Give me another putative cause for a 500% increase in cancellations.
“Give me another putative cause for a 500% increase in cancellations.”
Putatively, unusual weather, unprofitably low number of passengers, and Covid paranoia on the part of authorities come to my mind. No, I don’t know how valid or invalid any of those other suppositions are.
“Cancellations” is not as red a flag to me as “post-vaccination pilot deaths”, say. It’s seems to me more like a clue than like hard evidence.
“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.