SHORT-HAUL AIR CARRIAGE NEVER PAID ITS WAY, ANYWAY.

I have to wonder how much of the current commercial pilot shortage is self-inflicted on the part of the airlines.

“The pilot shortage for the industry is real and most airlines are simply not going to be able to realize their capacity plans because there simply aren’t enough pilots, at least not for the next five-plus years,” Scott Kirby, chief executive officer of United Airlines Holdings Inc. said earlier this week on a conference call. That will likely force United to keep 150 regional planes parked despite increased domestic travel demand, he said.

Some of the troubles are collateral damage from the corona shutdowns.

A quick aside: I used to close the survey of political economy class with a caution along the lines of "we don't know what sorts of things our descendants will point to and wonder how the heck that happened.  I have two candidates for that list now, the corona hysteria, and the intrusion of queer theory in kindergarten.

But this was supposed to be about the regional airlines.

The issue isn’t new -- airlines already faced difficulty finding and retaining pilots before the pandemic -- but a purging of employees at the start of the downturn in 2020 has left the industry ill-prepared for a rebound. Thousands of pilots accepted buyouts or retired early when federal aid to avoid furloughs failed to cover all the airlines’ labor costs, especially for veteran pilots earning six-figure salaries.

It's gotten to the point that your regional flight might be ... a bus ride.

Regional airlines play a critical role in ferrying passengers from smaller markets to hub airports where they board flights operated by larger partners. These work horses of the industry have capacity purchase agreements binding them to one or more primary airlines such as American or Delta, which control scheduling, pricing and ticketing.

“This is the pivotal point,” Faye Malarkey Black, chief executive of the Regional Airline Association, said in an interview. “We have not seen this level of service loss since right after 9-11, when that crisis changed the fly-drive equation. I expect this bad situation to get worse before it gets better, no matter what we do.”

In lieu of puddle-jumper flights, some airlines are linking up with charter bus services. United and American have contracted with Landline Co., a Fort Collins, Colorado-based startup, to ferry passengers and their bags by motorcoach on some shorter routes, allowing them to sell destinations where they don’t fly.

I can't wait for some spoiled Important Types getting upset when their connecting flight to Vail or Aspen never leaves the ground.

There's got to be a research project for somebody on the economics of a relatively short regional flight with no more than a bus load of passengers on board.  A lot of those regional carriers depend on the so-called essential air service subsidy to cover what the code-sharing partner carrier doesn't.  There aren't many amenities on those regional planes in any event.

Meanwhile, the people inside and outside government are too wedded either to high-end bullet trains or local rapid transit to consider supplementing the regional air carriers with regional passenger trains.