Dealing with a shortage of pilots until more can be trained, Alaska Airlines has announced it will cut 2% of its roughly 1,200 daily flights through the end of June.
“We don’t believe it will have an impact here in the state of Alaska,” Tim Thompson, company spokesman in Anchorage, said April 12.
Even without changes to the daily flight schedule into Wrangell, the cutbacks could affect travelers making connections in Seattle to other Alaska Airlines’ destinations.
The airline canceled several hundred flights the first weekend of April due to a shortage of pilots, creating travel headaches for several tens of thousands of passengers, in addition to airline customer service agents who worked to rebook the flyers. Flight cancellations continued into mid-April, though at a much-reduced level.
“Due to the training delays, we had 63 fewer pilots prepared to fly in April than we planned for in January,” the airline said in its April 7 statement. “We should have recognized this sooner and updated our schedule.”
Alaska has about 3,100 pilots. It lost 137 of its most experienced pilots to early retirement during the pandemic, and already this year has lost more than 50 pilots or pilots in training to other airlines, according to a report in the Seattle Times on April 12. Airlines nationwide lost several thousand pilots to retirement or other careers during the worst of the pandemic travel cutbacks in 2020.
Alaska Airlines’ pilot shortage has been building since early in the year, the company explained in its announcement: “During the first few months of 2022, a backlog built up in our training program. Trainings were canceled and delayed due to student or trainer illness during the Omicron surge and due to the operational impact of winter storms, and they (trainings) were not rescheduled fast enough.”
The company reported it is running an academy to train new pilots, and has doubled the capacity since last fall. “We will graduate more than 30 pilots this month, and even more in May.”
The flight cancellations are not due to the informational picketing by the pilots union on April 1 in Seattle, Anchorage and other airports, the company said. The union and airline have been negotiating over a new contract for three years, and the union has said the airline is short-staffed, putting pressure on pilots to pick up extra work.
“It’s important to clarify that our pilots are not on strike,” the airline said in its April 7 announcement. “This informational picket was not the cause of our cancellations. We’re committed to reaching an agreement for a contract that is good for our pilots … and supports the company’s ability to grow for all 22,000 Alaska and Horizon employees and all who depend on us.”
Regardless of this spring flight cutbacks, the airline is planning to grow substantially in the years ahead. Alaska Airlines executives, talking with investors last month, outlined plans to add 100 airplanes to its 300-plane fleet by 2025. That includes Alaska Airlines and its regional carrier Horizon Air, and will require hiring even more pilots.
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