Snook and Ireland describe a “singular” injury to 11 people in Honolulu, Hawaii, as a result of severe turbulence
HONOLULU — Severe turbulence rocked a flight from Phoenix to Honolulu Sunday, seriously injuring 11 people in what an Hawaiian Airlines official called an isolated and unusual event.
Jon Snook, the airline’s chief operating officer, said the airline hasn’t experienced “an incident of this nature in recent history.” He said that the flight was full with nearly 300 passengers and 10 crew members.
Jim Ireland, director of Honolulu Emergency Medical Services, said 36 people received treatment, including those with nausea or minor injuries. He said 20 people were taken to hospitals, including 11 people deemed to be in serious condition.
“We are also very happy and we feel fortunate that there were not any deaths or other critical injuries. And we’re also very hopeful that all will recover and make a full recovery,” Ireland said.
Passenger Kaylee Reyes told Hawaii News Now that her mother had just sat down when the turbulence hit and did not have a chance to buckle her safety belt.
The injuries and damage to cabin panelling made it likely that some passengers hit their heads.
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A weather advisory for storms that included Oahu, and areas that could have included the flight path at the time of the incident was issued by the National Weather Service in Honolulu.
The airline was aware that the weather forecast and the unstable air and weather conditions were not good, but didn’t know it was in a dangerous area.
He did not know how altitude had been lost during the turbulence, but that would be part of an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. The plane’s flight data recorder would provide those details, he said.
The Airbus A330-200 began its descent immediately after the turbulence and crew declared an emergency due to the number of injuries on board, he said. Air traffic controllers gave the flight priority to land.
The investigation will examine what other measures were taken, aside from turning on the fasten seatbelt sign, to ensure passengers were buckled in, he said.
It’s Thursday. The Christmas storm that dumped a lot of snow across most of America was mostly over by Monday. Southwest canceled another 2,300 flights today, even though its rivals were back to normal service.
That failure has attracted the attention of Congress. The causes of the disruptions will be looked into by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, according to a statement released on Tuesday.
For Southwest passenger Taylor McClain, 34, the saga started last Thursday, when his morning flight from Salt Lake City into Chicago Midway was canceled. He was re- booked for 3 p.m. that took him to 9p.m.
McClain’s return to Utah has been even more harrowing. He was going to leave late Monday. It was canceled on the spot. Now, the soonest he’s been able to reschedule is for Thursday night.
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He’s lucky to be with his parents, but he’ll burn a lot of days of vacation and have to pay more for a dog that he can’t get back to.
He says he’s flown Southwest for the past decade, but he will wait and see how the company makes him whole before deciding to fly with the airline again.
Helane Becker, an aviation analyst with the investment bank and financial services company, said Southwest needs to bring internal software systems up to date.
While Southwest grew from a Texas-based discount airline operating three planes into one of the nation’s largest, union officials representing Southwest workers say the company did not keep pace with technology changes. And they say they’ve been raising concerns for years.
It’s just a part of the course. Everyone is going to get everywhere at the same time. Southwest was the main culprit of this year’s travel unfortunate situation, Hister told CNN.
The pilots for Southwest fly to two, three, four, five, and six other cities in the morning. It’s a nightmare when there is a flight crew change, and then it flies one or two more legs across the country and spends the night.
As a result, “when you get a weather situation like this, you have all sorts of pilots and flight attendants that can no longer get to where they need to be, because quite often flight crews are not based at the same city or they don’t live at the same city that they’re based out of,” she says. Everything gets out of position when there’s bad weather.
“Southwest is unable to find their own crews or their own passengers, let alone their own baggage, which is the main reason why they are in the situation they are in,” said Buttigieg.
The man with his wife and two young children lives in Denver. A family was in New York City for a wedding anniversary and his daughter’s birthday.
The family flew out on the 23rd to return home on the 24th. Just before they departed for the airport, Lenz checked his phone app “to make sure everything was good.”
It wasn’t very good. The flight couldn’t take off. He had been on the phone for many hours, but couldn’t reach an agent. He used an app on his phone to rebook. He talked to his agent on Monday. He asked, “Do you think this is going to be resolved by the time we fly out?”
The flight was moved to the 27th, after the agent reassured him. He said that his Tuesday flight was canceled at that time.
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The family decided to rent a car and return to Denver in 26 hours. “There’s a place about halfway through in Illinois that’s 13 hours from here and 13 hours from from Denver. So our goal is to take a quick breather at the hotel and then pick it up again so we can be there Thursday night,” Lenz says.
Jay McVay of Southwest said at a news conference that the airline will do everything it can to make sure passengers get home.
But industry analyst Potter says the airlines’ failures mean customers end up paying the price. And that will continue as long as the carriers are allowed to “keep running these razor thin margins where mass delays and cancellations [are] just a storm or a mechanics strike or an IT software issue away.”
