In a note from COO Dan Janki in May, the airline indicated it was happy with its on-time performance, but “we need to improve controllable cancels and IROP recovery.” I’m not sure I agree. Oh sure, it does have a problem with cancellations and irregular operations, but on-time performance has suffered as well. While there are several issues that have led to this decline, one of the hot button topics is centered around pilot availability.
A letter from Ryan Gumm, SVP Flight Operations from April, explained that trips that needed coverage saw acceptance rates plummet from 37 percent to two percent. To me, this sounds like an effort to blame labor, so I spoke with Delta’s pilots union chair Eric Criswell to get his side. Eric said they don’t have access to the dataset that Delta referred to in that latter, but he wanted to point out that the number of trips made available has jumped significantly in the last year. You would expect acceptance rates to drop in a bigger pool. From the union’s perspective, staffing is a primary concern in this whole mess.