Jul. 21—Flying in the United States in 2022 is a nightmare of high prices, lost baggage and pervasive uncertainty, and airline leaders say the current state of affairs won't be changing until at least next year.
In a Wednesday interview with CNBC, financial reporter Phil LeBeau, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby cast a gloomy outlook for consumers even as the Chicago-based airline posted its first quarterly profit since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We are glad to be returning to profitability," Kirby said. "The biggest challenge that probably faced us, that faces us, for the next 12 months is all the infrastructure challenges around aviation right now."
"It's maddening to us at United, because we've hired, we've been hiring...we're ahead of the curve," Kirby said."We've got 10 percent more pilots now per block hour than we had in 2019."
Kirby pointed to the "mess that's happening in Heathrow" as part of the industry challenges the carrier is facing, referring to London Heathrow International Airport, whose officials recently pinned a letter to airlines asking them to limit outbound ticket sales until September in order to help the hub navigate staffing shortages.
"The system just can't support our flying, and the customers and the airline are at risk," Kirby said. "So what we've done is just pull our capacity back. All the costs are still there, because we're prepared to be a much bigger airline. We have the people to be a bigger airline. But we're going to be a smaller airline until the system can support it."
United Airlines has slashed dozens of flights from its summer schedule and will cut more in coming months, according to a USA Today report published earlier this month. In June the carrier announced its decision to cut Newark flights by 12 percent and later announced plans to end service on routes from Houston and Texarkana, Arkansas and from Flagstaff, Arizona to Denver this fall.
"We're not going to get back to normal utilization and normal staffing levels until next summer," Kirby said.
In October of 2020, United Airlines and American Airlines sent furlough notices to more than 32,000 airline employees saying the carriers cannot afford to keep employees on payroll past the expiration date of the federal CARES Act Payroll Support Program later that month. According to an NPR report, United at the time had received roughly $5 billion in federal funds for the purpose of keeping workers on staff and weathering adverse market conditions created by the pandemic.
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