Why Empty Planes Keep Flying Through the Pandemic - WSJ
As coronavirus shuts down travel, flights carrying a handful of passengers might seem absurd, but airlines are often left with no other options
JetBlue Flight 65 flew from New York to Albuquerque, N.M., with only seven passengers on board on April 21. There was no good reason to operate the nonstop flight—except for who was booked on the return trip.
One, two, three, four, five, six. Six passengers total. But all of them were medical professionals going from New Mexico to New York to help with coronavirus response. Once JetBlue’s operations team learned who the passengers were, the airline decided it shouldn’t cancel the 200-passenger Airbus A321. Flight 66, the return to New York’s Kennedy Airport, was flagged as a high priority/care flight to air-traffic controllers. The idea of so many flights with so few passengers has left many wondering why airlines continue to fly nearly empty airplanes. It seems like airlines are burning cash, fuel and goodwill. Don’t they know what they’re doing?
They do. Airlines say they scrambled in March and April to ground as many trips as they could. But they still found themselves locked into flying many trips with hardly any passengers for a number of operational reasons that show just how complex airline schedules are and how hard the choices are that airline dispatchers and operations executives must make.
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Airlines have grounded roughly three-quarters of their capacity, and it still hasn’t been enough. More than 90% of traffic has disappeared. For American, 99% of flights have been less than 20% full.
Sometimes flights had a few travelers on essential business or key top customers, so they flew. Other times it was a few passengers going to funerals, births or other life events. Canceling on them would be devastating.
“As strange as this sounds, now our obligation to customers has actually never been more important and also, unfortunately, never less profitable,” says Vasu Raja, American’s senior vice president for network strategy.
Besides critical travel, airlines say there are often operational reasons that they need to fly when even the two or three people on board might be scratching their heads wondering why the flight exists.
A flight attendant checks on passengers midflight on a Baltimore-bound Delta flight from Atlanta on April 20.
PHOTO: ROB CARR/GETTY IMAGES
In some cases, a flight might have to go with a handful of fliers because a later flight in that airplane’s schedule had more people. Fly two on one trip to get to 60 waiting for the next flight.
Delta says it has had very light loads on flights because of a flock of no-shows in March and April. Passengers realize they can get a voucher for your ticket whether you cancel ahead of time or not, and at some points in the crisis, airlines were begging customers not to call overloaded phone lines.
Sometimes it isn’t the aircraft that had to get there, but the crew: pilots and flight attendants needed somewhere else for later flights.
Some aircraft need to get to a maintenance base for overnight routine work. American does maintenance on Airbus A319 jets in Pittsburgh, so dispatchers would hesitate to cancel a flight to Pittsburgh if the airplane wouldn’t get its necessary maintenance work and be ready for the next day.
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Overnight parking is in short supply at many airports housing grounded planes. So a jet may need to make the last trip of the day with one or two passengers just so the airline can get it to its assigned parking space. JetBlue says it has parking in Boston—perhaps one of the few times a vehicle could find more parking in Boston than elsewhere.
Southwest says it has had instances where a few passengers luck out with their flight because the plane has a large cargo payload, often medical supplies.
Southwest has particular trouble canceling a flight here and a flight there because its planes hopscotch across the country. If an aircraft is scheduled to go from Baltimore to Nashville, Tenn., to Houston to Los Angeles to Phoenix to St. Louis, it’s hard to pull one or two flights out of that schedule.
May and June schedules have been reconstructed to reduce operational challenges and the number of flights with only a handful of customers, though there will still be plenty of light loads. There’s also a growing concern that there will be heavier loads on flights where passengers won’t be able to socially distance in a 12-foot-wide tube as much as they might like.
Airlines are setting limits beyond just blocking middle seats. Delta says it won’t book more than 60% of the seats on a flight. American says its limit is being worked out, but it will fly trips with more than half the seats filled, although on average the airline expects fewer than 20% occupied.
Adding to the complexity is a requirement in the federal airline bailout part of the Cares Act that requires airlines to maintain service to all the cities they currently serve. Airlines have asked for waivers for particular cities where there’s service from other airlines, but the Transportation Department has denied many of the requests.
For smaller carriers, that requirement is more of a burden. Spirit suspended flights to 26 cities in early April and asked for waivers from the DOT. But the government said the airline had to resume flights to 25 of the 26—the one waiver granted was for Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. The governor of Puerto Rico asked the Federal Aviation Administration to move all flights to the island to San Juan, where passengers can be screened.
Some airlines are filing more waiver requests, arguing they shouldn’t be forced to fly empty airplanes to big hubs with plenty of other service. On Tuesday, Spirit and JetBlue got some relief when the DOT said the two carriers could drop 16 large cities that have plenty of other flights. Carriers are also complying by turning nonstop trips into one-stop flights. Spirit is flying from Orlando to Pittsburgh, then to Latrobe, Pa., just 46 miles by air from Pittsburgh International Airport, then back to Orlando, because the DOT wouldn’t let it drop flights to Pittsburgh or Latrobe.
Airlines say because of the complexity of schedules, the need to figure out which aircraft to put in storage and uncertainty over travel patterns in the pandemic, schedules in April weren’t as efficient or coordinated as what they’ve put together for May, June and beyond.
American says it has revamped its schedule starting in May so that most trips are out and back from hub airports, making them easier to cancel if there are only a few passengers booked. The carrier has also scheduled crews to stay with the same airplane all day so flights don’t have to be operated just to get a crew to an airplane.
American is no longer connecting passengers in New York, Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles, turning those cities into spokes rather than hubs. To some extent, Miami and Philadelphia aren’t connecting hubs anymore, either. That means fewer nonstop itineraries available and more passengers funneled onto the same flights.
Many airline executives have been through the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Great Recession and various other epidemics, ash clouds and annual hurricanes and blizzards. When something happens in the world, airlines usually feel it. Tearing apart networks it took years to build was something for which they, in effect, have been well-trained.
American’s decision to ground its international fleet for most of April and May was done in a 20-minute phone call, Mr. Raja says.
“A lot of our careers have been marked by dealing with crises, each of which was completely unprecedented,” he says. “We’ve spent more time with bad times than with good times.”