Canceled flights, long lines, and overall chaos. Airlines are trying to keep up as travel demand goes through the roof following pandemic-related restrictions.

“When the pandemic hit, for most airlines around the country, our traffic volumes dropped by 85, 90, sometimes more than 90 percent,” Captain Marc Champion, the managing director of flight training at United Airlines, said. “With the traffic recovery, we’ve had to recover a lot of people that we had been placed on the sideline, in some cases some carriers had furloughed, to get airline operations back to where they were pre-pandemic.”

Fewer pilots to staff the flights.

Consulting firm Oliver Wyman estimates that in most scenarios, there will be a global gap of 34,000 pilots by 2025.

“We can't hire enough pilots to keep up with how many airplanes we have to fly,” Captain M’Lis Ward with United Airlines said. She is also an evaluator at the training center and has been flying for more than 30 years.

It’s not a new problem. Airlines were looking to fill the pilot pipeline before the pandemic.

At United Airlines’ expanding training center, pilots get first-hand experience in simulators. United plans to train around 5,000 pilots by 2030 through their United Aviate Academy, their pilot training school. Captain Champion said United is pretty well staffed currently.

This summer, there have been waves of canceled flights due to weather and staff shortages. American Airlines cut three destinations from its network in June. The same month, Delta Airlines cut flights to seven cities.

But there are even more efforts to tap into groups who may not see it as a career option.

“The push right now for women and people of color and minorities also…is not just because this is the right thing to do,” Captain Ward said. “It’s because there are a lot of talented pilots out there that don't have the opportunity.”

She says finances are part of it.

Captain Ward was reportedly the first black woman captain in commercial aviation.

“I'm not going to say that I felt incredibly welcomed as a woman of color…when I first got hired,” she said. “Thirty years ago to today, it's completely opposite.”

Seven percent of all airline pilots are women. Only one percent are women of color, according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nonprofits advocating for more minority representation in aviation are becoming more common.

“If you don't see it, it's hard to visualize yourself doing it. For women, for me, I would say that's the biggest barrier even now,” Angel Hughes, the founder of nonprofit Sisters of the Skies, said.

The nonprofit provides mentorship and scholarships to women of color interested in flying.

“These companies, various companies, everybody wants pilots,” Hughes said.

“If you look at the demand for airline employees over the course of the next decade, if we don't cast a wider net and get underrepresented groups more excited about careers in aviation, we’re never going to be able to find the numbers of people that we need to staff our airline. Both at the airports and on board our aircraft. So that's a business imperative for us,” Captain Champion said.

For airlines, getting people interested is just step one. Captain Ward and Hughes strive to offer opportunities to those who may or may not know the opportunity is there.

“What’s the end result? We have more great pilots. It's not taking away an opportunity from anyone. It’s adding opportunity for everyone,” Captain Ward said. The United Aviate Academy – a pilot career development program – hopes to have at least half of the pilots trained at the academy be women or people of color.

“The pilot pipeline starts at the point where we are incentivizing and motivating people to be pilots, professional pilots. It's something that starts in high schools, junior high schools,” Captain Champion said.

The Royal Air Force flight that transported Queen Elizabeth II's coffin from Edinburgh to Greater London was the most tracked flight in history, according to the website Flightradar24.

The flight, destined for RAF Northolt was tracked within its first minute in the air, and as the BBC reported, the huge amount of web traffic to the sight during the flights caused disruptions for administrators.

The previous record for the most tracked flight was when U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's flight from the U.S. on her tour of Asia was followed as she flew to Taiwan. That flight was followed by some 2.2 million viewers of Flightradar24.

As the BBC reported, Queen Elizabeth II's coffin was transported on an RAF Globemaster C-17 after it finished lying in state at St. Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh. It then was flown to Greater London, where it was driven to Buckingham Palace in London.

Princess Anne and her husband, Sir Timothy Laurence, accompanied the coffin on the flight.

The princess said, "It has been an honor and a privilege to accompany her on her final journeys."

She said she felt fortunate to be with her "dearest mother" in her final hours of life before her death.

