United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, who was smart enough to take a private jet rather than his own airline when he needed to travel from New York to Denver this week, shared an internal letter with his company’s employees explaining what happened as their operation melted down over the past week.
Kirby blames bad weather, FAA air traffic control staffing, and… Canada (yes, really).
Kirby set the scene, that it was one of the “most operationally challenging weeks I’ve experienced in my entire career” and he oversaw America West and US Airways prior to American. He offers that while an airline “can plan for things like hurricans, sub-zero temperatures and snowstorms” this was essentially out of their control because “United has never seen an extended limited operating environment like the one we saw this past week at Newark.”
He goes on to identify what he sees as the cause of United cancelling a couple of thousand flights and delaying many thousands more: reduced throughput at their Newark hub June 25 – 27, allowing for “less than 20 departures per hour for four hours” on June 25, “for nine hours” on June 26, and “for six hours” on June 27 – when their normal schedule is 40 departures per hour.
That means the total number of aircraft the could depart EWR was reduced between 60-75% for an average of 6 to 8 hours each day. Airlines, including United, simply aren’t designed to have their largest hub have its capacity severely limited for four straight days and still operate successfully.
What he does by framing this as “airlines, including United” is rhetorical sleight of hand to suggest this isn’t United’s fault and would happen to any airline.
And it’s odd to cast Newark as the airline’s “largest hub” and therefore disruptions having a greater impact than if they’d occurred elsewhere. United doesn’t have a single dominant hub.
- Denver has more scheduled flights in July than Newark does
- Chicago O’Hare has a mere average of 6 flights per day fewer than Newark, with Houston close behind
- Newark has more long haul and transcon service with larger planes, and so more seats, but that’s not really relevant when it’s takeoffs and landings that are constrained
He notes that he’s been on record about staffing challenges at the FAA. He offers the administration political cover, noting that “the current FAA leadership team inherited these challenges.” The truth of course is that the FAA has had problems for decades and has failed ot increase airspace capacity through effective leadership of technology upgrades. It’s incorrect to imply that is the fault of Buttigieg’s predecessor.
Thunderstorms moving west to east typically hit EWR first when they roll through the NYC area, and that closes the two departure fixes that aircraft use to travel west out of EWR. Pre-pandemic, when that happened, some of our flights still had a chance to depart to the north and then fly west over Canadian airspace to get where they needed to go. Sure, in those cases the flights were longer, and we took delays, but we didn’t have to cancel. But today, Canada’s air traffic control is short staffed too, so they’ve closed those routes. So now, we often get reduced to a single digit (and often zero) departures per hour. And that’s basically what happened between June 24-27. The reality is that EWR simply can’t function under thunderstorm conditions unless there are departure routes to the west and that’s one of the biggest takeaways that the FAA is diligently working on with us and Canada.
Kirby’s message: despite a years-long marketing investment in convincing New Yorkers that Newark is really New York City, you shouldn’t trust Newark during summer thunderstorms. Because Canada.
And almost as an afterthought, the whole thing about crew spending up to 9 hours on the phone trying desperately to reach the airline in order to find out where they were supposed to go next:
And after the storms ended, it took us a few more days to recover. The level of disruption we experienced left our aircraft and crews scattered around the country and out of position.
Kirby’s five action steps to avoid similar meltdowns in the future:
- Better crew technology so they can reschedule crew during large scale disruptions
- Getting the FAA to fix staffing shortages
- Lobbying for more FAA funding (taxpayers to subsidize it, does nothing to address leadership challenges or accountability at FAA)
- Balancing arrivals and departures at Newark
- Get more gates at Newark
Of these, only the first one involves an actual change by the United, the rest are laid at the feet of the FAA and the Port Authority of New York New Jersey to address.
Kirby isn’t wrong that United bore a greater brunt of weather and FAA challenges than other carriers this week, though they also fell down in trying to recover their operation. He’s right that the FAA’s Air Traffic Control Organization needs improvement, and staffing is a piece of this. They also should not be their own regulator, service provision and oversight should be split. And their annual appropriate cycle funding model is ill-suited to large-scale technology investment. Leadership has done a poor job implementing technology improvements to increase air space capacity as well.
You gotta love Scotch it’s-never-my-fault Kirby and his endless excuses. This is why United has management rather than leadership.
I’m sure that Canada burning off large tracts of trees this year hasn’t helped with air traffic control in a lot of places, too.
You can take the CEO out of Tempe-but you can’t take the Tempe out of the CEO.
glad you got a hold of the latest Kirby letter which is nothing more than a duck and cover missive that still fails to admit that he got caught flying on a private jet – which is why the whole thing is just a disgrace.
He admits that United is operating EWR well beyond its capabilities because thunderstorms happen. Every summer. Many days every summer.
