Great Western Coffee Shop

... But American companies don't have a shortage of people. They have a shortage of wages, benefits, and training. Companies could fix that problem, but they haven't.

Take Horizon Air, a regional airline that services the Pacific Northwest, which the Seattle Times reports is "cutting its flight schedule this summer because of a severe shortage of pilots for its Q400 turboprop planes. The shortage became a crisis this past month when Horizon was forced to cancel more than 318 flights because it didn't have enough pilots to fly all its planes." That represents 6.2% of the flights Horizon runs between Seattle and places like Boise, Spokane, and Portland.

Think about that. Flying these routes isn't some ancillary or side business for Horizon. It's the only business it is in. Canceling flights is damaging to your brand and your company's long-term prospects — it alienates and annoys customers who have already purchased tickets. And it's damaging to your short-term profits. You're in the business of moving people from point A to point B, the more you can move the better. You're already committed to pay for the overhead—the planes, insurance, the gate slots at airports, the maintenance, and the ground crews. You need volume to be as high as it can.

Choosing not to run flights that have paying passengers is an enormous own goal. It's the equivalent of Starbucks deciding not to open several hundred stores for which it is paying rent because it doesn't have enough managers.

Horizon Air isn't some tiny operation unable to cope with the vagaries of the marketplace. It's a unit of Alaska Air, a publicly held company that has a market capitalization of $11 billion and that chalked up $1.7 billion in revenue and $99 million in net income in its most recent quarter. It has a big balance sheet, vast resources, stock, borrowing capacity, and access to all kinds of services.

It's probably best that we don't draw this particular news item to the attention of member TaplowGreen.


Ooops.  :P

...........incidentally, I wonder if Horizon have any problems with "more planes than usual needing repairs at the same time"?  This now seems to have been affecting GWR for months, so I'm not sure what constitutes "usual"? (50-odd short forms listed today, seems par for the course)

Well if there was ever a day to have short formed trains on the Weymouth line today is it. With the weather forecast for today and tomorrow being poor there will still be plenty of seats on the services that are short formed. Maybe the weather swayed the decision to run shorter sets on the Weymouth line to allow busier services to run as normal length. If it had been a hot and sunny day....?

17:53 Chippenham to Melksham - Casper carrying 90 people!