Cabin pressure

Tracy* kept it together when her mom died in mid-March in New York. She kept it together when she came back from the funeral on an Amtrak rather than an airplane because there were no flights operating to get her home.

It wasn’t until she went back to her job as a flight attendant and saw out of the galley window row upon row of airplanes stacked nose to tail with cloth covers over their engines and sensors.

Tracy has been flying for over 16 years. She worked during the Great Recession, when passenger traffic fell by 10 percent and forced several airlines to declare bankruptcy. She worked during the years of nightmarish tarmac delays prior to 2010, when airlines weren’t required to taxi back to the gate to let passengers off even...