The Flying Southwest Airlines Dispatch: Staffing Issues, Flight Scheduling, and a Stripped Delta Pilots’ Strike
All domestic airlines have come back to normal levels after being knocked off balance by a severe winter storm last week. Yet Southwest Airlines, plagued by staffing shortages and an outdated scheduling system, is still paralyzed.
Southwest Airlines canceled thousands of flights in December due to a winter storm, outdated technology, and a busy travel season, but it expects to resume a normal flight schedule Friday.
There are issues that have worsened the airline’s problem with accommodating the holiday rush. The issue of crew scheduling services and reassigning employees makes it hard for them.
Watterson explained that Southwest’s crew schedulers worked furiously to put a new schedule together, matching available crew with aircraft that were ready to fly. Southwest has trouble scheduling because the FAA regulates when flight crews can work.
Jeff Windau is a senior equity analyst for Edward Jones and he said that when they have cancelations in one area, it really ripples through, because they don’t necessarily have their crews and their pilots in the right positions. They build on from the city to the city, and when that gets disrupted, it’s difficult to get operations flowing smoothly again.
From Houston, Texas, and Tampa, Fla., to Cleveland, Ohio, and Denver, Colo., passengers are sharing photos and video of overwhelmed baggage claim areas and long lines at reservation counters. According to Colorado Public Radio, the customer service phone line at Southwest took between two and four hours to answer.
He added: “It is frustrating for the pilots, the flight attendants and especially our passengers. We are tired of apologizing for Southwest, the pilots in the airline, our hearts go out to all of the passengers, they really do.”
At major airports this summer, Delta pilots picketed, asking for higher pay and highlighting concerns about their work as passengers faced flight cancellation during the Fourth of July holiday rush. The Delta pilots voted to authorize a strike after negotiations for a new contract were put on hold.
Southwest Airlines and Other Public Works Stations in the Afterglow of the August 13 Hurricane Elergy: Jay McVay at WSJ.com
There will be a few days until relief arrives for Southwest Airlines passengers booked this week, as the airline struggles with an issue that US transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg has described as a complete meltdown of the system.
The most affected airports were some of the same ones slammed the hardest earlier this week: Denver International, Chicago Midway, Harry Reid International in Las Vegas, Dallas Love Field, Nashville International and Baltimore/Washington International.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Jordan said that the company would operate about a third of its schedule in the coming days to give it the ability to get crews into the right positions.
We had a difficult day today. Jordan told WSJ.com that tomorrow will probably be another difficult day as they work their way out of the situation.
Passengers waiting in line at a Southwest ticket counter at Atlanta’s airport were told by Carlos Suarez of CNN that they would not get a seat.
Calls made Monday afternoon by CNN to Southwest’s customer service did not go through, so customers couldn’t even get in the queue to speak to a representative. Southwest told CNN it is “fully staffed to answer calls.”
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. To get through to an agent quickly, call the airline’s international offices, said Scott Keyes.
The storms continued to affect many of our larger stations, and that’s why Jay McVay held a press conference in Houston on Monday night.
“With those cancellations and as a result, we end up with flight crews and airplanes that are out of place and not in the cities that they need to be in to continue to run our operations.”
McVay said that the company’s first priority right now is safety. The flight crews that are on these flights have enough time to operate them, and we want to make sure that that is the case.
“We will do everything that we need to do to right the challenges that we’ve had right now,” he said, including “hotels, ride assistance, vans … rental cars to try and make sure these folks get home as quickly as possible.”
“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 they are taken care of, that is not a question.”
The Breakdown of the Southwest Airlines System and the Long-Term Future of U.S. Flights and Buses in the Early 1990’s
The news conference was preceded by an announcement that apologized to the customers, and said that the next seats were on the 31st and later. Southwest would give buses to area hotels so that all affected customers had somewhere to stay, the agent said.
The United States Department of Transportation, better known as the US DOT, issued a statement on Monday’s flight cancelation by Southwest Airlines.
Southwest Airlines’s downfall should be blamed on its reliance on technology and procedures in the 1990’s, says the president of the Southwest Airlines Pilot Association.
“We’ve been having these problems for the past two years,” he said. “We’ve seen a lot of these kinds of meltdowns happen more and more of the time, it’s just a matter of outdated processes and outdated IT.”
He said the airline’s processes have not changed since the 1990s. It is computers, phones, and programs in the airline that are to blame for the problem.
