As the rocky post-coronavirus recovery continues, North American passenger airlines are realising they have to be nimbler in their strategies in order to succeed in the new environment.
With the impact of the coronavirus’s Delta variant waning, a new Covid-19 threat – the Omicron variant – rattled the industry in the last few weeks of 2021. Airlines are pulling back on both domestic and international schedules, worried that a hard-to-contain Covid-19 variant may make more of an impact on the recovery than previously thought.
In 2022, airlines are going to be more careful to not make the same mistakes they made in the mad rush to bring back capacity in 2021. Their new challenge is to figure out the right balance.
And as the market shakes out, analysts say that the North American single-type, low-cost carriers will probably emerge from the crisis in 2022 in a better position than their major flag carrier peers.
With legacy carriers upgauging fleets and the dreaded pilot shortage hitting their regional partners hardest, majors such as United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines are facing more open questions as they rebuild their networks and feel out a balance that could be successful in a post-coronavirus environment.
“The ultra-low-cost carriers have just one fleet type, they don’t have this added complexity, or have to deal with salaries and benefits of regional pilots versus mainline and widebody pilots,” says Citi Research aviation analyst Stephen Trent.
“They don’t need two or three different kinds of flight simulators. Everybody can go through the same training. So that uniformity is going to be important, especially when you need extra slack in the system.”
In 2020, passenger airlines could not shed staff, store aircraft and cut routes fast enough in a multi-pronged effort to stop hemorrhaging cash, as the virus tore around the world.
In 2021, they could not bring them back fast enough. Some were overwhelmed by the…