Friday before June was the most popular air travel day of 2022, according to Transportation Safety Administration statistics. Airports have not been as crowded since Thanksgiving 2021. TSA officials said they examined about 2,438,784 people at airport security checkpoints nationwide on Friday, the highest number of checkpoints since Nov. 28, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. This was also about 100,000 more travelers than the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. “Welcome to the Juneteenth of travel holiday weekend!” wrote TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein on Twitter. While the Juneteenth became a public holiday last year, this is the first year that the US stock market and banks will close in his honor. The increase in numbers could not have come at a worse time for US airlines. A combination of difficult weather conditions, staff shortages and infrastructure challenges have made major carriers struggling to keep up with increased travel. Nearly 9,000 flights were delayed within the US on Friday and another 1,500 flights were canceled, according to the FlightAware data group. The increase in delays and cancellations comes just one day after Transport Minister Pete Buttigieg met with airline CEOs to discuss ways to improve performance and future operations. Another expected increase in travel during the July 4 holiday. . About 2,700 flights were canceled on Memorial Day weekend. The big airlines are already canceling more flights as a precaution, as soon as the busy summer season heats up. Southwest Airlines has cut nearly 20,000 flights between June and Labor Day and is struggling to hire the 10,000 new employees it says it needs to meet demand. “I go through Whataburger drive-thru and I pay and I get my bag, and the staple in the bag is a job application,” Southwest CEO Robert Jordan joked to the Dallas Morning News last year about the difficulty of finding job seekers. “That’s it.” Delta said it would cancel 100 daily flights to the US and Latin America from July 1 to August 7. In an open letter to customers, Delta pilots wrote that their lack of manpower has put them in a rhythm to fly more overtime hours this year than in all of 2018 and 2019 combined. “The shortage of pilots for the industry is real and most airlines are simply not going to be able to carry out capacity plans because there are simply not enough pilots, at least not for the next five years or so,” said the United CEO. Airlines, Scott. Kirby said during the airline’s quarterly earnings call in April. The unions representing pilots in Delta, American and Southwest say the airlines have entered the current situation by refusing to replace pilots who retired and took leave during the peak of the pandemic when air travel plummeted. About 8,000 new commercial pilots have been certified in the past year, according to the pilots’ unions, and they say there should be no shortage. The current service cut narrative, they claim, is being used by companies to justify a cut in training and security requirements that will boost profit margins. Some U.S. senators take note. “While some flight cancellations are inevitable, the huge number of delays and cancellations over the weekend raises questions about airline decision-making,” Senators Richard Blumenthal and Edward Markey wrote in a letter to Buttigieg earlier this month.
