Why are so many flights being canceled? Aviation analysts say it's due to airlines' inability to plan amid a tight labor market.

• Airlines have collectively canceled thousands of flights, with labor shortages often being blamed.
• Insider spoke to aviation consultants and a union boss to discover why airlines are short-staffed.

It's not a surprise if you're feeling nervous about flying at the moment. The list of global airlines to have canceled flights over the last few months reads like a departure board.

$4, $4, $4 $4, $4 are among the long list of carriers to have all culled flights in by the hundreds. The result has been $4, $4, long layovers, and acute disappointment.

Some passengers who have phoned customer services to complain $4 and others faced the prospect of being $4.

There are multiple reasons fueling the disruptions, from bad weather to the $4, but $4.

Insider spoke to two aviation consultants and a union boss about why the industry is struggling with staff shortages.

Firstly, it's complicated …

The labor shortage is "not black and white," said John Strickland, of JLS Consulting. Different employers within the industry are affected in their own individual way.

$4, either because they were able to $4 during the pandemic, or received longer packages of support from their governments.

While highly disruptive for passengers, the cancelations represent a small proportion of flights globally, he said.

The pandemic exacerbated existing shortages and changed the labor market

Like many industries, $4 before the pandemic but the pandemic made it much worse as airlines were forced to furlough or let go of workers in their thousands.

Oxford Economics estimates that globally, there were 2.3 million fewer people working in aviation by September 2021 compared with the beginning of the pandemic, per the $4.

"Now that you're coming out of COVID, and the demand is actually showing signs of rapid recovery. You're starting to see that they $4," said Umang Gupta, of Alton Aviation, a consultancy. Something that was made worse by airlines offering pilots voluntary opt-outs during the pandemic, Gupta added.

Add into that a squeezed post-pandemic labor market, which is making it harder for some aviation companies to recruit as $4, or reflect on their career.

"Now you're seeing that people are not ready to take the job at the salary levels that were offered $4," Gupta said.

Perhaps the best example of this is a simmering battle ongoing at London's Heathrow airport, hundreds of workers threatened to strike, though the $4 Union bosses said the planned strike was due to pay issues. An 8% pay rise has now been agreed.

In general, industry leaders have "been too optimistic about the preparedness of people they've let go to come back," said Mike Clancy, general secretary of the Prospect union, which represents air traffic controllers, licensed technical engineers, and air traffic systems specialists in the UK.

"At the present minute, $4, it's even more $4 than normal. Because the traveling public are not happy," Clancy told Insider.

Uncertainty has not let bosses adequately plan

Airline bosses have been accused of failing to act quickly enough to counter staff shortages and of optimistically overselling tickets for flights that they knew they couldn't service.

Strickland — who used to work in network planning for airlines — insists amid two years of uncertainty, emergent COVID-19 variants and constantly changing travel restrictions, airlines have been unable to plan adequately because their normal planning cycle has been disrupted and the data which supports it effectively rendered almost useless.

The swathe of cancelations the industry is seeing is an attempt to slim down capacity and stabilize operations.

How long will it last?

No one knows quite how long it could last.

The $4 is likely to further boost international traffic. Gupta highlights that many East Asian airlines are still yet to resume full international travel.

"I can't see the summer being anything but lumpy and bumpy," Strickland said. "There are many uncertainties."