...After furloughing thousands of pilots during the pandemic, airlines like American and Southwest were caught flat-footed this spring, with vaccine-driven demand for planes but not enough people to fly them. Delta reports online bookings at more than 100 percent of where they were at this time in 2019, while flying nearly 20 percent fewer flights than they did then, according to Cirium, which tracks aviation data. The FAA requires retraining those out-of-work pilots before putting them back in the cockpit, but airlines could not move people through the program (especially with social-distancing mandates still in place for flight simulators) in time to meet the so-called “revenge travel” demand as summer kicked off. That’s left scores of planes still mothballed in the desert, with airlines loath to spend the tens of thousands of dollars it takes to bring each jet back into service until they’re sure they can make money if they do it. American Airlines, for one, in late June announced that it would cancel nearly 1,000 flights in July as it ran short on staff....

To read the full article - The Travel Industry Is a Mess. Everyone Is Traveling Anyway. (nymag.com)