Travelers arrive at Montreal’s Trudeau Airport on April 20. Graham Hughes / The Canadian Press
The aviation industry’s attempt to return to the sky is compounded by a terrestrial problem: insufficient workers.
Canadian airlines are restoring routes to meet the accumulated demand from customers who did not fly during the pandemic. But the resurgence of vacations and visits to family and friends has been met with a shortage of people to load luggage and carry out customs and security checks. This, together with ongoing pandemic health measures, increases the time it takes passengers to get from the terminal to the asphalt or vice versa.
Laura Tilly of London, Ont., Traveled to Toronto’s Pearson Airport from Punta Cana on May 2 with Air Canada. After she and her family landed, she said, they waited in their plane for four hours before being allowed to disembark.
“The captain told us that there were nine planes in front of us waiting to land,” said Tilly, 24. “I can say that the cabin crew is just as upset. It was frustrating to be on the track as long as we were in the air. “
When she finally entered the terminal, she found that customs and luggage collection areas were supported by long, unorganized queues of passengers. “People were so frustrated with boarding planes that they were just cutting lines,” Ms. Tilly said.
As passengers line up, companies, contactors and government agencies responsible for airport operations blame each other for the problem.
Operators at some of Canada’s busiest airports say government agencies are to blame for the long queues because those agencies are responsible for staff shortages at customs and checkpoints. The agencies, for their part, say the private contractors they rely on to work in these jobs have not been prepared for the increase in passengers.
And contractors say they are trying to hire more people, but it is difficult for them to do so because the labor market is tight. Canada’s unemployment rate fell to 5.2% in April, the lowest level since 1976.
Figures provided by the federal government illustrate the sharp recovery in air travel. On May 1, security officers checked a total of 121,000 people at the country’s eight largest airports. On the same day a year ago, they checked only 15,000.
Although Air Canada continues to lose money, it expects to take off 90 percent of its schedule before the pandemic this summer.
In the first three months of 2022, the airline carried more than five million passengers. That’s about five times the number it took off in the first quarter of 2021. Air Canada kept most of its pilots on staff, even when its planes were stopped during the pandemic, and it withdrew flight attendants.
This allowed him to avoid the shortage of flight crews, which covered many of the world’s airlines, said Air Canada spokesman Peter Fitzpatrick. But he added that the airline needs to hire more support staff – people who load luggage and prepare the planes.
Delays in each stage of the check-in or check-out process can occur in cascades. “By forcing us to keep planes at the exit exits longer than planned, they cannot be loaded and reversed so quickly,” Mr Fitzpatrick said. “Schedules for cleaners and catering establishments may be canceled and crews may be delayed for their next flights.”
Jacques Roy, a professor of logistics at HEC Montreal, said longer queues, increased waiting times and a shortage of security staff were caused by labor shortages as well as revenue-based revenue models. who rely on privately operated airports.
Since 1996, most major airports in Canada have been operated by non-profit companies that pay rent to the federal government and finance their operations with fees charged to airlines, passengers and maintenance companies. This is a business model that failed when the flow of passengers stopped.
“These revenues are important because if airports rely solely on landing fees they receive from airlines, that’s not enough to upgrade their facilities and improve services,” said Prof. Roy.
Toronto Airport Authority, which manages Toronto Pearson Airport, said the government should abandon some of its pandemic health measures to streamline arrival and departure procedures and ease staffing. These measures include accommodation health issues and random COVID-19 tests for people arriving outside of Canada.
“While before the pandemic, it took an average of 30 seconds for an employee to process an arriving international passenger, today the process can take two to four times longer,” said Ryan White, a GTAA spokesman. “With an average of more than 30,000 international passengers arriving per day at the moment – it is estimated that by the summer they will reach 45,000 per day – every second counts and affects passenger traffic.
Allied Universal Security Services, which provides passenger screening services to the Canadian Air Safety Authority (CATSA) in British Columbia and the Yukon, said passengers were returning but workers were not.
The company had 1,000 agents working for CATSA before the pandemic. He is now aiming to add 300, but there are only about 100 in training, according to Sherita Coffelt, an Allied spokesman.
Barry Prentiss, a professor of transportation at the University of Manitoba, said Canada’s airport check-in and security processes are too late to streamline. Pandemic-related health checks are in addition to the screening measures introduced after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which have already made procedures slower and more expensive.
“It’s time to change the way we do things,” he said. “Checking everyone as if they were hostile aliens every time they pass through is ridiculous.
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