US airlines, on track for a profit this year, show a disparity between employment and aircraft utilization numbers.
Aviation Week Intelligence Network
The juxtaposition of aircraft utilization and total employment within the US airline market from January 2019 to April 2022 shows similarities and disparities. As would be expected, both metrics show drastic drops at the beginning of 2020, when the pandemic first struck, and utilization and employment numbers have grown since the all-time lows. In April 2022, US cargo and passenger airlines added close to 5,000 jobs, resulting in the highest number of employees since February 2020 and totaling 751,165 full-time and part-time workers combined—just over 16,000 more people than were employed in pre-pandemic April 2019. The difference between October 2020 and April 2022 US airline employment levels amounts to a 12% increase, while the difference between April 2019 and April 2022 is a 2.2% increase. Yet commercial aircraft utilization in April 2022 was 1.5 million hours, still 9% below where it stood in 2019. The low point for hours flown by US carriers occurred in May 2020, when just under 515,000 flight hours were tracked. Two rounds of US Treasury cash grants were given to American carriers during 2020 to keep key workers employed. But airline employment levels still hit a low point of just under 670,000 people in October 2020 as employees took voluntary furloughs or early retirements—permitted under the congressional payroll support program aid—or simply left for a different career track. Nevertheless, US airlines appear to have restored their staffing levels, but not their operational efficiency. IATA forecasts that US carriers as a collective will be the first to return to post-pandemic profitability this year with an expected $8.8 billion net profit for 2022. That’s good, but far below their 2019 profit of $16.6 billion. Returning to that level of profitability will require, in part, a return to pre-pandemic utilization levels.
