United Airlines’ impressive Meltdown memo to employees – one mile at a time

United Airlines had an absolutely terrible week operationally as the airline canceled thousands of flights and stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers during one of the busiest travel times of the year. A big question that many people have asked is “why?” Why did United experience such a bad bust when other airlines didn’t?

A memo has now been sent to United staff outlining what went wrong and how United intends to prevent it in the future. Let me start by posting a copy of the note and then I’ll give my opinion.

Scott Kirby’s note to staff on the meltdown

Here’s the memo sent to United employees and signed by CEO Scott Kirby:

Team:

This was one of the most operationally challenging weeks I have experienced in my entire career.

Airlines can plan for things like hurricanes, freezing temperatures and snowstorms, but United has never experienced an extended restricted operating environment like we experienced in Newark last week.

But despite all of that, you continue to be truly amazing – many of you working in incredibly difficult circumstances with just a few hours of sleep heroically looking after each other and our customers. While I often say that my goal is to create an airline you’re proud of, this week I’m especially proud of you.

So what happened?

While weather prevailed around the system, the truly unprecedented storm was concentrated in EEA. We had to contend with severe restrictions on flight operations from Saturday, which lasted until Tuesday.

• EWR has scheduled 40 departures per hour;
• On June 25, we were limited to fewer than 20 departures per hour for four hours;
• On June 26, we were restricted to fewer than 20 departures per hour for nine hours;
• And on June 27, we were limited to fewer than 20 departures per hour for six hours

This means that the total number of aircraft able to depart EWR was reduced by 60-75% for an average of 6 to 8 hours per day. Airlines, including United, are simply not designed to have their largest hub severely constrained for four days and still operate successfully.

I shared my thoughts earlier this week about the need for the FAA to increase staffing. Since then, I’ve personally had incredibly thoughtful and constructive discussions with the FAA and Secretary Buttigieg. The current FAA leadership team inherited these challenges, and to their credit they have publicly stated they are short of thousands of air traffic controllers — and that NY/NJ airspace in particular is understaffed. N90, which manages all New York and EEA airports, is also probably the most technically demanding aviation job in the world, meaning experience makes a difference too.

But here’s how those staffing issues, combined with days of thunderstorms, really impacted United:

Thunderstorms moving west to east usually hit EWR first as they roll through the New York City area, and that ends the two departure locations that planes use to fly west from EWR. When that happened before the pandemic, some of our flights still had the option to depart north and then fly west across Canadian airspace to get where they needed to go. Sure, in such cases the flights were longer and we had to deal with delays, but we didn’t have to cancel. But there is also a shortage of staff in Canadian air traffic control, which is why these routes have been closed. In the meantime, the departures per hour are often reduced to a single digit (and often even zero) value. And that’s basically what happened between June 24th and 27th. The reality is that EWR just can’t function in thunderstorm conditions unless there are westbound departure routes, and that’s one of the biggest lessons the FAA is busily working on with us and Canada.

And after the storms passed, we needed a few more days to recover. The scale of the disruption left our planes and crews scattered and out of position across the country. However, there are definitely things we can learn in the future to help us recover faster.

Here are five things that immediately come to mind:

1. Further improvements to our crew technology. Our crew systems are among the best in the world, but they’re just not designed for what we’ve been through over the past week. We’ve had very long wait times and while we already have a lot of online functionality, we still have far too much manual work – that’s unacceptable. Our goal for the future is that you no longer have to call the workforce planning department and can operate yourself and do everything online via an app that is just as good as our customer-oriented app. We strive to make this one of our top priorities.

2. Partnering with the FAA is vital. Again, the FAA is committed to this issue and has taken important steps in the near term, such as hiring more senior managers on weekends and working with NATCA to cover any vacation/sick calls. Additionally, the two of us have significantly improved day-to-day communications between the FAA and United, with a focus on EEA.