The numbers seem to show Southwest’s promise. FlightAware , the flight tracking service, showed that only 39 Southwest Friday flights have been canceled as of 6 a.m. ET Friday.
The mass cancellations have travelers at airports waiting in line for two or more hours to rebook their new flights, which, unfortunately, won’t occur anytime soon. A number of passengers report not getting new flights until the end of this week or after the New Year, forcing them to sleep on airport floors while they wait.
Major transit hubs, such as Denver International Airport, Chicago Midway International and Las Vegas, are hit byCancellations. The airport is named after Harry REID. Ryan Green, Southwest’s chief commercial officer, tells the Wall Street Journal that if customers don’t want to rebook their flights, they will get refunds for hotels, rental cars, and other airline tickets.
Southwest is not the only place that is struggling with a staffing shortage. The airline declared a state of operational emergency last week at the Denver airport after receiving an unexpectedly high number of absences. In a leaked memo to employees, Southwest Airlines says staff members will need a doctor’s note when calling out sick, and that it “will use mandatory overtime” to require employees to come into work or otherwise be fired. Chris had denied that the callouts were part of a coordinated effort from employees.
Relief is still a few days away for passengers booked with Southwest Airlines this week, as the beleaguered airline continues to grapple with what US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has referred to as a complete meltdown of the system.
Dallas Love Field is the most affected airport, followed by Denver International, Chicago Midway International, Baltimore/Washington International, Las Vegas and Phoenix Sky Harbor International.
Southwest has canceled thousands of flights this week with no indication as to when passengers can rebook.
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“I made clear that our department will be holding them accountable for their responsibilities to customers, both to get them through this situation and to make sure that this can’t happen again.”
Long lines of travelers attempting to rebook or make connections were witnessed at Southwest ticket counters at multiple US airports on Tuesday, while huge piles of unclaimed bags continued to grow as passengers struggled to reclaim their luggage in airports including Chicago’s Midway International, Harry Reid in Las Vegas and William P. Hobby Airport in Houston.
At the airport in Atlanta, Jones said that she and her partner had been on the road for five days trying to return to Kansas from the cruise ship.
“We were able to borrow a car so we could go see my family for Christmas, since my family lives in the bay area,” Jones said. “We’ve seen a lot of families who are sleeping on the floor, and it just breaks my heart.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg wrote in a letter to Southwest CEO Bob Jordan that officials will take action against the airline if it does not follow through on promises to reimburse passengers for alternative transportation costs, as well as provide meals, hotels, refunds and baggage reunification.
Questions about how the airline could allow things to go wrong are still not mollifying. And the Department of Transportation (DOT) is still taking a firm line with Southwest.
While all of the aviation system has been moving towards recovery and improvement, it’s actually been going the opposite direction with this airline,” said Buttigieg.
The statement suggested that Jordan did not expect major changes to the procedure of Southwest because of the mass cancellation.
“The tools we used to recover from disruption serves us well 99% of the time, but we need to double-down on our already-existing plans to upgrade systems so that we never again face what’s happening right now” said Jordan.
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“The odds of getting a seat on every airline in the country is less than half a chance at a decent price”, Potter said.
“Travelers in the thick of this should be sure to save all their receipts: other flights, a rental car, nights at the hotel, meals, anything,” Potter said.
If you’ve been left in the lurch and your efforts to reach a customer service agent are going nowhere, the founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights suggests trying an international number.
“The main hotline for US airlines will be clogged with other passengers getting rebooked. Scott Keyes said that to get to an agent quickly you have to call one of the airline’s international offices.
“If you’ve already left, take care of yourself, do what you need to do for your family, keep your receipts,” McVay relayed. “We will make sure that they are taken care of, it’s not a question.”
He said that the scheduling software’s IT infrastructure is outdated. “It can’t handle the number of pilots, flight attendants that we have in the system, with our complex route network.
The other airlines have a normal hub but we don’t. We fly a point-to-point network, which can put our crews in the wrong places, without airplanes.”
The United, American and Delta airlines fly from smaller markets to hub airports, requiring passengers between small cities to change planes. The operational advantage of that model is its ability to fly crews and planes quickly from the hub to where they are needed.
“If there is a cancellation in one area, it really ripples through because they do not necessarily have their crews and their pilots in the right positions,” said Jeff Windau, senior equity analyst of Edward Jones. It’s hard to get operations flowing again when they build on from city to city.
Watterson explained that Southwest schedulers were working crazy to put a new schedule together so they could assign available crew to planes that were ready to fly. But the Federal Aviation Administration strictly regulates when flight crews can work, complicating Southwest’s scheduling efforts.
Watterson noted that manual scheduling left Southwest building an incredibly delicate house of cards that could quickly tumble when the company encountered a problem.
