If you are reading this, I am sure that you have your own air travel “horror story” and have seen the uptick in news about significant meltdowns and slow recoveries of airline networks over the past year. To use as context, let me quickly share the story of my attempted travel last week. I will not be sharing any identifying characteristics of the airline or my travel as this is an industry challenge that all must work to address.

(If you don't want to relive the stress of a flight disruption, skip the italics to read about potential solutions)

I was attempting to travel mid-week out of the greater NYC area the week before the 4th of July. The weather and Air Traffic Control (ATC) staffing shortages led to airport capacity restrictions on the east coast earlier in the week – causing delays and cancellations. As these restrictions continued, the knock-on effect made it harder for the airlines to recover

I was not contacted at all by my airline until the morning of my flight (7:45 email for a 2:30) departure. For what it’s worth, I have the second highest tier status on this airline. There was no notification about potential risk ahead of time, even though the "meltdown" was ready in the press. The rebooking options that I was given were for at a minimum of three days later. At least the airline didn't have change or cancellation fees. Two days after the incident the airline followed up with an apology note, summary of the challenge, and bonus frequent flyer points. While this was a nice touch, enhanced communication earlier in the process would have been more impactful.

I quickly rebooked to another airline out of an alternate airport (3 hours away from initial airport). The flight was boarded that evening and seemed that things were going to go smoothly. After boarding, we were notified that the First Officer (FO) had not arrived. They kept searching for the scheduled or reserve FO, but none were found and we were deplaned. As an aside, the airline had no available hotel room to book passengers (that is a whole different fiasco.) The flight was delayed to 10:00AM the next morning, and we woke up to another delay until 12:00. We gave up and went home, The flight subsequently went into a 30-minute rolling delay and didn’t depart until 4:00. To cancel my flight and get a refund on this one required four separate transactions on the airline website. No communication from the airline was received about what went wrong.

In the story above, as with other recent aviation meltdowns, there was not a single point of failure nor is there a single “solution” that can be put in place to avoid future breakdowns.  All stakeholders can help drive transformation to reduce the impact of future disruptions. 

Travelers

• Temper our expectations – We are now living in a world of instant gratification and unrealistic price expectations. The tension of these two is exacerbating the challenge for airlines. Travelers should consider what they might be worth paying more for in the risk / benefit tradeoff – no different than what many of us do with Amazon Prime – we pay more for the expectation of speedy delivery.  If we knew that the money was going to addressing a challenge (rather than just profits to shareholders), would we be willing to pay for things like priority rebooking should the airline have an uncontrollable delay or a fare premium for the most on-time airlines?
• Support lobbying for improvements to Aviation where we agree with the cause – This could be for enhancing ATC capabilities, hiring more ATC staff, putting regulations on airlines to perform on time, or even evolution of the 1500 hour rule to address pilot shortages (in a safe manner of course.) We should note that change will come with a cost and ultimately it will get passed on to the consumers – see point above – lets be prepared to fund the change. For reference, each 1 dollar increase in price (or tax) would create almost a billion dollars that could be spent toward addressing the problem.
• Have empathy toward airlines and their staff - There will always be uncontrollable delays. Airlines don’t control the weather after all, and airline frontline employees (Pilots, flight attendants, gate agents, and call center agents) don’t define the airline policies. Let’s not make the problem worse by treating them poorly and leading to high turnover (read - more cost and challenge for the airline).
• Consider sustainable decisions in general – weather events are getting more frequent and severe as a result of climate change. Consider how you might make day-to-day decisions that help address this challenge and its impact on your future travel.

Airlines

• Don’t play the blame game – Know that there are things that you can’t control and treat them all just like you would the weather. For big items like ATC capacity – track, forecast, and react in real time.
• Invest in the right tools to predict and manage disruption – airlines have many of the tools today, but with the enhancements to data collection and AI/ML, the ability to predict and manage disruption is accelerating.
• Set up the right structure “around the tools” to enable success.  For the foreseeable future, there will be a “human in the loop” for airlines operations management tools. Especially in a time of turnover at airlines, they must focus on having the right processes, authorities, feedback loops and incentives in place to capture value from tools.
• Over-communicate – be open and honest about what is going on. We live in the information age – passengers will find out what is going on, even if you don’t share. Control the narrative and give us our options. We will respect you for it.
• Build the right buffers into the system while still managing cost – Identify the highest risk areas in the system and either cut back or add buffers. Both will add cost to the system, but this cost can be strategically placed. Don’t hesitate to share what is being done, why, and its impact.  This will help you, selectively, capture a revenue premium for being resilient
• Question the status quo while innovating – Consider ways to mitigate the impact of uncontrollable items (e.g., weather) on the system. Imagine the impact of being able to safely turn an aircraft in a thunderstorm would have on the entire network.

Government Entities

• Accelerate investments in capacity enhancing solutions – NextGen Air Transportation System, additional ATC staff and training, runway and airport capacity, etc.
• Revisit decisions using data, new analytics tools, and new technologies to remove system constraints while maintaining (or enhancing) safety
• Over-communicate with airline customers so that they can more efficiently plan and react

This is just a sample of the many things that can be improved in the system. As you can see, it takes all the players to work together, including us as travelers. I look forward to helping the industry work together to continuously improve its ability to react to unplanned disruption and minimize the effects.