Airlines should have better performance this year after rough 2022, expert says

(TND) — U.S. airlines had a turbulent 2022, but one aviation expert is anticipating a smoother 2023.

A new Department of Transportation report shows that on-time arrivals, cancellations and baggage handling were all worse last year than before the pandemic.

Laurie Garrow, of Georgia Tech, said those problems stem from the “whiplash effect” created by the pandemic.

The airline industry “ripped half of its planes out of capacity” during the early pandemic shutdowns and then spent most of the last two years ramping up capacity, she said.

Staff turnover has been a big problem for airlines, she said.

But they’ve also been constrained by the time needed to perform maintenance on the idled aircraft and, in some cases, the time needed to retrain pilots on new aircraft.

“It’s not like parking a car in your garage for a year,” Garrow said.

She called the shutdown and resumption “unprecedented.”

You just run into all of these bottlenecks,” she said.

Airlines last year posted an on-time arrival rate of 76.7%, down from 78.9% in 2019, the DOT said.

They had a cancellation rate of 2.7%, up from 1.9% in 2019.

And the mishandled baggage rate was 0.64%, worse than the 2019 rate of 0.59%.

Airlines also reported 376 tarmac delays of more than three hours on domestic flights last year compared to 155 such delays the year before.

The DOT this week also released December flight performance data.

The holiday travel month was a rough one for airlines compared to their pre-pandemic operations.

Airlines flew about 578,000 flights in December with 5.4% of them canceled.

December 2019 had more flights (nearly 680,000), and just 1.1% were canceled.

The problems with Southwest drove much of this December’s turmoil, according to the DOT.

Over half of the industry’s cancellations were attributed to Southwest, and over a quarter of the mishandled bags were from Southwest.

Garrow said it wasn’t a singular event but a series of incidents that caused so much trouble this holiday for Southwest.

“(The) Southwest network structure that doesn't use this sort of hub-and-spoke (model) like many of the main carriers also exposed it to more delays rippling through the system,” she said.

Garrow said Southwest’s point-to-point network makes it more difficult to contain flight disruptions.

Delta had the highest on-time arrival rate in December, with 77.5%.

Frontier had the worst, with 56.6%.

American had the lowest rate of canceled flights during the holiday month, with 1.8%.

Southwest had the highest rate, 14.6%.

But summer cancellations also contributed to the rough 2022.

In September, an Allied Pilots Association spokesman told The National Desk that airline scheduling practices overwork pilots and lacked the flexibility to rework flights.

Garrow thinks airlines are ready to return to pre-pandemic performances.

“I am very hopeful in 2023 that we have learned from our growing pains,” she said.

The DOT says it’s also doing its part to improve passenger experiences.

It launched a dashboard after the summer disruptions so fliers can see what airlines offer in the case of a “controllable” cancellation or delay. That wouldn’t include disruptions due to weather.

And this month, the DOT added a dashboard that shows which airlines guarantee fee-free family seating.

“Parents traveling with young kids should be able to sit together without an airline forcing them to pay junk fees,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a news release.

Garrow said there’s pent-up demand for travel, and she advises anyone planning to fly this summer to book early.

And avoid connections if possible.

“If you want to avoid delays and disruptions, typically flights that depart early in the morning tend to have higher on-time performance than flights later in the day,” she added.