Robert Silk
Ahead of the passage of the Cares Act in late March, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) was one of the major voices that helped persuade Congress to prohibit airlines from laying off or furloughing staff until Sept. 30 in exchange for being eligible for up to $50 billion in grants and loans.
Less than a month later, the AFA, which is this country's largest flight attendants union, called for the suspension of leisure travel in the U.S. as a safety measure.
It seems incongruous to, on the one hand, push for full airline industry employment while, on the other hand, pushing for a suspension of what was already almost nonexistent leisure travel. Still, I don't want to be too hard on the AFA. After all, the current federal policies related to air travel are similarly incongruous when placed against the nation's broader goal of limiting the spread of Covid-19.
Take a look at FlightAware or Flightradar24 at pretty much any hour these days and you'll immediately notice how many planes are in the sky in the U.S. compared with Europe and other parts of the world.
According to flight data analytics company OAG, some 2,300 flights were scheduled within Western Europe during the last week of April, compared with 64,000 within the U.S. And though OAG noted that U.S. airlines have been canceling an average of 38% of flights on short notice, even the estimated remaining 40,000 flights that week would have dwarfed Western Europe by a factor of nearly 20.
It's true that 40,000 flights represents a 75% reduction from the same week last year. But demand is down approximately 95%. And the fact that even that many flights are still operating is largely by federal design.
Under the Cares Act, airlines that accept grant money are required to continue serving all of their domestic stations (though they can apply for case-by-case waivers). The requirement is meant to serve a couple of key purposes. For one, it ensures that small markets won't lose access to the national airspace system. That's important long-term for small communities, where air access might otherwise return slowly or not at all after the Covid-19 pandemic. It's also significant now for the movement of essential workers and for the movement of emergency supplies.
More broadly, requiring airlines to maintain a presence at all their stations should facilitate a faster ramp-up of service as the economy begins opening up.
Still, the policy is a textbook example of overreach. For example, it hardly seems vital to the national interest that Allegiant continue flying its lone route from Ogden, Utah, to Phoenix when three other carriers serve Phoenix from nearby Salt Lake City.
Meanwhile, forcing planes to keep flying has plenty of downside from a public health perspective.
As of May 4, at least 1,284 pilots, flight attendants and TSA agents had tested positive for Covid-19, and 14 have died. It's anyone's guess how many passengers have contracted Covid-19 in flight. And while it’s unclear how many of those cases
were contracted on or related to the job, it’s reasonable to presume many were.
These days, though, many flights are nearly empty. Southwest expects load factors in the single digits through May, for example.
And this brings me back to the Cares Act airline payroll grants. Paying airlines to maintain a threshold level of staff for operations and an eventual ramp-up makes sense. They are indeed an essential service, vital to the national interest.
But Delta, American and United have already said they're going to have to downsize after Sept. 30. In other words, layoffs or furloughs are almost certainly coming.
Using federal dollars to keep airlines fully staffed is a jobs program, pure and simple. I certainly support jobs programs during this time of crisis, but airline employees are enjoying a level of protection employees in other industries can only dream of. I don't like it when the government picks winners and losers.