Canceled and delayed flights, lost luggage, and airport chaos are offshoots of the pandemic. Now everyone wants to fly, but airline staffing shrank during the pandemic, and the airlines can’t handle the demand.
This is make-or-break time for Pete Buttigieg, who’s been given a president-level crisis to deal with, which is an opportunity to show what he can do. If he handles it well, that will improve his chances of being president someday, possibly as soon as 2025. If he stumbles, Secretary of Transportation may be as far up the political ladder he goes.
Buttigieg can’t do the airlines’ job for them. He can only regulate the industry. Being a Democrat helps, because they believe in regulating business, so his hands aren’t tied by what Republicans call “market-based solutions.”
What, exactly, is a market-based solution? In econo-speak, market forces bring supply and demand into balance. For example, more people buying tickets gives airlines incentive to expand capacity; but if flying becomes expensive and miserable, fewer people will buy tickets, and airlines won’t need as many seats.
In another context, if a restaurant keeps giving people food poisoning, nobody will eat there and it’ll go out of business.
A person with a free-market mindset might let bad food or too many crashes drive a bad restaurant or airline out of business, whereas someone with a regulatory mindset would send in a food inspector or ground the planes. If I’m a diner or frequent flyer, I don’t really like the market-based approach to these situations.
So what can Buttigieg do? He can’t do anything about weather cancellations. Nobody can. And those will get worse as the planet heats up, thanks at least a little bit to Republican stupidity on climate issues. But he can order airlines to stop scheduling more flights than they have planes and crews for, stop selling tickets for seats they don’t have, and fine them for losing luggage. As an aviation expert said, “He’s the only sheriff that the airline passengers have” (see story here).
If the mandatory retirement age for pilots is to be tinkered with to help relieve the pilot shortage, he’ll be involved in that, too; although he didn’t sound enthusiastic about that idea on NBC Nightly News last week. Reason: Safety; motor skills degrade with age. (The pilots’ association, though, argues older pilots’ ability to keep flying should be judged on an individual basis.)
The seeds of today’s pilot shortage were sown years before Covid-19 appeared, as was the trucker shortage. The cause in both cases: Market-based low pay. As recently as 2015, starting pay for new pilots averaged $23,000 a year (see story here). Pilots often graduate from flight school with $100,000 of debt. If there aren’t enough new pilots, it’s up to airlines to remedy that by increasing the financial incentive to go through pilot training.
Back to Buttigieg. What he can do is create order out of chaos. Airports are publicly owned, and air traffic control is run by the FAA, a subordinate agency of his department. It should be noted the staffing shortage extends to baggage handlers, flight line workers, ticket agents, and other ground personnel. He’s in a position to coordinate airport and air traffic operations, and order the airlines to limit scheduling of flights to what the system can handle. It may not handle all the passengers who want to fly, but he can make what we have run smoothly.
There’s a set of flyers who don’t have to put up with the frustrations and inconveniences of commercial air travel: Those with access to private jets. I used to think of private jets as an ostentatious luxury of the obscenely rich (and some people still do, see opinion piece here), but I’ve come around to the view they’re an essential business tool for companies that have to get executives to meetings on time, get engineers into the field, and so on. They can fly people when and where needed, not limited by fixed schedules, nor to airports served by scheduled airlines.
As of 2019, the U.S. business jet fleet consisted of about 13,700 planes, with another 8,000 turboprops, according to this source. By comparison, in 2020 there were 7,690 planes in the U.S. commercial airline fleet, according to this source. The airlines fly far more passengers, of course; the vast majority of flyers travel commercially. But the private plane fleet adds capacity and flexibility to the air travel system.
There’s a guy who flies a Beechcraft Premier* and has a YouTube channel called Premier1 Driver. His videos are fun to watch. He has a fan base, a website (here), and even sells merchandise. His name is Greg Mink, and he flew F-16s for the U.S. Air Force. He owns a medical equipment company called Modular Devices (details here). I doubt he makes enough money from his side hustles to pay for the airplane, but he doesn’t have to; the company owns the airplane, and he uses it for his business, which requires a lot of travel. He’s smart enough to have turned the public’s fascination with private jets into an additional revenue stream.
(* About 300 of these airplanes have been built, they can be flown by a single pilot, and sell used for around $2 to $3 million.)
Meanwhile, if you’re a lowly proletarian stuck with the cattle car experience offered by the airlines, I suggest you lay low a while longer if you can, until the post-pandemic chaos settles down. And if Buttigieg brings order out of this chaos, maybe we should consider giving him a bigger job sometime in the future.