A worker walks past an Air Canada plane parked at a gate at Vancouver International Airport after operations returned to normal following last week’s snowstorm, in Richmond, British Columbia, on December 26, 2022. DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
This holiday travel season will be remembered for canceled flights, lost bags and stranded or stranded passengers, people whose winter getaways were thwarted by storms and the responses of the airlines they trusted with their plans.
Canada’s aviation industry and fliers had hoped the December holiday would mark a recovery from nearly three years of the pandemic and a summer of 2022 that featured chaos at the airport amid staff shortages.
Instead, the turmoil has resurfaced with dozens of canceled flights piled up on the busiest travel days of the year. The Sunwing Airlines crash was the worst, with customers stranded for days in Mexico and other destinations complaining of poor communication from the carrier. WestJet Airlines, Air Canada and others canceled flights as storms grounded planes and halted crew transfers.
So why, in a country where winter happens every year, were airlines and airports unable to operate as usual? And how did airlines, which make much of their revenue selling tickets to people looking to escape the cold weather, find themselves unable to operate?
The problems started with winter storms just before Christmas in western Canada and then in parts of Ontario and Quebec. But safety issues were compounded by the fact that airlines had few spare resources to rely on. Their planes were largely full and almost all were in use, making it difficult to book passengers. And then there was a thinly dispersed workforce, with many inexperienced workers recently hired. Storms make it difficult to get planes and crews to where they are needed.
“They were in such high demand [and] they had so little downtime in their system that when things went wrong, there was nothing they could do,” said Barry Prentice, a professor at the University of Manitoba. “And then that tends to multiply.”
“The problem with that [storm],” said John Gradek, who teaches airline leadership at McGill University, “it happened on Christmas Day.
“Christmas flights were sold out, if any disruption happened there was very little flexibility on the part of the airline to recover and provide seats for those passengers who were displaced,” Mr Gradek said.
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Two days of canceled flights in Vancouver, for example, left 100,000 passengers scrambling for different flights at a time when few were available, he said, a scenario repeated at airports across the country. “It was a perfect storm, literally: snow during the Christmas week, no vacancies and major disruptions in North America,” he said.
The snow and cold have slowed and halted operations at many airports for safety reasons, causing a backup of planes, passengers and baggage. Passengers complained that they were kept on parked planes for hours and that they arrived at their destinations without luggage. Others saw their vacations completely ruined.
WestJet canceled 1,640 flights. Sunwing canceled all flights from Vancouver between December 22 and 25 and postponed much of its schedule elsewhere. It also canceled all flights from Regina and Saskatoon until Feb. 3 as it chartered planes to bring in stranded vacationers.
“As a carrier expanding to meet our highest demand in years, we built an achievable plan that due to a combination of factors we were no longer able to deliver and we regret not meeting the level of service our customers have come to expect from Sunwing,” the Toronto-based airline said in a statement.
In an email, Calgary-based WestJet said the weather affected crew and aircraft availability on the network. “Despite the best efforts of our planning/crew scheduling teams, active weather systems can cause the aircraft and crew to move out of position for multiple safety reasons, including mandatory crew rest requirements, resulting in delays and cancellations far beyond the affected region,” spokeswoman Madison Krueger said.
“This holiday season we saw that compounded as adverse weather systems simultaneously impacted our operations across Canada.”
Bernard Lewall, a WestJet pilot and union executive at the International Air Line Pilots Association, said in a video posted on social media that the disruptions were “unacceptable.”
“I have been here for 17 years; I’ve never seen it this bad. We don’t treat customers the way we used to treat them,” he said.
Air Canada spokesman Peter Fitzpatrick declined to say how many flights were canceled but said “the vast majority of our customers who had planned to travel were able to do so. Between December 15 and January 4, we operated more than 17,000 flights and safely transported more than 2.1 million customers.”
Air Canada operates an average of 1,000 connecting flights per day, and a delay in one part of the country can lead to disruption and baggage shortages in another.
“A plane can be scheduled to fly from Toronto to Calgary to Vancouver and then to a southern destination in one day,” he said. “But if it is held up by weather somewhere, then it is delayed for its next flights, or its next flights may have to be canceled if the crew flying them are close to or over their statutory working day and there are no replacements available.” This can also affect ground operations as people’s work schedules are synchronized with our work schedules.”
John Lawford, executive director of the Public Interest Advocacy Center in Ottawa, said the risks of running an airline have become more pronounced as climate change increases the frequency of storms that disrupt travel. “It was kind of an accident waiting to happen,” he said.
“The difficulty is that I believe there is not a lot of regulation on private airlines,” Mr Lawford said. Ottawa does not require airlines to show they have contingency plans to recover from service failures, nor do they have to reach agreements with other airlines to share cabin space if their planes go out of service.
Passengers have the protection of federal rules that require airlines to provide refunds, rebookings and sometimes compensation when flights are delayed or canceled. But airlines are not required to provide meals and lodging if the cancellation is due to reasons beyond the airline’s control, such as a snowstorm in Calgary. And with the Canadian Transportation Agency’s backlog of airline complaints reaching 30,000, the rules offer no comfort to aggrieved passengers.
Without elaborating, Transport Minister Omar Algabra said legislation introducing stricter rules governing passenger rights and airline conduct was forthcoming. They are likely to be introduced in the spring after consultation, he said by phone.
“Operational decisions made by independent organizations are not my responsibility,” he said. “But I am aware that the public expects the government to set the rules and improve them and I am determined to do that,” Mr Algabra said.
Mr Algabra said it was a mistake to compare the summer’s air transport problems with the recent rumblings. The first were because of the unprepared and ill-equipped aviation industry, including the government agencies that work in it. The recent problems stemmed from weather disruptions and were felt by all North American airlines.
He said his own return flight on Dec. 27 from a trip to Europe and the Middle East was smooth and he made a quick transit through Toronto’s Pearson Airport. But he knows that’s not the case for all passengers, especially Sunwing customers. He called Sunwing’s cancellation and poor communication “unacceptable”.
“We’ve seen, for the most part, a quick recovery. But what we also saw was a unique failure that occurred at Sunwing, a self-confessed operational failure in customer response and communication.”
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