Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Thursday, August 12th. I'm Nyla Boudou. Here's how we're

making you smarter today. What we know about kids in COVID right now. Plus, calls for better

conditions for migrant teens in U.S. custody in Texas. But first, today's one big thing. The Delta

variant is catching up with air travel. We started the summer talking about unruly airline

passengers, and I have to say the summer's still not going well for airline companies. If you're

planning on hopping a flight this month, we wanted to give you a sense of what's going on.

Axios is Joanne Muller has been hearing the Delta variant maybe slowing things down in a big way.

Hi Joanne. Hi Nyla. Joanne, first I just want to start with how messy things have been

for airlines. I'm thinking of spirit airlines last week that had to cancel more than half of

their flights over several days. What was going on there? Oh, what wasn't going on? It really

was just a perfect storm of bad weather, low staffing, computer outages. It just all snowballs.

And there really just isn't enough slack in the system, particularly for a low-cost airline

like spirit. And so if we're starting to see a decrease in leisure air travel because of the Delta

variant, is that actually a good thing for companies? Well, I think we'll start to see that

happening in the fall, and that is a good thing for airlines because they really need some time

to reset and catch up. Anybody who's flown this summer has realized just how difficult it is.

There's a lot of scheduled changes. The lines are long, people are on edge, and it's just been

a little bit too much. And how does that translate into earnings for a company like Southwest

Airlines and their business? Just yesterday Southwest Airlines issued an earnings warning and said

they might not be profitable in the third quarter. And they're the first to acknowledge that

they're starting to see a slowdown in bookings and a rise in cancellations, which they are

attributing to the rise in COVID-19 cases. So I think we're probably going to see a little bit more

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