Is It Time The US Ban Domestic Flights?

By: Ben Schlappig

Published: March 24, 2020

67 comments

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about how US domestic passenger flights could be virtually shut down, voluntarily or by government order. I wanted to take a look at that, and also share my take on the current situation.

In this post:

Domestic flights are empty

Despite a lack of government restrictions (at least in most parts of the country), people aren’t taking a lot of domestic US flights right now. That’s good news, because people should be staying home so that we can squash this thing and get a return to normalcy sooner rather than later.

While airlines have canceled a good percentage of flights, the reality is that many flights still have load factors of under 20%. Yesterday I shared a sampling of some United flights, which were between 5% and 14% full.

Presumably airlines are bleeding money on the routes that they’re operating. Then again, parking planes isn’t exactly cheap either.

Most domestic flights are under 20% full

Why do airlines operate mostly empty flights?

That raises the question of why US airlines continue to operate these flights. My best guess is that they’re doing so because they’re also asking for government aid right now.

Presumably the optics of asking for tens of billions of dollars looks better when you’re actually continuing to operate your business best you can within the guidelines set by the government, rather than shutting down.

At least that’s the only reasonable explanation I can think of.

Optics aside, this just seems very poorly executed, no matter what — flying empty planes is costly for airlines and bad for the environment. We don’t need over a dozen flights per day in some city pairs, when most flights are under 20% full.

I understand there’s a need for some connectivity to get people places, but the volume of flights we’re seeing seems unnecessary.

Asking for government aid while grounding all flights may send the wrong message

Options being considered to reduce domestic travel

This gets to the WSJ story I mentioned above. According to industry and federal officials, there’s serious consideration for just ending all US domestic flights. Apparently airlines are considering this independently, and the government is also considering such a ban on flights, though no decision has been made.

There are a few issues at play here:

Flights are legitimately empty, in some cases with load factors in the single digits
On Sunday traffic through TSA checkpoints was down by over 80% compared to the same day last year, and it’s expected demand will drop even more
One major issue has been that air traffic control centers have shut down every time there has been a COVID-19 case, and this has now happened several times, causing panic

TSA checkpoints are empty right now

Airlines want the government to ban domestic travel

Airlines seem to have a strong preference for the government banning domestic travel, or at least mandating reductions in frequencies, rather than voluntarily suspending operations. Why?

Government restrictions on flying give the airlines more clout when it comes to their request for government aid
In terms of labor agreements and union negotiations, a government shutdown would make things much easier for the airlines than a voluntary shutdown

Airlines would rather be forced to cancel flights, rather than do so voluntarily

Trump seems unlikely to do that

While the above is what the airlines want, it seems fairly unlikely that’s actually going to happen. During a press conference yesterday, President Trump indicated the importance of restarting the economy, and wasn’t down for the limbo we’re currently in lasting much longer:

“Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this. America will again and soon be open for business. Very soon. A lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting.”

President Trump also indicated he was likely to put less of an emphasis on social distancing at the end of the 15 day period where they hoped to slow the spread, which ends next Monday.

In light of that, it seems unlikely that now would be the time for him to shut down domestic flights.

Bottom line

While I’m not suggesting that airlines should stop operating domestic flights completely, it seems like we should see a further significant reduction in flights.

The issue is that airlines don’t want to initiate this, since the optics aren’t good while asking for government aid and negotiating with unions. Meanwhile Trump wants to restart the economy, and shutting down domestic travel won’t help with that.

At a minimum it seems like domestic frequencies should still be drastically reduced, given the lack of demand. The question is how it will get to that point…

What do you make of the current domestic flight conundrum?

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Dumbfounded Guest

March 25, 2020, 8:29 am

Getting back to the original question: Obviously sufficient air traffic should be maintained to provide air freight / mail service. If the passenger loads are not sufficient to support this (they aren't), this minimum service should be financially subsidized by the govt. Ideally the airlines would coordinate their schedules to provide non-duplicative schedules between major population centers. Frequency should not be curtailed so significantly that load factors exceed 50 % (above that the flights themselves become potential sites for spread of infection). Passengers NEED to be at least screened for fever at airport entrances, with febrile passengers denied entry. This has been done in many areas in Asia for over a decade. Airlines should be fogging planes between every flight. (again look to Asia, South Korea in particular) Flight attendants, gate agents, etc should be wearing masks and gloves. Airport employees should be required to practice social distancing when their work allows (they aren't).

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BIndair New Member

March 25, 2020, 2:30 am

For anyone who’s interested in almost real-time numbers, (graphs per country, age, sex etc.) Also for the US. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/

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Jimmy Guest

March 24, 2020, 11:21 pm

Wow, all I can say is wow with a lot of these comments. A lot of ignorance, denial, callousness. If you social distance, pretty much shut things down, bridge the gap with aid (which sadly many countries can't do however which is a problem) then the virus could be mostly eliminated in 8-12 weeks according to experts. Europe, Japan, China, Singapore, and USA and Canada can easily do this. Limit travel from the other countries and provide aid (food, etc) to help those countries. Get a vaccine, possible treatments, and end it until the next mutated destructive virus comes calling. Otherwise a 1% death rate will lead to 3m fewer Americans and 60m globally. That will hurt global GDP.

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Reed Guest

March 24, 2020, 10:51 pm

*collapse of society. Damn autocorrect.

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Reed Guest

March 24, 2020, 10:49 pm

Without disputing ANY of the epidemiology, and stipulating everything about the science of flattening the curve... the worry is very, very real that we are committing economic suicide, plain and simple, with the level of open-ended draconian lockdowns of billions of people based on a highly noble, but narrow purpose (suppressing this specific virus). And that there are mounting irreversible economic disasters happening every day which will cause actual, literal death and violence from coming economic depression and despair. Which could kill many millions of people over the next few years, across a mind-numbing array of knock-on effects. Savage economic collapse is how wars start. The question few people are willing to grapple with, in flippantly calling people “idiots” or “anti-science” is: are we recognizing at all that a line DOES exist, somewhere, where continued self-inflicted economic destruction is no longer worth the potential lives saved from not catching the virus? And I mean in worth it LIVES, not money. It’s so short-sighted to think the world under endless lockdown won’t explode with hunger, non-viral sickness, depression, suicide, crime, etc. The alternative is not “do nothing and sacrifice millions”, either. It’s an incredibly complex problem, and I don’t have an answer. We’re probably right to be under lockdown right now, for a few weeks. I think that keeps us firmly on the right side of the balance, even if it causes high unemployment and a recession. But lockdown for months, or a year, or 18 months (!!!) as some undoubtedly intelligent British researchers propose? I can’t imagine the kind of hellish world that would result from trying to impose or maintain such a world-ending lockdown. The reduced deaths from coronavirus after 18 months of a mostly-unemployed world would be vastly outnumbered by the deaths from ensuing violence and collapse of Soviet. It simply can’t happen.

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