In a surprisingly candid email to employees, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby expressed frustration that the Federation Aviation Administration (FAA) failed his airline over the weekend, leading to a ripple effect that continues today and is being further exacerbated by East Coast storms.
United Airlines CEO Blames FAA For Operational Mess
Kirby will typically get in front of a camera and record a video for employees, but last night an email went out that was shared with Live And Let’s Fly. Let’s examine the note and analyze whether Kirby’s concerns are valid.
Team:
I wanted to say thank you for the incredible work you did this weekend under what were unprecedented challenges. I know it was very tough on each of you, and it’s not over yet with weather continuing today on the East Coast.
But I want you to know that I’m proud of you.
Indeed, it’s not over yet as I found out last night…
> Read More: My Trip To Newark On United Airlines Comically Unravels
The operation is pretty messy today, though it all started over the weekend in which bad weather plus an FAA staffing shortfall led to a domino effect of flight disruptions.
I’m also frustrated that the FAA frankly failed us this weekend. As you know, the weather we saw in EWR is something that the FAA has historically been able to manage without a severe impact on our operation and customers.
This past Saturday, however, was different.
The FAA reduced the arrival rates by 40% and the departure rates by 75%. That is almost certainly a reflection of understaffing/lower experience at the FAA. It led to massive delays, cancellations, diversions, as well as crews and aircraft out of position. And that put everyone behind the eight ball when weather actually did hit on Sunday and was further compounded by FAA staffing shortages Sunday evening.
As a result, we estimate that over 150,000 customers on United alone were impacted this weekend because of FAA staffing issues and their ability to manage traffic.
Kirby blames the FAA for slowing down traffic into Newark, which he deduces can only be blamed on a staffing shortage.
To be fair, it’s not the fault of the current FAA leadership that they are in this seriously understaffed position – it’s been building up for a long time before they were in charge. But it is incumbent on them now to lead and take action to minimize the impact. It’s not their fault, but they are responsible for solving the problem they inherited.
There is no way Kirby is going to bite the hand that feeds him, so any frustration will be tempered in this way. Blaming U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg or FAA Acting Administrator Polly Trottenberg is not going to be helpful in solving this problem.
In the next few days, I will be in touch with officials at FAA and DOT to discuss what steps FAA can take in the immediate term to prevent this from happening again this summer and offer my assistance to help lobby for the resources that the FAA so desperately needs to finally resolve these issues.
It isn’t clear to me that there is a short-term fix for the staffing issue.
While I’m frustrated that the FAA is letting us and our customers down, I’m encouraged at everything all of you are doing to manage the best we can. At United, our team will continue to do great things to take care of customers no matter what happens outside of our control. We’ll also remain overstaffed and over resourced for as long as it takes to minimize the impact on our people and our customers.
Thank you to everyone who went above and beyond this weekend.
Scott
I agree that the FAA is letting customers down. But if this weekend foreshadows what the summer is going to look like, it would behoove United to reduce its schedule now…in order to avoid a weekly meltdown and also playing a key role in letting customers down. Because it seems to me that the bottleneck at Newark Airport is not going to clear up anytime soon and that hiring and training additional staff cannot be done in a matter of days or even weeks…it will take months.
CONCLUSION
I appreciate Kirby’s candor and fully concur the FAA understaffing is a huge problem that has contributed to United’s operational woes over the last few days. That said, in the eye of the customer United will be the one blamed if these delays and cancellations continue. With no overnight solution in sight, I fear United will need to pare back its schedule or else face a summer of operational woes.
I’m sure at some point Kirby, et alia, will ramp up the call for Privatization again.
I’m so glad I retired the day I turned 50.
This FAA mess has been going on a very long time and it’s getting worse. Long past due for the spineless members of Congress and the Senate to get their finger out and fix. Kirby is right to a great extent but the FAA is not the only issue. Newark will always be a problem because of its lack of space and layout/airspace. One of the reasons I always go through Chicago or Dulles if I have to when heading eastward.
Your second sentence applies to a lot of problems in this country. No one is ever held accountable. We just keep voting them back into office.
