Airlines blame Canada travel chaos on weather, pilot shortage

Sunwing Airlines Inc. said it failed to serve customers because of a shortage of pilots over the holiday. Air Canada blamed bad weather for chaos at airports that left thousands of customers stranded. 

“We know we could have done better,” Sunwing President Len Corrado said at a Canadian House of Commons committee hearing on Thursday. 

Winter storms of snow and ice, a lack of airline staff, and operational problems at airports forced Sunwing, a leisure carrier, to cancel 67 flights. The company has received 7,000 complaints; some passengers were stuck for days in Mexico without knowing when they would return.

Airlines battle winter storm disruption from New York to Seattle

Sunwing went from 40 pilots during the Covid pandemic to more than 400 for this season, Corrado said. But it still couldn’t hire quickly enough: More than 60 pilots were expected under a government program for temporary foreign workers, but their applications weren’t successful. 

Air Canada executives said the airline was fully staffed, with a prudent schedule and 15 aircraft set aside to help handle disruptions. Still, storms and cold weather caused bottlenecks in Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto.

“In such situations, we prioritize international flights, which are more difficult to recover because of the long flight times,” said Kevin O’Connor, Air Canada’s vice president for system operations control. “Overall, we operated 98% of international flights during the holiday period.” But in many cases, luggage didn’t show up on time.

Transport Minister Omar Alghabra plans to strengthen air passenger regulations in the coming months. “Passengers are told too often that they are not entitled to compensation when they really are,” he said. “This situation has generated an avalanche of complaints to the Transportation Agency since last summer.” 

The minister said airlines must provide refunds within 30 days when flights are canceled. “Passengers are not on the hook for a canceled flight even if it was the weather or a pandemic.”

Air carriers argued that new regulations should encompass all participants in the travel industry, such as airport authorities and government bodies — not only the airlines. 

“It was really a perfect storm of significant, epic bad weather, an industry healing from the Covid extended shutdown, labor still very weak across the board,” said Deborah Flint, chief executive officer of the Greater Toronto Airports Authority. “Cancellations due to weather have a compounding effect.”