UK airline industry should pull out of evasive manoeuvres

theguardian.com:

Only one of three airline chief executives turned up to be quizzed by MPs on the business select committee on Tuesday, which we can chalk up as the industry’s latest scheduling failure.

It was also a shame because one of the absentees, Johan Lundgren, of easyJet, who had the legitimate excuse of illness, could have been asked if he stood by this statement he made four weeks ago.

“We have transformed the airline during the pandemic which has enabled us to emerge with renewed strength, underpinned by a product, network and service that customers really value,” he trumpeted alongside half-year results.

Ho, ho. That self-assessment now reads as spectacularly hubristic. In the cancellation stakes, easyJet seems to have been outstripped only by British Airways (BA), but the budget airline gets a special demerit mention for scrapping so many flights at short notice. BA, at least, seems to have cancelled weeks, and sometimes months, in advance.

Nobody, of course, should pretend there is a single cause for the messy revival of flying. There is blame to go around – and much of it falls away from the airlines. Some airports and ground handling agents have been shocked to discover that the low-paid staff they laid off in the pandemic are not available for rehire – some have found jobs in supermarkets or Amazon warehouses.

There is also, possibly, a Brexit angle as the pool of migrant workers has shrunk. Admin hassles shouldn’t be ignored either. Lundgren’s stand-in, Sophie Dekker, said easyJet had a small army of staffers chasing the past-employment references required to get airside passes for new recruits, a process that used to take 10 weeks but now lasts up to 14. Throw in understaffing among air traffic controllers and one can see