A pilot shortage is forcing a number of major airlines to cancel flights headed into the summer travel season.


What You Need To Know

  • Local pilot says delays tend to start with weather delays, then compound into bigger issues because of lack of pilots

  • Southwest, Delta, and American Airlines are cutting some flights and grounding planes due to staffing issues

  • Long training process, expensive startup costs, and large number of pilots retiring part of the problem

Over the last seven days, Tampa International Airport had 55 canceled flights. That's slightly higher than average, according to an airport spokesperson.

Commercial airline pilot Jim Shilling says the cancellations he's seen nationwide tend to start with weather delays and compound into bigger issues because there are not enough pilots in rotation.

"You get pilots who run out of duty time because their planes have to sit on the ramp," he explained. "Now there's no pilots to fill those slots from the reserves. There's just not enough pilots to backfill whenever we run out of time."

Southwest, Delta, and American Airlines are cutting some flights and grounding planes due to staffing issues.

Shilling says he believes the long training process, expensive startup costs, and large number of pilots retiring during the pandemic are all reasons behind the shortage.

American Airlines’ pilot union says some airlines encouraged pilots to retire early during the pandemic in order to cut costs when few people were flying.

"American Airlines management was not prepared for this powerful passenger demand. And this is the second summer of failure. They said they were prepared, however, their actions have proven they were not. They mismanaged the future operation during the pandemic by enticing pilots more than 1,000 to retire early to save management money, laid-off more than 1,500 pilots and failed to keep up with pilot currency training," Captain Dennis Tajer, spokesperson for the Allied Pilots Association wrote in an email.

"That has caused a severe log jam in training. That along with selling tickets for flights they didn’t have enough pilots to reliably operate, has caused meltdowns whenever it rains. Add that to leaving very little buffers in pilots’ schedules and any delay leaves no room in a pilots FAA maximum hours of flight and/or length of work day, causing more cancellations and delays."

Shilling feels while the bigger carriers will rebound, smaller airlines will feel the brunt of the shortage as pilots will quickly move on to larger carriers.