Watterson said they would make progress, and then there would be other disruptions, which would affect their work. We spent several days finishing up the problem, but it had to be reset after that.
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Wall Street expressed concern that the debacle could cost Southwest. Investors sold off the stock, erasing $2 billion in market value from the company’s shares over the course of a week. The airline’s stock price bounced back nearly 3% Thursday, but remains down about 9% since the closing price on December 23, just before the mass cancellations.
A Southwest executive said in a Thursday morning message to customers that the airline is making “a pledge to do everything we can and to work day and night to repair our relationship with you.”
We are encouraged by the progress we’ve made to realign crew, their schedules and our fleet. “We know even our deepest apologies — to our customers, to our employees, and to all affected through this disruption — only go so far,” the statement read.
The big question is, can Southwest deliver? As air traffic picks up Friday morning, the picture will become clearer.
It would be a relief for passengers and the company if the planes came back up, and the luggage was less piled up. It’s got a mark on its back.
The US government is unnerved, to say the least, about how Southwest came to this point, even though other major US airlines were well positioned days ago to deal with a massive winter storm.
Southwest said it hoped for less disruptions over the New Year’s weekend, in a statement after another disappointing day in which 2,362 flights were canceled.
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“It would be an unfair and deceptive practice not to fulfill this commitment to passengers,” Buttigieg wrote, specifically referring to alternative travel reimbursements.
Ryan Green, the airline’s chief commercial officer, promised to rebuild customer relations that have fallen to rock bottom, after he apologized for the collapse of services.
“My personal apology is the first step of making things right after many plans changed and experiences fell short of your expectations of us,” Green said in a video issued Thursday.
His remarks, which follow earlier apologies from airline CEO Jordan, came as Buttigieg made his own scathing assessment Southwest’s troubles, calling the situation a complete “meltdown.”
Several people at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport spoke to CNN’s Nick Valencia on Thursday about their travel experiences with Southwest this holiday season.
When asked what he thought about the lack of lines at the Southwest counters at the airport, Hister said: “Maybe speaks to the improvements that they’re trying to make, because there’s not long lines, people aren’t here complaining. The attempts to redeem themselves are working.
They and the airline said that the process to manually redesign the airline’s schedule is a system that works “the vast majority of the time.”
When something goes wrong, the Southwest software — including the crew scheduling system tool — leaves much of the work of rebuilding that delicate network to be done manually.
Elaine Kao, who served as secretary of transportation in the administration of President Trump, called the breakdown of Southwest Airlines a failure of unbelievable proportions.
She told CNN that it was a perfect storm of problems with the company. She said it will take a long time to rebuild trust with consumers.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/southwest-flight-cancellations-friday/index.html
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“Southwest says, ‘We will honor reasonable requests for reimbursement for meals, hotel and alternate transportation,'” he said. Southwest is vague on how much they will reimburse, so I would avoid expensive hotels and restaurants. If you’re at the airport, you could find nearby hotels with the help of the internet.
“Do a few searches for free things to do near me.” I doubt Southwest is going to reimburse tours or other paid activities, so I would not book any expensive excursions that you cannot afford.”
The pilots union is prepared to testify about how Watterson and Jordan took over a massive, complex operation by using duct tape and baling wire. The system has failed multiple times with increasing frequency and magnitude, making it predictable and avoidable.
Among the union’s evidence is a message sent during the meltdown to a cockpit computer from the airline’s dispatchers asking what crew is onboard the plane.
A picture of the breakdown of the airline is going to be in testimony the Southwest Airlines pilots association union is going to present at a Senate Commerce committee hearing. (The message and others are seen in all capital letters, standard for this type of cockpit display.)
“No updates here,” another cockpit computer message to pilots read. We were told we weren’t allowed to walk over and chat with them because of the late scheduling.
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Southwest executive Andrew Watterson and Southwest pilot union president Casey Murray are among those set to be questioned by lawmakers.
In the past 18 months, the testimony says, SWA has had one major operational failure. “Warning signs were ignored. Poor performance was condoned. Excuses are made. Processes atrophied. Core values were not remembered.
A copy of Watterson’s testimony, obtained by CNN, includes an apology to travelers and employees for the disruption. It shows he is prepared to say that the crew schedules were forced to be changed many times because of the difficulties recovering from the storm.
Southwest launched a new team in its command center and tested a scheduling software update as well as investing in betterpreparedness for cold weather.
Watterson is set to say the airline “had an opportunity to test some of these newly-implemented mitigation efforts” when the FAA grounded all departures nationwide last month due to its own computer failure.
The union criticized the airline for giving executives stock options in the wake of the meltdown while employees lost profit sharing pay because of the airline’s financial hit due to the meltdown. The airline did agree to give some employee groups hardship pay.