Who Hates Who More

David J. Danto

Business travel thoughts in my own, personal opinion

eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD

Who Hates Who More? – November 2022

I wrote a blog a few years ago asking why the airlines hate us. It was obvious to me at the time that passengers were just a necessary evil to the people that pass for management in this strange industry. Well, it seems that what goes around comes around, as now large number of groups are making it clear that they hate the airlines.

Let’s start with Delta, as this past week their pilots voted to authorize a strike against them. The pilots, who are represented by ALPA union, last negotiated their contracts in 2016. Renegotiation started in April 2019 and the employees and airline had entered the mediation stage in February 2020 but was postponed due to the pandemic. Renegotiations resumed in January but have been going too slow for the pilots who have now authorized a strike.

Not to be outdone, pilots at United Airlines voted to reject their new contract offer and are planning to set-up picket lines at multiple airports. And this wasn’t by a slim margin - 94% of the nearly 10,000 pilots voted to reject the offer. United said the rejection was ‘expected’ so they are not concerned, which makes one wonder why an offer that was already known to be unacceptable would even be made.

This is of course in addition to the United FAs that had already begun picketing multiple airports in September over system wide operational issues. Their beef is that United’s management continuously fails to properly staff crew schedulers, the flight attendant support team, catering and more. The result is terrible experiences for both FAs and passengers, who can’t get answers from anyone during irrops for hours at a time.

Add to this mess that the TSA just this past Sunday screened 2.49 million air passengers on Sunday, the highest daily number since February 2020 – before the pandemic hit the US.

The bottom line, the airlines suck, the crews are mad, there aren’t enough people to meet the need, and there are now more travelers than at any time before.

Welcome to the end of year / holiday season hate fest / mess in the air.

This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions.

All image and links provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.

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