Laurie Garrow

CNN Travel asked Laurie Garrow, a professor of civil engineering at Georgia Tech with an expertise in aviation, what factors helped Atlanta.

Laurie Garrow, a professor at Georgia Tech, directed me to FlightAware, a website that tracks airline-industry statistics. On any given day, it seems normal to have a cancellation rate of about 1 percent—or one cancellation for every 100 scheduled flights.

any travelers returned to the skies in 2021. The Sunday after Thanksgiving, 2.4 million individuals were screened by the Transportation Security Administration, a number just shy of the 2.5 million who were screened on the same day in 2019, as reported by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

The pandemic has brought fresh challenges, said Laurie Garrow, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta who specializes in air travel.

ince February, Delta has dealt with major issues trying to keep up with the demand of people flying amidst staffing shortages and flight cuts, but professor and aviation expert at Georgia Tech Laurie Garrow explained how these issues arose from changes that the airline made at the beginning of the pandemic. 

Images of queues, huge piles of luggage and even pilots loading their planes with cargo have plagued the media throughout the world. Airports have been in chaos for months as they have attempted to re-emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, with Europe, the UK and the USA all having suffered the worst of the effects so far. Flight cancelations have played havoc with business travellers and holiday makers alike, and the problem only appears to be getting worse as a whole raft of flights have recently been cancelled in the UK. 

All this begs the question, Why are things so bad right now and how do we fix the situation? So this week on the inquiry we ask, Will air travel ever return to normal?