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.

DAYTON, Ohio —

The Dayton International Airport temporarily shut down due to a plane crash on Wednesday evening.

According to FAA officials, just after 7 p.m. United Express Air Wisconsin Flight 3818 slid off the runway shortly after landing.

According our sister station WDTN, 45 passengers and 3 crew members were aboard the plane at the time of the crash.

The FAA sent out a statement about the incident Wednesday evening.

Air Wisconsin Flight 3818 slid off the runway after landing at Dayton International Airport around 7:10 p.m. local time today. No injuries were reported. Passengers were bused to the terminal. The Bombardier CRJ200 departed from Washington Dulles International Airport. The FAA will investigate. Please contact the airline for additional information.

Airport officials said flight passengers would be transported via shuttle buses.

No injuries have been reported as of 8:45 p.m., officials said. The plane suffered minor damage.

Dayton International Airport reopened for operations shortly after 9 p.m.

WLWT has a crew headed to the scene to gather more information.

At least two major airlines in the United States have canceled flights just before Christmas Eve.

On Thursday, United Airlines said it had to "cancel some flights" because of the omicron variant of the coronavirus.

"The nationwide spike in omicron cases this week has had a direct impact on our flight crews and the people who run our operation," said a United memo obtained by CNN.

United has canceled more than 100 Friday flights, according to flight tracking site FlightAware.

United said it is "notifying impacted customers in advance of them coming to the airport," according to a company statement. "We're sorry for the disruption and are working hard to rebook as many people as possible and get them on their way for the holidays."

Later Thursday night, Delta Air Lines also canceled flights. The airline canceled 93 Christmas Eve flights, according to FlightAware. That's 4% of its total schedule.

Delta said the cancellations are due to multiple issues including the omicron variant.

"We apologize to our customers for the delay in their holiday travel plans," Delta said in a statement. "Delta people are working hard to get them to where they need to be as quickly and as safely as possible on the next available flight."

It’s not just people, freight is also a burden for the airline industry this season.

“We are a passenger airline, but not many people realize that almost every flight you go on, there’s actually cargo below as well,” Chris Busch, the managing director of the Americas region for United Airlines Cargo, said. “This is a normal peak season for air, but it’s definitely, I think, the largest one any of us have seen in a very long time.”

Ships are backed up at seaports across the U.S., waiting to unload cargo from overseas.

“The demand is strong from all places into the U.S.,” Busch said.

As a result, air cargo is seeing more demand, especially from overseas markets. But the number of international flights isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels.

“Our transatlantic network, I think, right now, is roughly 75 percent of what it was pre-pandemic, but our transpacific network is only around 25 to 30 percent of what we were pre-pandemic,” Busch said.

And planes can only carry so much.

“The amount of freight you can carry on an airplane is a lot less than what you can carry on an ocean vessel,” he said.

“Typically we would use air cargo for very expensive, very time-sensitive products,” Donald Maier, the Dean of Maritime Transportation, Logistics, and Management at the California State University Maritime Academy, said. “There are so many different factors right now that have impacted our supply chains from inventory levels to significant consumer demand, COVID closures of the ports, our ports trying to catch up with it.”

The bottlenecks go from one area to the next. It’s something Maier said consumers should be wary of.

“As a consumer, plan on having higher prices. Unfortunately, and I can’t say that’s all because of the delays in the supply chain, there’s just a significant amount of demand. And we still have a pandemic we’re all living through so because of the uncertainty there is that challenge we still have to manage,” he said.

“Definitely a rise in prices, there's no question about it,” Joel Sutherland, a professor of practice in supply chain management at the University of San Diego, said.

He has more than 30 years of experience in logistics.

“If we’re going to meet the demand of consumers, then we have to use air freight. More importantly, if they don't use air freight and pay the premium then they risk losing business to their competitors that are doing this,” he explained.

Many airlines, like United Airlines, are trying to meet this demand by offering cargo-only flights. While it’s more expensive, Busch said it helps support the supply chain.

“They are still passenger aircraft, but we call them our freight-only flights,” he said.

