we are honored to bring you a senior research analyst at cowen helane becker. sk the question that every single listener wants to know including ms. keene. is this turmoil at airlines risking the wonderful safety record of commercial airlines? helane: not at all. the u.s. and worldwide airlines pride themselves on being safe. safety first. that is the most important thing and i think that will be the case going forward. the issue with delays and cancellations is another. tom: item not want to make jokes about this. we all have our own stories on this. let's start with the pilot shortage. they are not going to fix this by labor day, are they? helane: not at all. think about it this way. over the past two years, approximately 10,000 pilots retired and left the profession. the industry needs to hire to replace that just to get back to where we were in 2019. that is 10,000 pilots right there. they are about 2000 pilots retiring annually. when you think about replacing those 10,000 plus the additional 2000 that we need just to replace retiring pilots and pilots on to

with the biden administration to talk about solutions like staffing for the summer let's bring in helane beckerthe irony is this. terminal c at newark is mobbed. i have never seen it more crowded in 15 years. terminal b which i had to go through for global entry was empty. that is the international. i know the overall numbers are not higher, but i got to imagine the domestic flights and number of passengers are the highest they've ever been, no? >> absolutely, brian you are right. we forecast that domestic u.s. travel up 40% from where it was in 2019. the reason you don't see that showing up in the tsa numbers is because of what you pointed out. international is still down 50%. business is down 40% if those two groups were back to 2019 levels, the tsa would regularly be screening 3 million passengers a day the system could not handle that it can barely handle what it is doing now. the overall numbers, as you pointed out, are still down 10% from where they were four years ago. >> in terms inals that are domestic at hartsfield at atlanta and o'hare why don't they shift the gates to the internatio

tom: helane becker joins us now. a three hour conversation on air travel as we come out of the pandemic. let me get out of the way. spirit, frontier, and jetblue. to borrow a phrase from cfa level four, is this dinosaurs mating? is this much ado about next to nothing? helane: well, we will see what happens. it is certainly not a done deal in any case because they need regulatory approval and the regulatory hurdles in the current administration are pretty high, so there is no guarantee either deal gets done. obviously spirit thinks they have a better proposal and really are taking to task the spirit airlines board of directors and management team. tom: just to get this out of the way because lisa has 47 other questions that really matter, how does spirit, frontier, jetblue spirit, whatever the name is going to be, how do they compete with the juggernauts like united, delta, and american air? helane: it is a good question, and i think that is why they need to merge. i think any airline currently not named american, del