Veteran flight attendant Kristie Koerbel has seen the summer travel mess from the other side of the cabin, and her advice for passengers — shared via The New York Times and picked up by Gadling — doubles as a candid look at how airlines actually run right now.
Her top tip is simple: download the airline's app before you fly. In the middle of this year's wave of cancellations, the app can tell you a flight is axed before the crew themselves are notified. It also lets you track your checked bags, follow the incoming aircraft that will carry you, and rebook on the spot without queueing at a gate counter that's forty people deep.
Ever wondered why cabins feel like a fridge? That's deliberate. Crews often keep the aircraft cold on purpose because heat makes airsickness worse — nobody wants a cabin full of people reaching for the sick sacks. So pack a layer even on a short hop, even in July.
Koerbel also explains a quirk of the system that catches travellers out: flight crews face legal duty-time limits, usually 12 to 16 hours per stretch. If your inbound aircraft is delayed and the crew bumps against that cap, they legally cannot operate your flight — and with few spare crews on standby these days, that often means a cancellation rather than a delay. It has nothing to do with your destination or how full the plane is; when the clock runs out, it runs out.
The staffing crunch goes well beyond the people in uniform. Ground crews — the folks who park aircraft, operate the jet bridges, load and unload luggage and scan boarding passes — are also stretched thin. Pandemic-era buyouts and cuts pushed many of them out of aviation altogether, and with employers like Amazon and Uber offering comparable pay, airlines are struggling to win them back. That's part of why bags go astray and boarding takes longer than it used to.
For anyone flying this season, the takeaways are practical: treat the airline app as your real-time control panel, build slack into connections, and accept that some cancellations come down to legal crew limits no one at the gate can override. A little insider knowledge won't fix the chaos, but it helps you see it coming — and rebook faster than everyone else.