Nobody seems to figure out the core problem for airlines: they're selling tickets that they cannot fulfill under current conditions. If they know they don't have enough pilots, enough attendants, and so on, why in the world are they selling all the tickets they've "planned"? Is this a realistic plan or it is a SCAM, i.e., taking people's money for a service that they know they won't be able to fulfill in the future? These companies need to be investigated!
They're taking reservations months ahead of time. It's not as if they can magically know what staffing they'll have in 3-9 months. I'm effected by this, but I bought my ticket in September. It doesn't seem reasonable to require any business to know for-sure that every employee needed to run a flight in December will be there in order to sell it in September.
Anyone can quit, die, or become ill at any time. If they had to contract every employee into a binding contract where they must fly a given route on a given day at a given time, we'd be howling about how they're abusing their employees, and in fact that's not far off from what everyone's been complaining about the railroad industry doing.
Predicting the future, even a few days at a time, is always best-effort.
When I was stuck in Florida during Hurricane Ian earlier this year my flight got cancelled 3 times. Having a ticket means nothing in terms of reserving a seat on a plane, it’s a scam for sure.
