Charles Hall was getting ready to board a flight to Baton Rouge Thursday at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. He says he tries to get there as early as possible, because it’s one of the things he can control.
“You know, if you get here and planes are canceled or something like that—yeah, you’re frustrated, but [there’s] nothing you can do,” Hall said.
The Fourth of July holiday is normally one of the busiest travel periods of the year. And in a summer that has already seen thousands of flight cancellations and delays, the next few days could make for some frustrated flyers.
On Wednesday the website flightaware.com reported nearly 6,000 delays across the U.S. and more than 600 cancellations.
‘Once in a lifetime’
Laurie Garrow is a professor at Georgia Tech who studies the airline industry. She says the root of all these headaches goes back to the start of the pandemic, when there was a dramatic fall in air travel.
“This is literally a once-in-a-lifetime event for the airline industry,” said Garrow. “Never before has the airline industry seen such a dramatic and sustained drop in demand. We saw a dramatic drop in demand after 9/11 for instance, but the recovery was very quick.”
In 2020, airlines furloughed or offered early retirement to pilots, and parked airplanes too.
Then the vaccines came.
