Travellers who relied on Southwest Airlines to get them home faced another wave of cancelled flights on Wednesday, as pressure mounted on the US government to assist customers in obtaining reimbursement for unexpected expenses incurred as a result of the airline’s meltdown.
Many exhausted Southwest passengers attempted to find seats on other airlines or rent cars to get to their destination, but many were stranded. According to the airline’s CEO, the flight schedule may not return to normal until next week.
A Southwest Chaos
Adontis Barber, a jazz pianist from Kansas City, Missouri, had been camped out in the city’s airport since his Southwest flight was cancelled on Saturday, hoping to make it to a New Year’s Eve gig in Washington, D.C.
He departed from his airport vigil on Wednesday. “I’m done,” he told the Associated Press. “I’m starting to feel like I’m homeless.”
According to the FlightAware tracking service, by early afternoon on the East Coast, Southwest was responsible for roughly 90% of all cancelled flights in the United States on Wednesday.
Other airlines were able to recover from the severe winter storms that hit large swaths of the country over the weekend, but not Southwest, which cancelled 2,500 flights on Wednesday and another 2,300 on Thursday.
Why Did This Happen?
A combination of factors, including an antiquated crew-scheduling system and a network design that allows cancellations in one region to quickly cascade throughout the country, doomed the Dallas airline. These flaws are not new; they contributed to Southwest’s failure in October 2021.
The Transportation Department of the United States is now looking into what happened at Southwest, which transports more passengers within the United States than any other airline. A Senate committee has also promised to look into the matter.
Southwest CEO Robert Jordan said in a video posted late Tuesday that the airline would operate on a reduced schedule for several days but hoped to be “back on track before next week.”
“We have a lot of work to do to make this right,” said Jordan, a 34-year Southwest veteran who took over as CEO in February. “For the time being, I just want you to know that we are committed to that.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who has previously chastised airlines for previous disruptions, said “meltdown” was the only word to describe this week’s events at Southwest. While cancellations fell to about 4% of scheduled flights across the rest of the industry, they remained above 60% at Southwest.
From the high rate of cancellations to customers’ inability to reach Southwest by phone, Buttigieg said the airline’s performance has been unacceptable. He promised to hold the airline accountable and to press it to reimburse passengers.
“They need to make sure that those stranded passengers get to where they need to go and that they are provided with adequate compensation,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Wednesday.
What Will Southwest Now Need to Do?
Robert Mann, an aviation consultant and former airline executive told the Associated Press thatthe Transportation Department could order Southwest to pay refunds for all flights cancelled due to factors beyond the airline’s control, such as a lack of crews. He estimated that 6,000 cancellations would affect 1 million customers and cost $300 million.
“The numbers are not life-threatening, although brand damage has been done,” Mann said, referring to Southwest’s plan to pay $428 million in shareholder dividends next month.
Some consumer advocates believe the government will not penalise Southwest.
The Transportation Department fined Frontier Airlines and several foreign carriers for slow refunds early in the pandemic, but not the four largest US airlines, according to William McGee, a travel expert at the American Economic Liberties Project.
“What Pete Buttigieg should do and what he will do are probably at odds,” McGee said. His organisation is advocating for a change in federal law that would make it easier for states and private parties to sue airlines for causing consumer harm.
Southwest advised customers who had flights cancelled or delayed between December 24 and January 2 to submit receipts. “We will honour reasonable requests for reimbursement for meals, hotels, and alternate transportation,” the airline stated.
After spending hours on hold for two days, Navy physician Lt. Cmdr. Manoj Mathew said Southwest reimbursed him for the first leg of his family’s trip from Washington to Houston — they drove through terrible weather after the Dec. 23 flight was cancelled. He is now concerned about whether Southwest will operate the return flight on Sunday.
“I’m attempting to contact other airlines,” he told the Associated Press. “There are no flights, and it’s prohibitively expensive for us.”
Delta Air Lines announced a weekend fare cap in Southwest markets, and American Airlines announced a fare cap in “select” cities as well. Neither provided numbers.
Crew-scheduling System
Southwest labour union leaders have been warning for years that the airline’s crew-scheduling system, which dates back to the 1990s, was falling behind as the route map became more complicated.
“This is not the same airline that (Southwest co-founder) Herb Kelleher built where planes flew point-to-point,” Randy Barnes, president of the union that represents Southwest ground workers, said on Wednesday. “If airline executives had planned better, the recent meltdown could have been mitigated or avoided.”
The other major US airlines operate “hub and spoke” networks, in which flights originate at a few major or hub airports and radiate outward. This helps to limit the impact of disruptions caused by severe weather in certain parts of the country.
Southwest, on the other hand, operates a “point-to-point” network in which planes cross the country during the day. This can increase the utilisation and efficiency of each plane, but problems in one location can reverberate across the country, trapping crews out of position. (Crews can also become stranded on hub-and-spoke airlines.)
These issues do not explain all of the complaints lodged by stranded travellers about Southwest, including the inability to reach the airline by phone and a lack of assistance with hotels and meals.
With inputs from the Associated Press
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