United has moved more than 1.6 billion pounds of cargo since the beginning of the pandemic. The airline says 730 million pounds were moved on cargo-only flights. About 14,000 cargo-only flights have been flown by the company since the pandemic began.

“We’re doing all we can to support, but I don't know if it's going to be the solution for everyone," Busch said.

For now, consumers can still expect longer shipping times, higher prices, and possible delays.

“Be prepared for this to continue for at least another year, rough guess estimate,” Maier said.

United Airlines is trying to bring back supersonic travel. They announced a deal this week with a Denver-area start-up called Boom Supersonic.

It announced it's buying 15 new jets from a Denver startup.

The jets would carry between 65 to 88 people at a speed of Mach 1.7 and it would cut flight times almost in half.

A flight from New York to London would be 3.5 hours compared to the normal 6.5 hours.

The planes have not been built yet. United plans to have passengers on-board by 2029. It's been nearly 20 years since the Concorde supersonic plane was retired.

Robin Dich and Alex Livingston contributed to this report.

Inside a hangar that sits just outside the runways at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, Russ Peterson is one of the many people responsible for making sure United Airlines planes run smoothly – both in the air and on the ground.

“The guys today are going to remove all the external tape, flags, covers,” he explained.

A specific airplane had been in storage for just over a month.

“We have to do a lot of checks on the airplane,” said Peterson, a shift manager for United Airlines Aircraft Maintenance in Cleveland, Ohio.

It’s a process that takes about three and a half days.

“We go over the whole entire fuselage, wings, everything to make sure there's nothing out of place.”

But for planes that have been in storage long-term, the process takes longer.

“Long-term storage takes probably five to six days,” he said.

Multiply that by dozens of planes at that one location.

As the pandemic hit last year, the CDC ranked flying a moderately high risk for COVID-19 and every airline grounded aircraft, leaving these companies scrambling for storage space.

“When they first came about and this all hit the fan we decided to take on as many as we could,” Peterson said. “We took on 53 which was the second largest city of stored aircraft initially.”

Peterson and his team were now in charge of dozens of empty aircraft. After working there for almost four decades, he said he had never seen anything like it.

“The work that we've done on the 53 aircraft far surpasses what we normally do because we’ve had to work so much harder to keep them and maintain them. Airplanes are made to fly, not sit on the ground. We had to jack airplanes and rotate tires so they don't get flat spots, so there's always something to do on every airplane.”

It led to images of planes stacked next to each other on the tarmac – one of the jarring images during the height of the pandemic that showed the toll on the travel industry.

“At the worst scenario we only had 200 airplanes flying when normally we had over 700 flying,” he said. “And all the airlines basically had to do the same thing.”

On May 20, 2020, United Airlines had the most aircraft in storage with 515 planes.

Now, things are looking up. With vaccines available nationwide and loosened restrictions, more people are filing seats, which translates into more planes filling the skies.

United Airlines said they’ve seen summer bookings for June through August go up 214% from July 2020.

It’s led to the greatest demand for trips that Heather Travis has ever seen.

“About March I got super busy,” Travis said. “March was my busiest month ever and I was booking trips for the summer, I was booking trips for 2022.”

As a travel agent, she said she sees the pent-up demand to travel, and some of the issues customers face with booking flights as everything goes back to mostly normal.

“It just feels a little different, there's maybe not so many options. I haven’t seen a whole lot of there's just no availability, not that problem, just flight prices. People are calling me like I can’t believe it’s going to cost me $1,700 to get me to the East Coast,” she explained.

Of the 53 United airplanes stored at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, just one remains in long-term storage. One last reminder of the way the pandemic rippled through the travel industry.

“It’s wrapped up, engines are closed off, air conditioning systems closed off, flight controls are disabled,” Peterson said, explaining the last plane in long-term storage. But even this one will be out by September.

“It really does show the horizon for us, so we can get everything back flying,” he said.

Workers like Peterson can focus less on the unknown every day and more on the regular maintenance and safety of the planes.

“That’s it. That’s what I like to do, keep them flying, keep them safe.”

In June, United Airlines will fly its largest schedule since before the pandemic, with 561 aircraft in the active fleet. By July, they expect to be operating 80 percent of its domestic network compared to July 2019.