With airline staff at a breaking point, passengers can expect more headaches to come

Although this weekend’s problems were mainly limited to Southwest, it is by no means the only airline struggling to restore staff and flights that were trimmed during the pandemic. Fixing these problems will be expensive and time-consuming — and are likely to cause further pain for passengers returning to the skies.Southwest said a number of issues caused the weekend cancellations, including bad weather and a brief problem at the Air Traffic Control center in Jacksonville, Florida. But those hiccups caused only minimal disruptions at other airlines, and Southwest admitted to its employees Monday that things cascaded out of control over the weekend because the airline doesn’t have adequate staffing.”We are still not where we want to be with staffing, and in particular with our flight crews,” Chief Operating Officer Mike Van de Ven said in a recorded video to employees. A transcript of the recording was shared with CNN. “We simply need more staffing cushion for the unexpected in this environment and we are bringing new people onboard every day,” he said. The airline has roughly 7,000 fewer employees today than it did pre-pandemic. Its most recent headcount, reported to the Transportation Department in August, was 54,500, down from the nearly 61,300 employees in August 2019. When air travel plunged in early 2020, all the airlines offered “We don’t want the company canceling flights. We don’t want the company hiring more people to fill in an inefficient scheduling process,” he said. “Until the company corrects some of these issues with how they schedule and reroute pilots and flight attendants, we’re going to continue to see these issues next week and over the holidays. That’s what we want to see avoided.”Murray denied rumors from over the weekend that the staff shortage was caused by some kind of “sick-out” by Southwest pilots unhappy with operations or the airline’s recently announced mandate that all employees must be vaccinated against Covid.”Our sick rates are right in line to where they were this summer,” Murray said, and the number of pilots signing up for flights is as high as it has ever been, he added.