Don’t forget that at NY airports and others airlines have already significantly reduced their summer schedules at the request of the FAA to help deal with the staffing shortage. I also very much doubt that there is anything United and others can do at this point. Cutting the schedule back in a major hub by 40% or 75% or even 25% is a non starter. And no airline is built to deal with a 75% reduction in departure flow that gets dropped on them out of nowhere at a major hub.
Yes customers will certainly blame United. And United and others will certainly (if things unravel again) be responsible for a chunk of that blame. But I think it’s also going to be incumbent on airline leadership to get the story out there that the FAA has failed the traveling public. Yes, the current leadership inherited this mess and it’s been a long-time brewing. But they are at the helm of the ship now and need to do something about it.
“ I appreciate Kirby’s candor”
Sounds like he’s just being a salty lil’ biatch after his best airline in the galaxy is having the biggest operational meltdowns the past few days, lmao.
I do think the FAA staffing shortage is real worse than it has been in decades.
They should probably lift the age restriction for new hire atc trainees. Ridiculous it’s so low.
The real shortage was after Reagan (remember him) fired all the air traffic controllers in 1981.
Lots of alcohol was consumed at the terminal bars to calm down the PAX pre-flight.
I so miss the 80’s!!! 😀
Combination of weather, FAA issues, and aggressive growth.
United management has (for decades) chosen a business model that assumes all will be peachy at EWR, and that puts so many eggs in that horrible basket. What a miserable excuse for an airport to bet your farm on. Great planning, United!
Somebody has to establish a hub at EWR. If an NJ resident wants to fly to Korea or Japan or Netherlands, they would have to travel further if they want to fly to those places because KLM, KAL, and ANA refuse to fly to EWR. A lot of NJ residents do not want a longer drive or commute to JFK, hence United’s hub at EWR.
I understand but the rest of us don’t want to deal with EWR. I hope this further discourages airlines from flying through that awful airport.
Very tangentially related (but related to United) – if I have 1 united club pass left, would you recommend using it at DCA or IAH?
DCA.
What bull. Airlines have been crying about the FAA and ATC for years, trying to blame general av for not paying it’s share (tiny in comparison), etc. The bottom line is the ATC system is decades out of date, and US airlines that make up the grand share of its use do not want to pay to modernize it. Efficiency could be improved immensely if stakeholders get on board, but it’s not going to pay for itself and the public coffers should bear the brunt of the cost. To be fair, this is not a Kirby-isolated thing, but if he’s going to open his mouth, then speak the truth.
The public *shouldn’t* bear the cost outside of plane taxes/fees
Lol I found out today Kirby is under 6 feet tall.
What a pathetic excuse for a “man” (if you can even call someone under 6ft a man).
@ Chad — Under 6″ disqualifies you as well.
DHS has sent CBP employees from the northern border to assist the southern border. Why cant the FAA send ATC from other smaller / mid sized airports to Newark for a few weeks at a time? Rotate them through. While not a perfect or permanent solution, it could help until new ATCs are hired and fully trained.
It takes years to become proficient in controlling flights at these airports’ complicated airspace. It’s not like Oshkosh where they can have temps working the tower every summer.
Haha this could be fun tho! Would love to see a 777 rock its wings to get cleared for the approach. …and land on the blue dot while the 737 ahead lands on the orange dot.
You are right in your comment however 🙂
Lol
What good has it done?
Kirby’s “candor” is always evident when he points fingers at other people. Funny how that candor is somehow missing when it comes to his innumerable screwups. His management style, while common in ex-AmericaWest people, is simply not leadership.
Who knew that the former president’s efforts to hatchet federal agencies so they were short staffed and ineffective would come back to bite us in the future? People want smaller government with inadequate funding? Be prepared to be inconvenienced at the most inopportune of times.