MOSES LAKE, Wash. (AP) — A prototype, all-electric airplane took its first flight Tuesday morning in central Washington state.

The Seattle Times reports that if the Federal Aviation Administration eventually certifies the small airplane to carry passengers, it could become the first all-electric commercial airplane.

The plane, built by startup Eviation, was built to carry nine passengers and up two pilots. It took off from Moses Lake, Washington, at 7:10 a.m. Tuesday, and landed eight minutes later.

The company's goal is to show such electric planes are viable as commuter aircraft flying at an altitude of about 15,000 feet (4,572 meters).

The plane, designed by engineers in Washington state and Israel, is powered by 21,500 small Tesla-style battery cells.

A Florida college student who shot to internet fame recently after he began tracking the private jets of billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, is now tracking flight paths of the planes of Russian oligarchs.

19-year-old Jack Sweeney has now started the new automated accounts on Twitter: @RUOligarchJets and @Putinjet, which follow some of Russia's richest people, in their planes.

The accounts gained somewhere around 300,000 followers just days after some of the toughest sanctions since Russia invaded Ukraine had been levied onto Russia's banks and its most powerful.

Sweeney's is able to publish real-time movements by going around data from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration that would allow plane owners to block this kind of tracking, according to Forbes.

The account @Putinjet publicizes the movements of aircraft associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Sweeney said that he made the new automated Twitter bots over the weekend after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Sweeney told Bloomberg in an interview, "The aircrafts these oligarchs have are absolutely crazy."

As CNN noted, some of Russia's richest are traveling on commercial-sized aircraft like the Airbus A319 and Boeing's 737.

"Their planes are huge compared to other jets," Sweeney said.

In January, tech titan Elon Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to close the automated Twitter account @ElonJet.

"Can you take this down?," Musk wrote. "It's a security risk."

"I don't love the idea of being shot by a nutcase," Musk continued.

As CNN reported, Sweeney countered the offer with $50,000. The deal fell through when Musk said that it didn't feel right to pay to shut down the account.

After struggling through the global pandemic, air travel is set for a rebound — and that is stoking concerns about the climate.

Aviation's environmental footprint is significant. It's considered one of the fast-growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet.

That is why the airline industry has committed to net-zero emissions by 2050 — but it won't be easy.

"2050 seems like a long way away," said Sharon Pinkerton with Airlines for America. "But if we're going to meet our targets, then we're going to have to have both speed and scale."

New sustainable fuels and more efficient aircraft are on the horizon — and some solutions are already taking off.

The innovators of the world are creating new hydrogen, electric and solar-powered airplanes.

"It has to be able to be dropped into the system, and it has to be safe," Pinkerton said.

Boeing has pledged to develop the world's first zero-emission commercial aircraft by 2035 using hydrogen propulsion. United Airlines is planning to purchase 100 hydrogen engines by 2028 from a company called Zero Avia.

Aviation contributes just over 2% to global carbon dioxide emissions, and experts say that amount could triple by 2050 if action isn't taken.

Watch the video above to learn more.

HAMPTON, Va. — A test airplane that could change the way people fly is nearing completion in California, with Virginia scientists and engineers playing a big role in making it happen.

NASA's X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) aircraft is designed to break the sound barrier without the loud and disruptive sonic boom that typically accompanies Mach 1 speeds, leading to the banning of supersonic travel over land.

The NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, took an early lead in the project, known as Low Boom Flight Demonstrator, when it began a few years ago.

"People would rather have faster air travel if they could so our goal with this project is to have those rules changed," said Craig Nickol, the project manager for the Low Boom Flight Demonstrator.

Nickol, who's based at Langley, says research centers across the country are working on the project, including around 20-30 scientists and engineers in the Hampton area.

Langley played a key role in early design and testing. Specific major contributions include the creation of a real-time camera and screen system pilots will use to see out of the aircraft, which lacks a cockpit window due to design constraints.

"They've actually finished it. They've done ground tests on that system, they've even done flight tests on the system and it's been delivered out to the West Coast already from Langley," Nickol said.

