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(Trends Wide) — A winter storm that dumped feet of snow across much of the United States led to widespread flight cancellations over the Christmas holidays. This Monday, air travel more or less returned to normal, unless they were booked with Southwest Airlines.
More than 90% of the flight cancellations this Tuesday in the US correspond to Southwest, according to the FlightAware flight tracking website. Southwest canceled 2,500 flights; Spirit Airlines follows, with 75.
Southwest warned that it would continue to cancel flights until it could get operations back up and running. The CEO of the company said that this has been the biggest interruption that he has seen in his career. The Joe Biden government is investigating the situation.
What happened?
Southwest had a combination of bad luck and poor planning.
The storm hit Chicago and Denver hard, where Southwest has two of its largest hubs: Chicago Midway Airport and Denver International Airport.
More bad luck: The storm came just as the so-called tripledemic was sweeping the United States, leaving people and their families sick with covid-19, flu and RSV. Although Southwest says it was fully staffed for the holiday weekend, illnesses make it difficult to adjust to the increased pressure on the system. Many airlines remain short of staff to recover when events such as bad weather cause delays or flight crews exceed the hours allowed by federal safety regulations.
insufficient investment
But Southwest has also hurt itself with an ambitious schedule and underinvestment in its operations.
Kathleen Bangs, a spokeswoman for FlightAware, told Trends Wide that Southwest’s schedule includes shorter flights with tighter turnaround times, which is causing some of the problems.
“Those response times hinder things,” Bangs said.
Stranded customers have been unable to contact Southwest’s customer service lines to rebook flights or find lost luggage.
The employees also said they have not been able to contact the airline, the president of the union that represents Southwest flight attendants told Trends Wide on Monday.
“The phone system that the company uses is down,” Lyn Montgomery, president of union local 556, told Trends Wide’s Pamela Brown. “They just don’t have enough staff to give flight attendants the schedule changes, and that has created a ripple effect that is creating chaos across the country.”
According to Capt. Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, the problems facing Southwest have been brewing for a long time.
“We’ve been having these problems for the last 20 months,” he told Trends Wide. “We’ve seen these kinds of crashes happen on a much more regular basis and it really has to do with outdated processes and outdated technology.”
He said the airline’s operations have not changed much since the 1990s.
“It’s the phones, it’s the computers, it’s the processing power, it’s the programs used to connect us to the planes — that’s where the problem lies, and it’s systemic across the airline,” he said.
Southwest CEO Bob Jordan, in a message to employees obtained by Trends Wide, acknowledged many of Murray’s concerns, vowing that the company will invest in better systems.
“Part of what we’re suffering from is a lack of tools,” Jordan told the employees. “We’ve talked a lot about modernizing the operation, and the need to do it.”
He said the airline is “committed and invested in” improving its systems, but “we have to be able to produce solutions faster.”
The US Department of Transportation (USDOT) said it is investigating.
“USDOT is concerned about Southwest’s unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays and reports of a lack of prompt customer service,” tweeted the agency. “The Department will review whether the cancellations were controllable and whether Southwest is following through on its customer service plan.”
To recover, Jordan told The Wall Street Journal that the company plans to operate just over a third of its schedule in the coming days to give crews a chance to get into proper positions.
Not the first episode of Southwest
If all of this sounds familiar to you, it’s because this isn’t the first time Southwest’s service has crashed in epic fashion. In October 2021, Southwest canceled more than 2,000 flights in a four-day period, costing the airline $75 million.
Southwest blamed that service collapse on a combination of bad weather in Florida, a brief problem with air traffic control in the area, and a lack of staff on hand to accommodate those issues. The company admitted it was experiencing service problems due to understaffing even before the thousands of canceled flights left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded.
Similar to the service chaos this month, Southwest fared much worse than its competitors last October. While Southwest canceled hundreds of flights in the days after the height of the October disruption, its competitors quickly got back on track.
That same month, on a call with Wall Street analysts, then-CEO Gary Kelly said the company had made adjustments to avoid a similar collapse in the future.
“We controlled our capacity plans to adjust to the current staffing environment and as a result our on-time results improved,” Kelly stated on October 21. “We are aggressively hiring a goal of approximately 5,000 new employees by the end of this year, and we are currently more than halfway to that goal.”
And, like the last outage, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association claimed the cancellations were due to “poor management planning.”
Trends Wide’s Ross Levitt contributed to this article.