— In hard-hit western New York, Buffalo International Airport said in its most recent tweet that it does not plan to resume passenger flights before 11 a.m. ET Wednesday, pushing back the expected reopening by another 24 hours later than previously anticipated.
Greyhound, the largest provider of bus service in the US, had issued a service alert on Monday stating that many of its services in the upper northeastern US will be disrupted or canceled due to winter weather. Affected cities include Buffalo, Cleveland and Syracuse.
A winter storm that swept across the US was ill-timed for travelers who had started pushing Christmas week flying numbers back toward pre-pandemic levels.
The Southwest Airlines Airline System: An Overview of Murray’s Outbursts to Southwest Airlines and to the Collapse of the CoVID-19 Pandemic
The phone system the company uses is not working, according to the President of TWU Local 556. “They’re just not manned with enough manpower in order to give the scheduling changes to flight attendants, and that’s created a ripple effect that is creating chaos throughout the nation.”
Southwest CEO Bob Jordan acknowledged many of Murray’s concerns in a message to employees obtained by CNN, and promised the company would invest in better systems.
“Part of what we’re suffering is a lack of tools,” Jordan told employees. “We’ve talked an awful lot about modernizing the operation, and the need to do that.”
Gary Kelly said on a call with Wall Street analysts that the company had made adjustments in order to prevent a repeat of the crisis.
The ontime performance has improved due to reining in capacity plans, said Kelly on October 21. The goal of hiring 5,000 employees by the year’s end is currently more than half way to being achieved.
The airline has also begun notifying customers that it expects to fly a “full schedule” on Friday, after more than a week of massive flight disruptions.
Southwest has problems not only because of the weather, but also because of staff shortages caused by the CoVID-19 Pandemic, and employees out sick with the Influenza and respiratory syncytial virus. Most important is an outdated computer system for crew scheduling that turned what would have been simply a challenging storm into a full-scale meltdown.
That failure has attracted the attention of Congress. On Tuesday, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, released a statement saying the committee would look into “the causes of these disruptions and its impact to customers.”
After his morning flight from Salt Lake City to Chicago was canceled, Taylor McClain’s saga began. He rebooked for a 3 p.m. that didn’t end up departing until 9 p.m.
McClain’s return to Utah has been even more harrowing. He was scheduled to leave the city late Monday. It was canceled. He’s only able to change it for Thursday night.
A Denver passenger’s phone call for a flight to New York City with Southwest Airways, a source of frustration for his family and his family
At least he’s lucky to be with his parents, but “I will burn multiple days of unplanned vacation and absorb four days worth of extra kennel fees for the dog I can’t get back to,” he says.
Helane Becker, an aviation analyst with Cowen, an investment bank and financial services company, says Southwest needs to bring those tools, in the form of internal software systems, up to date.
The airline did not keep up with technology changes as it grew from a small discount airline to one of the nation’s largest. And they say they’ve been raising concerns for years.
Many flights are routed through a few big airports in order to cut costs. Southwest has long prided itself on using a “point to point” system instead. It’s a leaner system day-to-day but also means lots of complex scheduling challenges to get planes, pilots and flight crews in the right place at the right time.
With Southwest, their pilots take off from one city and then they go to two, three, four, five, six other cities. There’s a flight crew change somewhere in there, and then it flies one or two more legs across the country and spend the night,” Bangs says.
As a result, ” when you get a weather situation like this, you have all sorts of pilots and flight attendants that can’t get to where they need to be, because quite often flight crews aren’t based at the same city or they don’t live at the same city Everything tends to get out of position when there’s bad weather.
The man who lives with his wife and children in Denver is a passenger. The family was visiting New York City, where they were celebrating together — a wedding anniversary and his daughter’s birthday.
The family flew out on the 21st, and planned to fly home on Christmas Eve. Just before they departed for the airport, Lenz checked his phone app “to make sure everything was good.”
It wasn’t good. The flight was called off. He was on the phone for hours, but couldn’t reach an agent. So, he used an app on his phone to rebook — for Dec. 28. He finally reached an agent on Monday. He asked, “Do you believe this will be solved by the time we fly out?”
He was reassured by the agent, and the flight was moved to the 27th. “But that’s when everything started to get canceled,” he says — including his Tuesday flight.
The Miracle of Christmas: Finding a Car for Families to Fly to Orlando, Florida, and Arriving Back to Denver to See Their Family
Finally, the family decided to rent a car and drive back to Denver — a 26-hour drive. It’s 13 hours from here and 12 hours from Denver to the place that is halfway through Illinois. 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.