The Crew Scheduling meltdown currently happening at United echoes Southwest’s meltdown in December. This is a systemic failure on the part of the company and has nothing to do with the FAA. United’s poor infrastructure cannot handle the scope and breadth of its operation even during routine operations. Flight attendants have experienced significant hold times for months just trying to obtain hotel and transportation information that was never inputted into their trip pairings. In irregular operations, 1 hour wait times (which has become the new normal in recent months) have lapsed into 5+ hour wait times. There are crew members stranded in hotels all over the world with no updated flight information and no way to reach the company’s crew scheduling and hotel & transportation departments. I would imagine impacted customers are experiencing similar issues with re-booking canceled flights as rolling flight cancellations continue. Mr. Kirby needs to look within rather than point fingers toward the FAA.
United cannot keep the Crew Scheduling Department staffed because the company offers low wages to staff who must be adept at understanding FAA crew legalities and be familiar with the complex guidelines of ALPA and AFA collective bargaining agreements. Their workload is not commensurate with what the company is willing to pay and so the department is a continual revolving door. Furthermore, the company chooses to separate pilots and flight attendants during layovers, meaning separate hotels and separate ground transportation. When operations go south, Pursers are often having to fend for their crew for hotel rooms or transportation while the pilots go their own separate ways. If crews stayed together, having the Captain advocate for the entire crew would yield better results. Lastly, I will say that Mr. Kirby did himself no favors by stalling pilot contract negations and by failing to reach a tentative pilot agreement prior to the start of the peak (over-scheduled) summer season. I lived through the summer of 2000 when pilot contract talks were in the same boat and the pilots chose to fly to the book and not pick open time (un-crewed) trips. United’s operation was crippled and many of the company’s elite 1K and Premier Execs permanently fled to Delta and American. I anxiously feel a sense of doom as a repeat of 23 years ago looms in the not-always-so-friendly Friendly Skies.
No it does not echo Southwest which did little to invest in new technology due to its “keep it simple” philosophy. It was a lack of ATC controllers and a series of thunderstorms that triggers this. As Mathew and others pointed out United already pulled down it’s summer schedule to compensate for understaffed ATC in NY airspace. And when ATC forces United to cancel 40% of its arrivals and 75% of its departures crews will be scattered everywhere. There is no way United or any other airline could compensate for that. Your post sounds like it has some kind of agenda behind it.
The problems with UA’s crew scheduling have began pre covid. Miss Management’s choices to do more with less have eroded the operation at UA. It was only a matter of time for a debacle.
Faa may have started the issue, but United’s own failures have exacerbated it a thousand fold. Planes, pilots and FAs don’t follow the same daily schedules so in a mess like this, they never have a full crew/plane to operate. There were plenty of partial crews liking for full ones and planes looking for full crews, but no way to match them up. My crew worked part of our pairing then spent 9 hours at SFO yesterday before sleeping in the crew room last night (still waiting for our hotel assignment and couldn’t find one on our own). We offered to work several flights yesterday just to get out of here, but couldn’t without talking to scheduling. We were on hold with scheduling since about 3pm and turned the phone off at midnight having made no contact. I expect more of the same today.
Another take…he knows there will be a “meltdown” over the 4th weekend and he’s getting ahead of the story by blaming the FAA.
That’s a very likely outcome.
This “blame” may lead to more UNITED flights (more so than other airlines) being delayed even more ?
And of course, true to form, let’s blame everyone/everything else for this debacle. Let’s not admit that we were over zealous in adding flights without considering the “what if” factor. Apparently Scotty and other Airline CEO’s/Schedule Planners have never heard of the military adage … The 7 Ps is a British Army adage for Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
@ Matthew — The blame for United’s current disastrous state (it didn’t start this week) is greedy management that has stretched the operations too thin. United should receive a massive fine for the way it has been screwing its customers. They need to trim their schedule to minimize delays and cancellatioms rather than maximizing desired profits.
The issues were mostly internal with the lack of scheduling reps, hotel accommodations for crew and planes. All things unrelated to the FAA. Scott needs to be honest and STOP pointing fingers everywhere else and look at himself and his management team. What took place could’ve been avoided. We were crippled at every base in our system. EWR wasn’t the issue. Scott and his greed is!!! Once that is addressed then we can have a real discussion.