United made lots of bone-headed moves regarding NYC over the years including not using its slots resulting the FAA removing full slot control status for EWR (even if not done under Kirby it was still UA). They left JFK which means their operation is far more concentrated in one NYC airport than any other airline.
And it also doesn’t change that EWR is never going to get another runway and its airspace is shared with LGA, JFK and Teterboro.
Delta’s NYC hub operation is spread over 5 effective runways at LGA and JFK and DL also serves EWR.
Does Kirby and his blame for Canada realize that departure and arrival corridors for DTW – a DL hub – regularly use Canadian airspace but the US and Canada have managed to figure out how to work together?
Kirby has abundantly proven his character this week and his inability to understand the airline industry and the constraints on it even as he pursues his dreams of industry domination which are rooted in his rejection by Doug Parker and others at American.
There’s still time in Boulder this weekend for a few more rounds of scotch and several more letters trying to spin what happened.
Why not wait like us? Dont blame FAA . You trying to avoid to look good.
I endured five out of nine flights by United canceled this week between Buffalo, New York LaGuardia, and Washington Dulles. 40 hours of delays, 4 hours on the phone. One long mechanical delay. In each instance, the airlines operations were a total mess. Zero information. Understaffed. untrained employees who couldn’t process simple ticket re-issues. App and website showed zero inventory for flights I stood by for and went out with many empty seats. Two paid F flights downgraded just so I could get on. (No compensation – yet!) wifi on 2 of 4 flights. In fact, United messed up a reroute by collecting all the flight coupons for my entire itinerary and then telling my assistant that it could not be fixed and the only solution to get me on my ticketed return last night was to buy a new ticket for $1,200 and sort it out later. I never saw a thunderstorm. Kirby is full of shit
Does anybody know what happened to the size of the FAA budget over the last 10 years? I honestly don’t know.
How.much of this is of Congress’ making? Leadership can’t do a thing if the positions are not authorized, so let’s dig more instead of parroting talking points, with the potential of spreading misinformation, shall we?
Jake,
while no one can deny that the FAA needs to spend alot more money and speed up getting new controllers onboard, the hard, cruel reality, and Kirby’s latest letter validates it, that all of the controllers and technology don’t do a thing if thunderstorms set themselves up on key arrival and departure paths from an airport where there are not a whole lot of options because of conflicting airspace between other NYC airports.
Earlier this week, Kirby blasted the FAA for cutting arrival and departure rates so significantly but his latest says that someone explained to him that entire paths in/out of EWR were cut off by thunderstorms and wouldn’t have been usable regardless of the technology or manpower.
Instead of shooting off his mouth earlier this week, he should have understood the situation – which I am sure some people at the FAA showed him via weather radar replays.
The chances of the exact scenario setting up again are probably slim but just like the WN Christmas disaster, it proves that if you push a system hard enough, the right (or wrong) circumstances undoubtedly will show up and destroy any hopes you had of operating.
Unlike JFK which has intersecting runways which provide flexibility in severe weather, EWR’s primary runways do not have the operational flexibility necessary to deal w/ severe weather issues like this.
And most of us still struggle w/ how Canada really could have changed anything given what was happening within miles of EWR.
and nothing changes that Kirby disappeared and bailed on his customers and employees when his best course of action would have been to either hide in a hotel and work or get in a car and drive if he didn’t want to be anywhere near his failing operation.
@Tim Dunn – And Delta remains just as vulnerable to mismanagement – witness the Memorial Day weekend 2022 meltdown that rolled well into June from mismanaged over scheduling. And Bastian was out blaming the FAA in January for its winter meltdown. Delta has become just another airline.
Then there was the 2016 and 2017 meltdowns where Delta played the blame game with ATL.
They’re all on thin ice.
He isnt wrong about Canada. Nav Canada screwed the pooch big time by firing most of their controller trainees during Covid. It will take years for them to recover from this short sighted decision.
Scott Kirby is a very small man, but I do commend UA for having an LGBTQ+ CEO.
He’s extremely bad at strategy, however, and he cannot execute whatever strategies he does come up with.
At the end of the day, Americans get what they deserve.
Greg,
first, the DOT has released data for the month of May 2022 and DL’s cancellation rate for the entire month was 2.9% while UA, the next worst of the big 4, was at 1.9% and B6 was at 2.3%. As much as some people try to keep equating DL’s operational mini-meltdowns to other airlines, they simply are not on the same scale.
The DOT has also finalized data including cancellations for all of 2022. You should look at it. Every airline has weak moments but you really should understand broader trends. Hint; Delta still ended up in the best position of the big 4 and the US airline industry when both delays and cancellations are considered.
“It’s always someone or thing else’s fault.” Sound familiar????