Top Executive at Bradley International Airport Says Travel Disruptions will Continue as Long as Latest Coronavirus Surge Persists

A top executive at Bradley International Airport said Tuesday flight cancellations and delays dogging air travelers nationwide through the holiday season and now, into the new year will most likely be tied to the course of the latest coronavirus surge.

“I think you’re going to continue to see impacts to service levels until this Covid surge starts to subside,” said Kevin Dillon, executive director of the Connecticut Airport Authority, which oversees operations at Bradley. “There’s no doubt that Covid is having an effect on airline ability to staff.”

Between Dec. 24 and Monday, airlines serving Bradley canceled 133 arrivals and departures at the state’s largest airport, according to the CAA, about 9% of the flights scheduled for the period.

On Tuesday, as of early afternoon, 20 flights had been scrapped. Across the country, 3,600 flights were canceled Tuesday, according to FlightAware, the digital flight tracking company.

The recent surge in the pandemic is taking a toll on the airline staffing levels, which were already reduced after the air travel industry took a hit in 2020 at the start of the pandemic. This summer and fall also was marred by cancellations as travel soared and airlines struggled with staffing shortages.

The troubles this holiday season with the stunningly swift surge of the omicron variant added to the typical seasonal bouts with bad winter weather.

Dillon said half of the flights canceled Monday at Bradley were due to winter weather, particularly crippling snowstorms in Washington D.C. and the mid- Atlantic region.

“That’s the perfect storm, right?” Dillon said. “It’s going to lead to significant service disruption as it occurs.”

Not only the airlines are contending with flight crews and support staff falling ill to the coronavirus.

The Federal Aviation Administration warned last week that the number of air traffic controllers — those who guide aircraft during takeoffs and landings — also could be reduced if there are Covid infections.

“Like the rest of the U.S. population, an increased number of FAA employees have tested positive for COVID-19,” the FAA said in a statement, reported by ABCNews. “To maintain safety, traffic volume at some facilities could be reduced, which might result in delays during busy periods.”

Dillon said Bradley has taken steps such as mandatory masking and social distancing practices to ensure the roughly 130 employees of the airport stay healthy and are able to remain on the job. On Tuesday, just three were out ill, Dillon said.

“If we have Covid running through our fire department here at the airport, through our maintenance department, it really starts to jeopardize an airport’s ability to operate, if you don’t have the maintenance people to remove snow.”

The omicron variant was a shock to the system and its speed broadsided just about everyone, airlines included, experts said.

“This is kind of an extreme circumstance,” said Jim Hetzel, an operations expert at Cirium, a data and analytics firm that has clients in the airline industry.

Some airlines were hit harder than others simply because of where they tend to operate. Southwest and American had lower geographic exposure to the areas of the U.S. where weather was awful, and less of its staff is based in areas where COVID-19 cases are surging, Savanthi Syth, an analyst at investment research firm Raymond James, said.

Labor groups, however, say more could have been done, like offering extra pay to flight attendants during the holiday earlier on.

The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which represents 50,000 workers at 17 airlines including United, Alaska, Frontier and Spirit, said Delta started offering on Christmas Eve but should have done it sooner.

The union that represents American’s flight attendants said it probably helped that the airline recalled staffers who were on leave. In a November memo, the chief operating officer at American noted that nearly 1,800 flight attendants returned from leave in November, and 800 would return in December, along with 600 new hires.

Syth, of Raymond James, did an analysis of which airlines she thought were more at risk of operational problems during the holiday season, which drives most of the fourth quarter’s profitability for airlines. She found that airlines that were conservative with scheduling were hit as well as those that were aggressive.

“This leads me to believe that this has more to do with the uniqueness of the omicron variant and the greater impact it is having in the Northeast currently than a failure on the part of airlines to prepare,” Syth said.

A report from the Chicago Tribune was included in this story.

Kenneth R. Gosselin can be reached at [email protected].

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