The aircraft of the Lufthansa company, which announced that it will hire 10,000 workers next year due to a shortage of personnel / Kai Pfaffenbach / REUTERS

The pandemic gave way to a tourism “boom” with July levels at 88% of pre-pandemic levels. All indications are that August will far exceed this recovery because the anxiety to take advantage of the lost time before the next crisis does not subside. What is missing are pilots, operators, personnel, and even aircraft. The big airlines got rid of the workforce when the world stopped, and between options and options, they were slow to rehire. As a result, the world experienced another wave of delays and cancellations over the weekend.

The United States, where many flights around the world depart and depart, was the epicenter of this chaos, with nearly 1,400 flights canceled and more than 15,000 delayed between Saturday and Sunday alone, according to FlightAware data. The website shows a “suffering map” showing Spanish government vice president Yolanda Diaz stuck at a Washington airport last month until her team rented a car to arrive in New York at 2 a.m., missing meetings. that day.

As a regional conglomerate, New York and Washington recorded the most cancellations this weekend, but as an individual airport, it was Chicago O’Hare that won the pie, with 12% of flights canceled and 40% delayed.

As the FlightAware map shows, this is a summer of misery for travelers. The New York Times called it “Air Crash Summer”, adding a record number of lost luggage. In addition to wage cuts, airlines are also cutting any investment in baggage handling technology and equipment. The GPS trackers that some passengers put in their bags don’t solve the problem. “Follow him,” a Cleveland (Ohio) airport employee replied to a passenger who returned after a week in Vienna without receiving her suitcase. The apparatus showed it in Paris.

“The system is overloaded,” an analyst with the American Economic Freedom Project told a New York newspaper. This weekend alone, United Express, second in terms of delays and cancellations behind Southwest Airlines, canceled 25% of its flights, while JetBlue delayed 41% of its flights. Experts believe that it may take years to restore the level of reliability to which we are accustomed. Air Canada has already included “crew shortages” among the factors that will allow it to not compensate passengers, which the US Federal Aviation Administration plans to fight against. Lufthansa, for its part, has announced that it will hire 10,000 workers next year.

Source: El Correo

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