The hidden cause behind your miserable flight delays

No one likes it when their flight is delayed. For flight attendants, though, a delay isn’t just a hassle – it’s a lot of unpaid work. You’re at the airport, in your uniform, yet the pay clock doesn’t start until the plane is pulling out of the gate. 

“I don’t know another job in the world where you can show up, clock in, essentially, and just not get paid,” says Rory Kimbrough, who represents JetBlue flight attendants as the executive board member at large for the Transport Workers Union Local 579. Kimbrough has been a flight attendant for 20 years.

Treatment like not being paid throughout the labor-intensive boarding process or during delays isn’t just shoddy, it’s indicative of a delicate and strained system for airline workers that, in the end, makes flying worse for everyone. When other common problems crop up, such as understaffed support teams and difficulty getting a hotel room for proper rest, those issues can just make delays even worse for passengers. 

“Not getting paid is a huge issue,” says Brittany Norris, a member of the Delta AFA Organizing Committee who has been a flight attendant for eight years. “When something is delayed and passengers are upset, we’re also upset.”

More people have been jetting around this summer than last, with a record 3 million travelers passing a TSA screening point on the Sunday of Fourth of July weekend. Between late May and August this year, about 25 percent of flights were delayed — roughly the same as last summer — according to data from flight tracking site Flight Aware. Compare that to summer 2019, when 18.6 percent of flights were delayed. When the CrowdStrike IT outage hit in late July, over 46,000 flights were delayed in one day. The outage lasted for days. Throughout July, almost 24,000 flights in North America were canceled, according to the aviation analytics firm Cirium. Delta was the hardest hit, with delays and cancellations rippling on for almost a week after the issue first surfaced. 

Passengers and flight attendants alike were stranded at airports for days. While CrowdStrike started out as an IT issue that brought down computer systems crucial to airline operations, the Delta organizing committee, which has been fighting for a union since 2019, blames a lack of communication and understaffed teams as reasons why the flight disruptions lasted so long.

How flight attendant pay works

In an email, Delta explained they are “the industry leader in operational performance,” canceling fewer flights, leading to less time delayed in airports and more in the air. “Delta is the only major airline that provides boarding pay for our flight attendants, and we’ve been doing it for more than two years,” they wrote. 

Indeed, the way pay works for flight attendants can be a bit head-spinning. In general, there’s a base rate that applies to flight time and distance flown that roughly mimics an hourly wage while in the air, often called “block” time. The entire duty period, however, can include multiple flights and includes the 45 minutes to nearly two hours flight attendants would have to arrive at the airport to “sign in” for work, as well as about 15 minutes after the plane lands. Most unionized airlines have some minimum pay protections around duty time, however, like being guaranteed flight time rate pay for at least half of the duty hours.

The flight time rate is supposed to be high enough to make up for those on-the-ground hours, but pay increases haven’t caught up with inflation or how much more work flight attendants do now compared to many decades ago. Particularly after Covid-19, delays in new contract negotiations have meant some unionized flight attendants have gone years without meaningful raises in a period of high inflation.

“They are working harder than ever before, with full aircraft, minimum staffing, long days, short nights, and no return for their hard work,” says Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. The industry underwent seismic changes after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and ensuing airline bankruptcies. “The number of hours that the airline could schedule us increased, the number of hours that we could schedule ourselves increased,” she says. “Everyone was willing to do that because there were such steep cuts in pay, and they had to make up for those losses in some way.” After 9/11, flight attendants essentially became the “last line of defense in aviation security,” Nelson notes. After the pandemic, they had to become public health enforcers too.

Beyond the duty time pay protection, there’s also usually a small per diem (ranging from around $2 to $3 per hour) while on duty, meant to cover paying for food and other expenses that pop up while working. Some airlines also offer overtime pay if a flight attendant exceeds a certain number of hours per month or higher pay for working certain hours and routes. 

All this means that if a flight is delayed before the plane door is shut, many flight attendants are waiting even longer to start making money.

