Flight delays, ground stops, and cancellations are all in the news. Travel over the July 4 holiday was described as a flightmare. Who or what is to blame?
The airline industry blames the FAA, the FAA blames the airlines, many cite the lingering effects of the pandemic, some blame technology, others point to extreme weather and smoke from our Canadian cousins to the north, some are even blaming passengers referring to them as “inexperienced travelers.”
While the blame game heats up, nearly everyone is missing what should be obvious. We should blame our shared inability to see and respond to demographic changes that have been reshaping the aviation workforce and traveling public for decades.
Demography is not sexy. It is not like AI, which conjures images of promising machines to make big decisions and deal with boring busywork or nightmarish bots that will take our jobs and destroy us. Demography is about numbers that appear mundane, e.g., birthrates, worker age, retirement trends. Demography just does not make the headlines. The impacts of demographic trends are often viewed as years away, causing policy makers, business executives, and corporate boards to yawn at the mention of the topic and to move on figuring, “Sure, population change is probably an issue, but not my watch.”
Unlike technological advances or economic forecasts, demographic changes can be seen long in advance and are relatively clear when they are likely to have the most impact. Sadly, however, like most individuals, organizations are poor at seeing the future that is unfolding right in front of them. They are blind to slow but steady change. Unfortunately, government and industry suffer from demographic change blindness and their lack of awareness now has everyone scrambling to assign blame and to fix the aviation system.
Despite all the excitement about technology, particularly GenAI, the human factor remains integral to the systems we depend upon every day – even the most technologically complex systems such as aviation. Workforce shortages, retirements, and the rising number of people who wish to travel are stress-testing the air travel system. This was not only foreseeable; it was known to have been coming for decades.
We hear about a pilot shortage today. Some say the shortage is due to compensation, age restrictions, fewer military pilots to feed the commercial airline business, etc. This is not news. Pilot shortages have been discussed for decades. Reports of how the pilot shortage would affect airline operations were widely reported throughout the the 1980s and 90s in the industry’s trade magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology and was certainly a discussion in the halls of the FAA and General Accounting Office decades ago.
Airport workers, ranging from gate agents to baggage handlers and flight attendants are in short supply as well. Those that remain in the workforce are reporting that they are overworked. Flight attendants in particular are facing the stress of too few co-workers and too much demand. To cope, some flight attendants are choosing to drop shifts they are assigned to resulting in flight delays or cancellations. United is seeking to hire nearly 4,000 new flight attendants to meet current demand.
Similar to the pilot shortage, this was foreseeable long before the pandemic. The average age of flight attendants and related retirements have been increasing. A 2009 report by the Population Reference Bureau showed how the aging of flight attendants would be leading to fundamental structural change in the airline workforce. Between 1980 and 2007 the average flight attendant age went from 30 to 44 years old, three years older than the average worker age across all industries. Today reports indicate that the average flight attendant is 49 years old.
While there is a focus on the industry workers travelers see, gate agents, flight attendants, and pilots, there is also a shortage of air traffic controllers – those hidden government employees in towers that keep flying safe. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg estimates that there is a shortage of 3,000 controllers. Again, this is not a new issue nor a result of the pandemic alone. Since the mass firing of air traffic controllers by President Reagan in 1981 and the resulting wave of replacement hires, those once new recruits from the 80s are now retired. The aging of the air-traffic control workforce, waves of retirements, and reports of less than robust recruitment and training of new controllers has left towers with fewer operators and those that remain report being overworked. In fact, a recent U.S. Department of Transportation Inspector General report indicates that the number of air traffic controllers available to meet 2023 demand is 10% lower than it was more than a decade ago.
The demographics of pilots, flight attendants, and airport workers certainly explains reduced capacity. Little has been said about increased demand. Many cite the dramatic increase in air travel as a bounce after years of COVID-19 quarantine. Certainly newfound postpandemic freedom is encouraging people of all ages to travel. However, there is also a demographic element to increased travel demand. We can blame the boomers. They have the time, money, and desire to travel. Travel is among the top retirement goals most often cited by those planning retirement or in retirement. According to one survey, boomers travel nearly a month a year and are likely to spend more money than other generations while traveling. With nearly 10,000 baby boomers retiring each day, it was foreseeable that there would be a dramatic increase in travel demand, with or without the pandemic.
Some advice for leaders in both government and industry: Next time you ask for a briefing to inform strategy, ask the economist armed with assumption laden forecasts to wait, tell your chief technology officer you will be right with them, but invite in the unknown person hidden away somewhere in the building that studies demographic change. They are likely to offer a far higher degree of certainty and serve as a major hedge against flying blindly into the future.
As one would-be futurist Yogi Berra is said to have remarked, “You can see a lot by looking.” And, as we are seeing in the air travel business today, demography is destiny.
