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From Northwest to Northworst: what can you do?
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If it's late in the month, there is one thing a traveler does not want to be holding this summer: a ticket on a Northwest Airlines flight. That is, unless you like sitting in an airport waiting for a Northwest pilot to show up.
Due to a combination of overly aggressive furloughs, a general pilot labor shortage, poor scheduling and possible "sick-outs," Northwest Airlines has racked up an atrocious cancellation record this summer. In the final days of both June and July, as pilots at the airline reached their 100 allowable flight hours per month, Northwest started canceling flights in the dozens and hundreds.
For the past two months, cancellations on Northwest Airlines in the final few days of the month have outpaced those of all other major U.S. airlines combined by about 400 percent -- at a rate of over 12 percent from Friday, July 27 to Monday, July 30. That's over one out of every eight flights canceled. Other major airlines canceled flights at a rate of under 3 percent.
The rest of the month wasn't much better; for the first 26 days of July, Northwest cancellations ran at about 3.5 percent, more than twice the rate of 1.4 percent for all the other major carriers. Despite promises from Northwest to fix the problem, it is going to take some time to do so, and August may be no better -- in fact, it could even be worse.
The Solution Sounds Identical to the Problem
Unfortunately, the problem is not easily fixed. First, it's not a new problem: according to widespread reports, Northwest's unions have been predicting for months that the airline would not be able to fly complete schedules this summer. Northwest originally went into defend and spin mode, first denying outright there was a problem, then citing weather and other factors for cancellations in June.
But when it happened again, they were forced to acknowledge they had a staffing problem. (I believe their response was in no small part due to an aggressive union response, and possibly to the hard and incontrovertible evidence found on flightstats.com, where airline performance statistics are available to Joe Public as well as to airline insiders.) Even now they're still looking for scapegoats, blaming everything on those scurvy pilots and their absenteeism.
In the same week he was trumpeting a profitable second quarter, Northwest Airlines CEO Doug Steenland was downplaying flight cancellations -- which lets you know who the average airline CEO is trying to please (hint: it ain't the folks sitting in the back of the plane). But Steenland is now pledging to address the problem, of course; now that the cat is out of the bag, it is much more likely to affect the bottom line.
The real problem is that Northwest is trying to fly a full schedule with a skeleton staff. As noted above, the unions saw this coming, and Northwest should have too: the airline has about one-quarter fewer pilots on staff than it did in 2000, mostly due to massive cuts undertaken while Northwest was under bankruptcy protection. The airline's union has consistently said that the cuts were too broad, and the post-bankruptcy expansion of the flying schedule too fast and large for the remaining staff to handle; sure looks like they had it right!
Even more unfortunately, the solution sounds a lot like the problem. For the month of August, Northwest's management is planning to reduce the airline's overall flights by 4 percent -- so in order to keep from canceling a lot of flights, they're going to cancel a lot of flights. Got that?
There is some consolation for travelers in this approach; after all, there's a big difference between a canceled reservation and one you were never even able to book. However, you can trust that the reduced capacity will result in higher fares on those flights still on the schedule due to simple supply and demand.
When to Be Careful
What dates could be trouble? Back in June, the cancellations started piling up on Friday the 22nd. In July, the problem was most severe on the final weekend of the month, but cancellations were as high as 6.9 percent on Thursday, July 19. Considering the pattern, trouble this month could begin as early as the August 25 - 26 weekend, if not sooner.
Note also that when one flight is canceled, the plane never gets to the next airport from which it would have flown, and a domino effect ensues. Employees get out of position as well, which can turn into a real mess for everyone involved. Once a lot of planes and people get out of position, it can take days for the airline to get back on track. Unless Northwest makes some serious changes in the next few days, I would say that you want to be careful into the last few weeks of September.
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