Our article deals with intensities and fragilization of work collectives, and offers a synthesis of the literature regarding work and its intensities, particularly within the air travel sector. Analyzing commercial airline crews, the article uses the demands-resources and capacitating organization theories to analyze the perceptions of these workers as concerns physical, psychosocial and organizational demands of work, as well as the resources of same nature, in the context of a reduction of personnel authorized by the Transportation Department for many Canadian carriers in July 2015. We pay particular attention to the work demands which constitute a constraint, something which is rarely considered in research on intensification of work. With the resource-caravan and capacitating organization concepts we seek to determine whether airline crews (stewards and directors) have the means to ensure their collective mission of security and service to the public. We conducted 41 semi-directed interviews with stewards and pursers or flight directors from two Canadian airlines. We conducted an inductive research based on qualitative content analysis to obtain the main themes and analyze the physical, psychosocial and organizational demands and resources for work. Our results illustrate in an original way how an important increase in constraining work intensities disrupts the work collective, particularly the pivotal role of the flight director, thus contributing to emerging research on fragilization of work processes. Many aspects would need to be changed in order to qualify airlines as capacitating organizations.