Flight attendants who have worked for an airline for decades can make much higher trip rates. At Delta, the scale now tops out at close to $80 per hour of flight time (an hourly rate of $77.43, the new top rate at Southwest, works out to about $74,332 per year.) But that’s only if you can survive the first several years. In recent years, some flight attendants have reported experiencing homelessness due to their low wages. Others work multiple jobs to afford basics. A proof of income letter for an American Airlines flight attendant went viral earlier this year when it showed that, at a rate of $30.35 per flight hour, a first-year employee would make about $27,315 per year. According to the MIT Living Wage calculator, a single adult in West Virginia — which has one of the lowest costs of living in the US — would need roughly $39,386 a year to cover the cost of their basic needs. Kimbrough says that some of his fellow union members are on government assistance programs such as SNAP. 

“These new people coming in, I don’t know how they’re surviving being flight attendants,” says Maria Teresa Hank, a member of TWU 556, the union of Southwest flight attendants. “It’s the first time in the industry that we’ve actually had people quitting because they can’t afford to be a flight attendant.” A spokesperson for the company told Vox in an email that “Southwest and its Flight Attendants union negotiated an industry-leading contract, which our Flight Attendants ratified back in April.” 

Many are fed up. Flight attendants from American Airlines and United have been fighting for more pay, and also to be paid for the entire time they’re working. There have been some recent wins and movement on the issue; the new contract ratified between Southwest and its flight attendants does provide some extra pay if there are long delays. A tentative agreement that was reached between American and its flight attendants offers half-pay during boarding the same way Delta does. On August 28, flight attendants at United voted to authorize a strike if negotiations break down, with an overwhelming 99.99 percent of yes votes. 

How delays can throw a wrench in the workday – and your travel plans

It’s not uncommon for a flight attendant to be scheduled for multiple flights a day. Delays can mess up their route, which — you guessed it — can trigger a domino effect of more delays. When airlines are ill-equipped to quickly react to disruptions, that slows everything down even more.

The flight attendants we spoke to all emphasized that their employers could stand to be more proactive when disruptions, called “irregular operations” in the industry, occur. One example: ensuring flight attendants can get hotel rooms when delays stretch on for more than a few hours. Flight attendants are legally not allowed to work more than a certain number of hours, often between 14 to 16 hours for domestic routes. Long airport waits eat into the time that a flight attendant can legally be on duty before they need to get nine consecutive hours of legal rest. “Then when we are ready to go, the customers are like, ‘Why is the crew timing out, we didn’t even go anywhere’?” says Norris. 

Hank says that airlines tend to wait right up until the minute they’re contractually obligated to provide a hotel room. Finally, when flight attendants are allowed to request one, there’s the time it takes to reserve and travel, so “by the time you get to the hotel, you literally get an hour, maybe 30 minutes, of just sitting down and being restful before you have to go back to the airport.” They then return to work not feeling rested and closer to timing out of being able to fly, which is an especially big problem if there are multiple legs on their schedule. 

“People think of us as just serving drinks and snacks, but we’re really there for the important stuff, like if there’s an evacuation of an aircraft or if you have a medical [emergency] on an airplane,” says Hank. “You need your flight attendants alert and ready to go.”

Given that a lot of people — including passengers — are looking for lodgings during major disruptions, it’s not entirely uncommon for flight attendants to struggle to obtain a hotel room for themselves. Even if rooms are available, it can take hours to get in touch with someone from the airline hotel team. That means they just end up sleeping on the plane, in airport chairs, in the crew lounge (if there is one at the airport), or on the floor, as stranded passengers do. 

“I’ve had to actually pay for other [flight attendant’s] rooms before,” says Kimbrough. Newer flight attendants in particular may not have a few hundred dollars in the bank to drop on a hotel room, and a full reimbursement isn’t necessarily guaranteed. Norris says that until recently, Delta capped reimbursements at $200 per night. Now, it reimburses up to a “reasonable amount.” (The company told Vox that receipts should be submitted for reimbursement for any out-of-pocket hotel costs but did not clarify whether it only reimbursed up to a “reasonable amount.”) Sometimes, Hank says, pilots at Southwest end up paying for a room on behalf of flight attendants, as she says they seem to have an easier time getting reimbursed.

