Airline Hell

Russ was supposed to come home from DC last night. He texted me from the jet bridge that it didn’t look like they were going to make it. The flight was delayed originally an hour because there was an aircraft with an issue in their gate and the plane they were going to take was stuck without a gate to come into. That hour, plus too much time unloading that plane when it finally got a gate pushed the pilot into overtime. The airline begged him to fly anyway and he refused. There were no “extra” pilots hanging around who could fly the plane.

So at 11:30 at night Russ had to go to a hotel and come back in the morning for a 9:30 flight. It didn’t take off on-time because there was only one working runway at Reagan because there was a pothole in the other runway.

This past week Heathrow Airport put a limit of 100,000 a day on the number of passengers who can travel through the airport. Apparently they can’t find enough staff to handle bags. There were thousands of bags that aren’t getting sorted and are just stuck at the airport. Delta had to fly a plane with no customers, just a thousand suitcases from London to Detroit just to try and get people back their lost luggage.

Heathrow is a major hub airport, but now with the 100,000 person cap they are going to lose a lot of routes. Who wants to try through Heathrow anyway if you can’t be guaranteed you will ever get a checked bag back.

I predicted things like this would happen when you restrict immigration. It was clear to happen in the UK with Brexit. They did this to themselves, the lack of airport workers or lorry drivers to deliver fuel and goods. We have the same issue, with the backlash on immigrants, but it was not such a public one day change as it was with Brexit.

America and Britain used to be places that people from other countries wanted to move to and work because we had more opportunities. Well, when the people in those countries become hostile to people from other countries they stop coming. So we can’t fill all the jobs we need filled. Like enough pilots, or baggage handlers, or pot hole fillers.

Our economy works when we have enough people to work and right now we don’t. Thankfully America did not have a Brexit situation, which legally makes it difficult to let workers come in. But we have obstructionist politicians who do nothing and don’t work together to fix our immigration policy. Both parties need to come together and work on the issue of immigration, which is not all about illegal immigration.

As Americans we must become a lot more welcoming to people from all different countries because we need them. All of us came from someplace else at one time or another. Just because you have been here for seven or ten generations doesn’t erase the fact that your people were once Germans, or Italians or Irish or Nigerian.

I am sure that Delta would gladly take a bunch of German pilots right now, but there is no way they would leave Germany to come to America the way things are going here.

I do suggest if you have a kid who like video games, perhaps they might like to learn to fly planes. I think there will be a lot of jobs available for a while. We aren’t going to get out of this problem this year, or the next, or the next.