“Give me another putative cause for a 500% increase in cancellations.”
That’s easy to answer when you actually talk to pilots, but their explanation is not nearly as much fun as your hair on fire story.
American and other majors riffed pilots when the covid shutdown began. This created a big pilot shortage when reopening began, because once they are riffed pilots cannot simply be recalled. They have to go through a lengthy retraining process.
The pilots who are coming back are being retrained. Some pilots have decided not to come back and are retiring instead. A few airlines didn’t rif any pilots and they aren’t suffering a shortage. I know that this isn’t as satisfying as the vaccine wiping out herds of pilots, but sometimes reality is mundane.
That doesn’t look correct for several reasons.
1) With COVID going on as long as it has (remember the Federal bailout which the companies mainly used just to buy back stock?), you’d think they’d have rotated pilots in and out to keep as many possible qualified.
2) Airlines know how to forecast and plan. Why would they bother scheduling flights if they knew they didn’t have enough pilots for them? They’d know how many pilots are available.
3) The uptick in cancellations is recent, sudden, and monotonic.
4) Your reason is one of several disjoint explanations all being shoved forward at the same time. Some of the others are weather in Denver and Chicago (mentioned by Southwest but not American); staffing and maintenance issues (American); lack of qualified pilots...
5) I didn’t say the vaccine wiped out herds of pilots. But if a few pilots died after the jab (both being a pilot and receiving the jab increase the risk for DVT / abnormal blood clots), then word probably got out PRONTO among the pilots. Alternatively, maybe the insurance companies underwriting the airlines are demanding all pilots get thoroughly checked before being allowed to fly again, since it wouldn’t be healthy for their wallets if a pilot was to have an embolism and stroke out while flying a plane, as it makes landing more...challenging.
6) Finally, PR dictates that the airlines want to keep any HINT of this out of the public consciousness so that people don’t stampede away from flying in fear of a pilot having a stroke.