When a flight attendant times out, they are supposed to rest in a hotel room, not kick back in the crew lounge at the airport or get shut-eye on the floor. The Delta AFA organizing committee is hoping that, once they’re negotiating their first union contract, they’ll get a minimum of 10 hours of legal rest with “nine hours behind the actual hotel room door,” says Norris.

Why the CrowdStrike delay was worse for Delta passengers

It’s still not clear why Delta was hit hardest by the CrowdStrike outage in late July, taking almost a week to recover when other carriers bounced back within two to three days. One factor that might have impacted Delta is that its computers had to be manually fixed and restarted instead of being done remotely. That took a lot of time.

But the Delta AFA organizing committee suspects there’s another reason that contributed: a lack of staff on the airline’s crew scheduling team. “Right now, we have the fewest amount of schedulers of any of the major carriers,” says Norris. Crew schedulers are the people who assign flight attendants to specific flights, communicate with them about delays, and make reassignments when there are irregular operations. It’s impossible to solve delays without a robust crew-scheduling system.

The committee estimates that there are as few as 53 crew schedulers at the airline, while at United there are about 120, and at American there are about 200. Delta has about 28,000 flight attendants, a little more than American and United. Anna Taylor Garland, communications director at the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, notes that United and American have more crew schedulers because their flight attendant unions pushed for more staff. “That is a really, really critical backbone infrastructure team,” says Taylor Garland.

Without an adequate scheduling team, an airline can lose track of where their crew is and where they could best be rerouted, which is exactly what happened to Norris.

On July 19, the first day of the CrowdStrike outage, Norris recalls how hard it was to get in touch with crew tracking at Delta. She showed up to the airport and was told that her scheduled flight couldn’t leave because the airline didn’t have any pilots who were “legal” to work at the time — as in, they hadn’t gotten the required amount of rest between flights. In all, Norris was “lost” to the crew tracking system for about 40 hours and ended up being unable to work one of her trips. 

When asked about Delta’s crew scheduling staff numbers, a spokesperson said that its “scheduler process is not comparable to others as their crew assignments are not built out the same way.”

When there are waves of delays messing up flight assignments and leaving some flight attendants stranded far from where they’re needed, airlines call on a team of reserves — often early-career flight attendants — to jump in. When disruptions last for days, though, those reserves can dry up. Carriers offer higher pay to incentivize off-duty flight attendants to pick up extra flights during such times, but even so, some turn down the offers because of the possibility of ending up stranded without a hotel room during the disruption, says Kimbrough.

If airlines want fewer, shorter flight delays, they need to beef up their support staff. This staff “is not seen but is crucial to getting flight attendants and pilots in the correct places,” Garland says. They should also be quicker to offer incentives for flight attendants picking up extra shifts when irregular operations occur.

Many of us have groused about how much more frustrating and conflict-ridden air travel feels today compared to before the pandemic. The percentage of flights that are delayed these days isn’t all that much higher compared to pre-2019, but there are more fellow travelers to bump shoulders with, and there’s been a huge spike in the number of “unruly passenger” reports since 2019, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The aviation industry is more fragile now, in part because of how many experienced workers left during Covid-19. Tens of thousands of pilots and flight attendants were laid off or retired early in 2020, when there was virtually no demand for air travel. By mid-2020, over 17,000 Delta employees had left the company. In the past few years, airlines have rushed to hire thousands of new pilots and flight attendants. A lot of institutional knowledge has been lost; it also means that a greater number of flight attendants we see today are making the lower end of the pay scale.

The flight attendants Vox spoke to implored passengers not to take their frustrations about delays out on them. “We are sometimes in the exact same situation as you, with a canceled flight, no way to get back,” says Kimbrough.