With Lockheed Martin set to finish construction on the X-59 this year, ground testing can begin as early as this fall, Nickol says, with the first test flight set for Summer 2022.

According to NASA, test flights over Armstrong Flight Research Center and Edwards Air Force Base will follow in 2023 to ensure the aircraft works as designed. From there, the agency will test over select communities across the country to see how people react.

The hope is to turn flight data over to federal and international aviation regulators in 2027, who could change the rules allowing for supersonic travel over land.

"I've always been an airplane nut and this is kind of like the best thing you could think of to do as an aerospace engineer is to be able to have a chance to design, build and test a whole new airplane, a research airplane that could potentially change the way we travel," Nickol said.

With travel times cut roughly in half, a whole new world of travel could be opened, with much of the early work done in Hampton Roads.

This story was originally published by Anthony Sabella at WTKR.

February is all about celebrating black history, and throughout the month we'll be honoring influential African Americans whose stories you might not yet know. Some are pioneers in their field, some helped spark the civil rights movement, and all have contributed incredible things to not only black history, but to the history of the United States as a whole.Discover the story of how Bessie Coleman became the first African American woman to earn her pilot license by watching the video above.

When we spoke with Tyson Phillips and Brett Harlow, they said it was a perfect day to fly in their eyes.

“An absolutely beautiful day to fly, light winds,” Phillips said.

So, it was hard to believe that they’d want to change that.

“When we start flying, our pilot, Brett, is going to start experiencing bad visibility,” Phillips explained.

Tyson Phillips is the president of AT Systems LLC. They’ve developed a device to help train pilots in bad visibility situations.

“I cannot see anything out in front of the aircraft at this point,” said Brett Harlow, Chief Pilot of Axxeum.

Harlow was wearing an augmented reality device, which simulates clouds, dust and other weather elements that limit visibility.

“The pilot has no idea when the instructor will input,” Harlow said. “So, the pilot has no idea when to expect it.”

“With our system, we control the visibility between unlimited visibility down to no visibility and everywhere in between,” Phillips said. “When we confuse the brain with both visual and vestibular illusions, the brain struggles to comprehend and it goes into what we call a fast brain mode. It responds intuitively, but the problem is to respond intuitively. You have to have been trained and we’ve never trained pilots to deal with visual and vestibular confusion.”

That means both your eyes and your sense of balance are being thrown off.

Phillips has been in the Army for 20 years and a pilot for 17 of those. This idea came from an accident that hit close to home for him.

“In 2015, the Louisiana National Guard crashed a Black Hawk off the coast of Florida,” Phillips said. “The aircraft involved in that accident was the most advanced the Army had with a very experienced crew which led us to why do we keep having these accidents?”

Weather-related helicopter crashes aren’t anything new.

“This is a problem that's gone on as long as helicopter aviation has been around,” Phillips said.

More recently, the crash involving NBA star Kobe Bryant brought this topic worldwide attention. Phillips saw it as a learning moment, one that could bring the need for more weather-related pilot training to the spotlight.

“With the Kobe crash, it's easy to armchair quarterback and it's easy to look back on things and say, 'I won't do this, I won't do that,'” Harlow said.

Harlow flies for Axxeum, a company that does everything from search and rescue, to firefighting, to cargo and charter flights.

“Definitely is a force multiplier for the training side of it.”

Phillips said they’ve built a number of safety systems, since they are flying helicopters and purposefully obstructing a pilot’s vision. First, a safety pilot who is focused on outside the aircraft. Second, limits on the aircraft.

If the training pilot breaks those limits, Phillips said, "the entire assembly will go clear and clear in front of his field of view, the reason for this is that added layer of safety.”

“With devices like this, it definitely adds to more of the real world scenarios the pilots need,” Harlow said.

As Phillips continues to develop the device, his goal is to have it as an extra tool for pilot training for military, law enforcement, private, commercial, you name it.

“Any kind of training device or any kind of training input that I can get as a pilot, and I think most pilots would agree, that there's no such thing as over training in aviation,” Harlow said.