Did the Airlines Underestimate Omicron’s Impact?

Having to make an estimate, for anything, is a curious thing. In the end, it’s more than just a big guessing game.

Like having a party, for instance. Having too little food or alcohol on hand can make for an embarrassing situation; having too much is just a pleasant problem to have. (Personally, coming from an Italian family, we never knew what ‘not having enough’ meant. For instance, if we cooked prime rib and lasagna for Christmas dinner for family and friends, we knew we were having prime rib and lasagna leftovers through New Year’s.)

Of course, there are far more important decisions to be made than just a dinner menu. Some people get paid nicely for their actuary skills of melding math and statistics and science and turning them into estimates.

I’m quite certain the airlines, whose very existence depends on numbers and hitting an exact schedule, employ such people. So it makes me wonder ...

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Did the airlines underestimate the impact of the Omicron variant, leading to the current situation we are in?

As we speak, more than 8,000 flights have been canceled over the last five days by airlines across the world. The culprit has been Omicron, the newest strain of the COVID-19 virus that is not as severe as the original virus or the Delta variant that cropped up earlier this year but is considered to be a fast-moving strain that is more easily transmissible. Currently, the medical community says that more than 70 percent of all new cases of COVID-19 are from the Omicron variant.

In estimating their staffing situations for the holidays, did the airlines not take this into consideration? Without dumbing down an assessment of what has gone on during this Christmas week holiday, you have to believe that carriers would have left some – here comes the dumbing down part – a little wiggle room in their estimates.

Then again, the airlines, especially U.S. carriers, put themselves into this situation more than a year ago. When U.S. airlines received a total of $54 billion in federal government grants and loans as payroll protection to keep them afloat during the pandemic, they took it a step further. One of the restrictions of the money was to not fire or lay off their employees. Instead, the airlines found a way around it to save more money – they offered buyouts and early retirement to clear jobs off the books.

So when travel demand rebounded early this year, they found themselves short-staffed.

And they’re still short-staffed. Obviously.

The airlines did try to compensate and adjust for the holidays by offering incentives to current employees to work overtime through the six-week holiday period between Thanksgiving and New Year's. But that was just a stop-gap measure using existing, not additional, workers.

However, that was a band-aid that wasn’t nearly big enough to cover that cut. Clearly, the airlines underestimated what would happen if those employees who committed to working double and, in some cases, triple shifts didn’t end up working any shifts at all because they were so sick.

No, this is all on the airlines, and it couldn’t come at a worse time given that Congress is investigating what carriers did with all that payroll support money.

A simple piece of advice – next time, plan on having more lasagna than necessary. Having extra never hurts.