3. Support the FAA’s efforts to find long-term solutions. First and foremost, this means that we remain committed to getting the FAA bipartisan Reauthorization Act passed, which gets them the right staffing, invests in upgrading infrastructure and technology, and gives the FAA more investment security so it can carry out long-term projects. We also support the FAA’s initiative to move EWR ATC from N90 to PHI, which we believe and the FAA will support operations at all three major New York area airports.

4. We need to balance EEA departures and arrivals. When departure routes are closed (due to thunderstorms in the west), incoming planes continue to land, and because planes cannot depart to make room for them, they fill taxiways because they get stuck in a long line. If only one plane in that row is waiting to depart, all planes behind it will get stuck and thus the entire Conga row will be trapped. The traditional way the FAA manages capacity constraints is through arrival rates. This is fine at most airports as there are multiple taxiways, gates and other places to park aircraft, but they have agreed with us to work on balancing arrivals and departures, particularly at the EEA.

5. EEA is the best international gateway available across the country. But it is also the country’s most operationally difficult airport. The Port Authority is working with us to get more gates (which are important to avoid congestion on the taxiways), but we need to further change/reduce our schedule to have even more free gates and buffers – especially during the thunderstorm season .

My overall conclusion is that while we work to control the things that are within our control, we also need to plan even better for the things that are out of our control in order to be able to move faster to recover.

I’ll end this note where I started, which is to say thank you and that I’m proud of you. It’s been an awfully difficult week with unprecedented circumstances but you persevered and did everything in your power to see us through.

We’re still monitoring several storms, but our deployment is back on track this morning.

Thank you again for your resilience, professionalism and dedication to serving our customers, especially during difficult times.

Preferably,
Scott

United’s operations failed at Newark Airport

My take on United’s explanation of operational issues

First off, let me say that I lost a lot of respect for Scott Kirby this week when he fled Newark on a private jet to fly to his vacation home as he couldn’t reliably get there with United. My problem isn’t that he flies on a private jet or even works remotely. My problem is more the optics.

Ultimately, a CEO cannot solve every problem personally, and if they hire the right people, those people should be able to help find a solution. The problem is that as CEO, he should set the tone for employees. United employees work overtime, sleep in cribs, and spend hours on hold scheduling workforces while you discover your CEO avoids all of these hassles by taking a private jet because he’s rich. A lot of employees won’t forget that, and that’s not good for the airline.

That being said, I have to give United great credit for that statement. I say “United” instead of “Kirby” because the airline has some really smart communications guys (including a former White House press secretary) who are clearly behind it, and I’m not sure Kirby deserves too much credit here.

But honestly, this explanation is thorough and accurate (well, aside from calling Newark the best international gateway in the country?) and also immediately explains what the airline will do in the future to minimize the likelihood of something like this happening happens. Essentially, the meltdown boils down to a few things:

• Newark is a very difficult airport to operate in bad weather, especially in the height of summer when the airlines are stretched to their limit, and especially because of the lack of air traffic controllers. The only flaw United has about the initial problem is how big the airline’s operations are at the airport
• As we saw with Southwest’s collapse over the holiday, the workforce management software needs an update. The thing is, it does exactly what it’s supposed to do 99.99% of the time, so airlines have a hard time justifying the investment, but when something goes wrong, it really does go wrong

I find it remarkable that there is no apology to the staff at all, just repeated mentions of how “proud” Kirby is of the staff. I imagine that’s on purpose, although it seems fair to acknowledge that staff have been let down (at the very least) by the workforce planning system.

This note from Kirby stands in stark contrast to the way Southwest communicated during its meltdown. The note to United employees acknowledges many important points while the airline is still recovering, while Southwest CEO Bob Jordan failed to even acknowledge the cause of the airline’s collapse a month after the airline collapsed.

That’s quite a contrast to the way Southwest has communicated

bottom line

A memo signed by United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has been sent to airline employees outlining the cause of the airline’s collapse and what is being done to prevent it from happening again. While I have issues with how Kirby behaved during the meltdown, and while I’m sure Kirby didn’t write that note, I’m still very impressed with the explanation.

It’s thorough, accurate, and explains what’s going to change. And the best part is that this is communicated shortly after the problems arise.

What do you think of Kirby’s message to staff?