![]() “You can’t put a wide-body on every single gate.This docket was last retrieved on March 27, 2023. “Not every gate is equal,” Rodney Cox, United Airlines’ vice president of airport operations at Newark Liberty International Airport, told CNBC back in March. The strategy of employing larger planes on existing routes is known in the industry as “upgauging,” which allows airlines to sell more seats on each flight and make do with fewer planes, which also happen to be in short supply.īut there are practical limits to how much airlines can upgauge. Bigger planes mean travelers will see roughly 20 more seats on many domestic flights. ![]() carriers have 2% more seats in their domestic schedules for summer compared with the same period of 2019, despite operating roughly 11% fewer flights, according to Cirium data. “How? The airlines are using bigger planes.” So we are moving the same amount of people on fewer flights,” says Bangs. “But, of course, the interesting thing is that we still don’t have the same number of flights that we operated pre-pandemic. ![]() airports, with a record 307 million seats now scheduled for the third quarter 2023, according to aviation data from Cirium. airport security checkpoints are seeing passenger volumes roughly on par with the pre-pandemic levels of 2019, according to throughput data from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The Transportation Department Office of Inspector General report comes out just as the busy summer travel season gets underway. Here's Your Summer On-Time Battle Plan By Suzanne Rowan Kelleher They looked at closing and cutting more than 100 federal contract towers, and stopped most modernization projects.” MORE FROM FORBES Flight Delays Are Up From Last Year. “They looked at reducing hours and many air traffic facilities. “They closed the air traffic control academy,” he explains. The current shortage of air traffic controllers can be traced back to the 2013 United States budget sequestration, says Paul Rinaldi, a former 16-year air traffic controller at Washington Dulles International Airport and 12-year president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA). Industry insiders argue that many of the FAA’s challenges stem from Congress’s long-term failure to adequately fund the agency. “Due to these uncertain training outcomes, FAA cannot ensure it will successfully train enough controllers in the short term.” FAA will not know the full impact of the training suspension on certification times for several years because training outcomes vary widely,” according to the report. “Additionally, Covid-19 led to training pauses over a period of nearly two years-significantly increasing controller certification times. It can take more than three years to train an air traffic controller. They can’t just take a new controller and put them into those really busy centers, like Jacksonville Center in Florida.” But it doesn’t mean they can get them up to speed. “I think they hired 1,500 new controllers a year ago. “They’ve hired a tremendous amount of people,” says Kathleen Bangs, a former commercial pilot and current spokesperson at FlightAware. MORE FROM FORBES Get Ready For Another Hellish Summer Of Air Travel By Suzanne Rowan Kelleherīut it’s not as if the FAA has not been staffing up.
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