FofF = Flights of Fancy

When I was at junior school, there were certain maths problems we had to solve. One was along the lines of, if you need 30 people to do 90 tasks and 10 people to do 30, how many people do you need to do 60 tasks? 

The answer of course is 20.

Here’s a follow-up question. If 3/5 of your staff are off sick at any one time during a pandemic, compared with only 1/5 when there’s no pandemic, how many staff should you hire for (answers in brackets):

a) 90 tasks in normal times  (38, or 37.5 if you’re a purist)
b) 30 tasks during a pandemic  (25)
c) 60 tasks during normal times  (25)
d) 60 tasks during a pandemic  (50)

Simplistic I know but the principles are sound. 

Applying this to a real-life, real-daft situation, if you ran an airline or airport that in 2019 needed 90 tasks doing but in 2020, thanks to Covid, only needed 30, you’d furlough or sack 13 people to leave you with 25 employees on your books.

Come 2022, the latest Covid variant (Omicron) is more infectious but less deadly, mainly because most people are vaccinated to the armpits. We can’t let our guard down though, because the physically vulnerable remain vulnerable and hospitals remain under pressure. Despite this, people are desperate to re-start their holidays – which is hardly a surprise – and airports and airlines have duly obliged by increasing the number of flights and destinations, and the number of tasks required has increased to 60. 

You’d think, therefore, aviation bosses would anticipate that 3/5 of their staff would be off sick at any one time, so they’d hire an additional 25 to make sure they were fully resourced at 50 employees. It appears that they haven't. Duh!

Alternatively, or maybe in addition, wouldn’t it be prudent to take extra care not to expose their employees to the virus by mandating mask-wearing and social distancing, even if the actual law has been relaxed? Course it would, but that might put some people off flying, which would impact profit margins, bonuses and dividends again, so to hell with caution and let’s go for the maximum number of passengers.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is why Heathrow, Manchester, Gatwick, Birmingham and Stansted Airports are in a mess at the moment – there are too few employees dealing with too many passengers because there’s too much Covid, and aviation bosses have too many pound-signs in their eyes, or too few brains, to do some simple maths. 

British Airways seems to be the main culprit (easyJet is also struggling), Covid infections exacerbated by lack of investment in IT, but if the airports had said: sorry, BA, we can’t deal with that many flights so are limiting the scheduling; that might have been sensible. But they’re not. So they didn’t. And passengers are suffering, as well as Blighty’s reputation.

I wonder how much (more) the CAA – the UK aviation regulator – could do / have done to improve / prevent the situation. Is that their job? What is their job? From their website, it’s to ensure that (my comments in italics):

• The aviation industry meets the highest safety standards - by negligently allowing Covid to spread?

• Consumers have choice, value for money, are protected and treated fairly when they fly. At the moment they’re lucky if they can get in the air!

• The environmental impact of aviation on local communities is effectively managed and CO2 emissions are reduced. 😖😖😖

• The aviation industry manages security risks effectively – by facilitating over-crowding and luggage-abandonment?

So I guess FofF doesn’t mean Flights of Fancy but Failure of Function.

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