Future of air travel likely means fewer options at regional airports, Delta CEO projects
MINNEAPOLIS -- America's travel industry is changing and it may mean Minnesotans who used to fly out of smaller airports may now need to drive to a bigger one.
The CEO of Delta Air Lines talked about the issue at an industry conference in Minneapolis Tuesday.
"For some markets, we're gonna need to make choices as to whether we're gonna fly a larger flight, whether we're gonna consolidate the number of operations, but you're never again gonna see the 50-seat aircraft have the level of prominence in the industry," Ed Bastian said. "In fact, at Delta, we're just about out of them. I think we have less than 20 that we're flying today. When Delta merged with Northwest in 2009, collectively we had about 1,200 aircraft as a company; 500 of those were 50 seat or smaller aircraft. That's down to almost nothing now today."
Bastian says at Delta, the changes at regional airports began when the company granted 20,000 early retirements at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. About 2,000 those retirees were pilots. While he says 85% of staffing has been restored, the changes in the industry mean some smaller airports have lost service, which he thinks may never come back the same way.
"Forward Momentum" was the theme of the ACI North America annual conference at the Minneapolis Convention Center. After more than two years of pandemic struggles, Bastian opened his Q&A session with a reminder of how far the industry has come in 2022 alone.
"Dialing back to the start of this year, remember where we were. We were back in omicron days. Fortunately the Delta variant was gone, thank God," he joked.
He was later asked to look back at lessons learned, and said the pandemic provided meaningful lessons about wellness, the power of being together and always putting people first.
"Putting people ahead of profits," Bastian said, "I can remember the conversations we had about blocking the middle seats. Delta blocked the middle seats longer than any airline in the world did. We did it for almost a year and a half until people could get vaccinated and what not. Customers still thank me every single day when they see me. That was focused on taking care of them, but it was also focused on taking care of our own people because our own people didn't want to be on crowded planes any more than our customers did."
Bastian said the world wants to travel again and strong demand is the reason prices remain high.
Earlier this summer, a number of off-duty Delta pilots executed an informational picket outside of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. They claimed that the airline is overscheduling flights. They called for movement on four key points, as contract negotiations continued: better pay, retirement benefits, job security, but the biggest is scheduling and quality of life.