Houston will soon lose a regional flight service and as many as 1,200 people will lose their jobs as ExpressJet Airlines readies to wind down operations by month’s end.
The regional carrier worked exclusively for United Airlines, which announced in July it would discontinue flights with ExpressJet in light of diminished travel demand during the pandemic.
Come Oct. 1, hundreds of people currently working for ExpressJet in Houston — the carrier’s largest hub — will be out of a job. The layoffs coincide with furloughs of some 1,349 people who work for United Airlines in Houston.
Many of these pilots, dispatchers, mechanics and flight attendants have worked for ExpressJet for decades, according to union leaders for the various working groups.
“They’re going to lose their jobs in an environment where there aren’t any aircraft jobs,” said Chris Moore, international rep for the Teamsters’ airline division. “It’s a pretty sad day for us; I’ve known a lot of these guys from the very beginning.”
Major airlines use regional carriers such as ExpressJet to run smaller flights that aren’t profitable enough for the bigger companies, said Henry Harteveldt, an airline industry analyst. Regional carriers fly smaller planes, make off-peak runs, provide connecting flights for a major airline’s larger flights and tend to pay their employees at a lower rate, he said.
United invited ExpressJet and others to vie for what would be its sole small-craft contract, Harteveldt said, and in the end ExpressJet lost the bid and chose to shut down.
According to ExpressJet, United selected CommutAir in its place on July 30. Though United’s partnership with ExpressJet could run through the end of the year, “ExpressJet and United’s management teams decided that due to uncertain schedules from October to December, it would best to accelerate the termination of all ExpressJet scheduled service flying, on behalf of United Express, on Sept. 30, 2020.”
Flyers aren’t likely to feel the effects of ExpressJet’s loss, Harteveldt said, since travel demand remains low and United replaced the carrier with another.
“Unfortunately, ExpressJet is not the only regional airline to have been forced to shut down,” he said.
It’s a shame to see so many skilled workers lose their jobs, he said, but “airports are ghost towns.”
“These are very dire financial operating conditions from an airline standpoint,” he said, noting they have to operate “surgically” in these times. “It’s forcing all of these airlines to make some very, very difficult decisions.”
ExpressJet’s roots trace back to the 1990s, when Continental Airlines started using smaller planes for connecting flights and trips to smaller cities in the region, said Pete Garcia, a former Continental executive and Houston airline industry analyst. He said the initiative grew into the country’s first regional service, ExpressJet, which spun off in the early 2000s, forming its own airline. But the business model couldn’t hold on its own, he said United Airlines, which merged with Continental in 2013, acquired a 49.9 percent interest in the ExpressJet’s parent company in January 2019.
It’s a big loss for Houston and the region that ExpressJet is closing up shop, he said, “but without the demand, there's no reason to fly the airplanes.”
ExpressJet declined to say how many Houston-area employees would lose their jobs while it winds down operations, though it notified the Texas Workforce Commission in July that it could lay off as many as 1,202 people at the Bush Intercontinental Airport.
The regional carrier employs about 1,400 pilots at IAH, according to the Air Line Pilots Association, though because many pilots live far from their bases it remains unclear how many of those pilots live in Houston.
Moore said 135 mechanics at IAH will lose their jobs, and 306 IAH-based flight attendants will be laid off, according to the Machinists Union. Nationwide, ExpressJet employed roughly 3,000 people, union leaders said.
Jeff Foster, a Houston-based dispatcher with ExpressJet and a representative of the Transport Workers Union, said he’s worked for the company for 21 years. Sept. 30 will be his last day, and at 56 he will now have to seek an alternative career path.
Unlike many of the airline industry furloughs, he said there’s no hope ExpressJet employees will be called back to work.
“We’re not getting recalled; we’re going out of a business,” he said. “There’s a difference.”
Foster said he may end up working as an emergency dispatcher, while some of his colleagues have already gotten hired to work dispatch posts for trucking companies.
He resists the temptation to dwell on the sadness of it.
“This is something that is out of everyone’s control,” he said. “We’re just all along for the ride.”
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