. Sometimes what they'll
do is just cancel it outright, get those crews
either reassigned to another flight.
Everything at an airline cost an airline by the
minute, whether it's a minute of flying time or a
minute of a fuel burn, crew, time, pilots, flight
attendants. So every one of these delays incurs a cost
on the revenue side of the equation.
Having had a bad experience with that airline, a lot of
people simply say to themselves or say to their
corporate travel manager, Don't ever schedule me on
airline X again because I'm not going to be delayed like
that ever again.
Airlines like American are trying to yield more control
over delays during big weather events using a new
tool it created called Heat, which stands for Hub
Efficiency Analytics Tool.
It looks at our aircraft routings.
It looks at where the aircraft are coming from.
It looks at our crew limitations. It takes into
consideration our customers or we have large connecting
groups on flights coming in and we take all this and
model it around what we believe the limitations are
going to be imposed from the weather.
And we can use this tool to allow ourselves to delay
through the operation, allow ourselves not to
cancel.
He is a simple concept but incredibly complex.
When working with up to hundreds of flights impacted
by weather. It was rolled out in mid-April and used
during a thunderstorm in Dallas.
American said he reduced cancelations by 80%, while
the number of diversions dropped by 62% compared to a
similar storm in April 2019.
The ops research algorithms that we've developed to be
able to manage these, it just wasn't present, you
know, 20 years ago.
We've gotten a lot better, but we're not satisfied with
where we are right now. We're continuing to look to
find better ways to manage these situations because the
best science out there isn't going to tell us
exactly how it's going to unfold.
And we've got to be able to be very nimble and adaptive
to the scenario as it plays out.
The contract issues which a lot of airlines are
discussing right now. It's that schedule reliability
issue, which is the number one factor for for
employees. So getting this reliability issue solved has
implications which are really in the billions of
dollars for a major carrier and of course, has billions
of dollars in revenue potential as well if you
simply do a better job.
It is common for airlines to add time to a flight
schedule to give it some wiggle room for on time
arrival. But that's in perfect conditions.
We build the schedule for a normal day.
We don't build schedules anticipating that
thunderstorms are going to happen. And that's why on
those days, you have delays because if you have a
perfect weather day, everything's arriving early
and then you create complications in the system.
It's estimated delays cost airlines several billion
dollars in additional expenses.
Dallas, Newark and Chicago had the most delays over the
past year. Since bigger airports have more
operations, it could lead to more chances of delays.
We did have a bird strike.
Coming out.
Of Newark.
They were short term holding.
While they work to do that, everything should be good
now.
And every now and then there's the occasional odd
delay.
We've had people streaking on the runway.
Nothing really too strange.
We've seen it all.
And it's not just passenger planes that are impacted,
but cargo planes to.
Anybody else with concerns about the construction.
Fedex.
Yeah. Fedex.
Yeah.
With flight disruptions expected this summer and air
travel set to hit new records, the FAA and
airlines have a tough job ahead of them.
Airlines are trying to capitalize on every bit of
demand that is out there.
In some cases, they know that they're not going to be
able to handle it. So we've seen them cut their capacity
and kind of admit that maybe they had sold more
flights or more seats than they were able to handle.
It has been extremely stormy in some parts of the
US and airlines are trying to build in a little bit of
wiggle room by cutting that capacity.
We've took out some of the planned growth that we had
into the summer. We're going to keep essentially
our current level of operations intact throughout
the summer. We're not going to grow at all because the
reliability of the product that we're providing the
customer is more important than, again, chasing that
last dollar of revenue.
I think folks are understanding of weather
events and the impact they have, but the day after and
two days after, they struggle a bit with why is
that still impacting you?
And that's what we've spent a lot of time trying to
understand how we can better manage those events
so that when the storm or the storm event is over, we
can recover really quickly and get ourselves back to
normal operations.
One thing passengers can do, if it's possible, is to be
flexible and to be patient and to know that this is a
little bit of a tricky summer. They are going to
probably encounter things like weather here and there
that could delay their flights. It's really
important also to know your rights.
If an airline cancels your flight, you are entitled to
a cash refund.
Sometimes airlines will offer you a voucher or a
credit, but you you are entitled to a refund.
And the Department of Transportation lists all of
passenger's rights on its website.
It's a very dynamic system and we work very, very hard
to ensure that you are not delayed.
But when delays happen, be patient with us and
understand that we are doing it for the safety and
for you to make sure that you get to your destination
safe and that you have a positive flying experience.