“It is going to take a long time for Southwest Airlines to earn back public trust. He said in an email to CNN Travel that Southwest had a great deal of trouble because of the extreme weather.
But industry analyst Potter says the airlines’ failures mean customers end up paying the price. As long as carriers are allowed to keep running these tight margins where mass delays and cancellation are just storms, mechanics strikes or IT software issues, then that will continue.
When thousands of flights were canceled due to staffing shortages in June, Buttigieg met with the CEOs of major domestic airlines and asked them to detail how they’d fix operations in writing.
“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.”
At the airport in Atlanta, Jones claimed she and her partner were trying to get back to Kansas after disembarking from the cruise ship.
“We were fortunate, because we were in Fort Lauderdale — my family lives in the Tampa bay area so we were able to rent a car to go see my family for Christmas,” Jones said. “We’ve seen a lot of families who are sleeping on the floor, and it just breaks my heart.”
The Southwest Airlines Flight Disruption Page: Insights from Blumenthal, Jordan, Potter, and the Plan to Improve the Operations, and a Call for Improved Service
Customers can submit refunds and reimbursement requests for meals, hotels, and alternate transportation on the Southwest.com/travel disruption page.
Some Democratic Senators, led by Richard Blumenthal, issued a statement on Tuesday calling on Southwest to give significant monetary compensation to the customers who have been ruined.
“While the other parts of the aviation system have been moving toward recovery and getting better, it’s actually been moving opposite direction with this airline,” said Buttigieg.
Jordan acknowledged problems with the company response but did not suggest massive changes to Southwest’s procedures.
We should double down on our current plans to upgrade our systems so that we never have a situation like this again.
The odds of finding a seat on an airline are getting smaller by the hour, as every airline is jam-packed right now.
“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.
“After days of trying to operate as much of our full schedule across the busy holiday weekend, we reached a decision point to significantly reduce our flying to catch up,” he said.
In a PBS Newshour interview, Buttigieg threatened to hold the airline to its own stated intentions if they continued to do such practices.
“We’re going to expect them to go beyond the letter of the law in terms of how they treat passengers, making sure they pay for things like hotels, ground travel expenses, meals and of course, refunds,” Buttigieg said.
Flying with Southwest Airlines: What do airline agents really need to know about regulations and how to negotiate with them? An investigation by S.C. Murray
“Employees were left to their own devices. […] They weren’t given the tools to do their jobs, nor were they given the leadership to answer questions and be able to provide solutions,” he told NPR’s Morning Edition.
The airline industry has long been wary of regulations, saying that they ultimately put the cost burden on the customer. Murray says Southwest is better suited to decide what needs to change than the DOT.
The Congress is watching to see if the airline will compensate customers. The Senate Commerce Committee will launch an investigation, its chair said on Tuesday.
Under current rules, if a passenger’s flight is canceled, they are entitled to a cash refund for the full price, plus any additional purchases such as bag fees or seat assignments.
Southwest does not have interline agreements with other carriers that would allow its agents to rebook passengers on a different airline, leaving travelers in charge of exploring other options.
Passengers flying between small cities have to change planes with United, American and Delta. But that model has the operational advantage of quickly flying crews and planes out of the hub to where they’re needed.
Watterson noted that manual scheduling left Southwest building an incredibly delicate house of cards that could quickly tumble when the company encountered a problem.
They would make great progress, and then some other disruption would happen, and that would hurt their work. We spent a lot of time trying to finish the issue, and then we had to reset the issue.
A Deep Apologise to the Customer: Southwest Airlines Can’t Resolve Their Problems, But They’ve Been There for a Long Time
Michael stated that he had to rebook on United after his Southwest flight was canceled. He said he paid United $295, but his original flight was $140, and when he tried to submit a claim, the Southwest system kept crashing. He said that he is not hopeful that he will get reimbursed. “Everything has just been a mess with them and I don’t have a lot of faith in them turning this around any time soon,” he said.
Southwest Airlines is offering a new appeasement to some customers after last week’s glut of cancellations while the misplaced baggage fiasco could grind on for days longer.
“We are encouraged by the progress we’ve made to realign Crew, their schedules, and our fleet,” the company said in a statement. “With another holiday weekend full of important connections for our valued Customers and Employees, we are eager to return to a state of normalcy.”
“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.
During the busy holiday travel period, the airline’s chief commercial officer Ryan Green promised to rebuild customer relations that had sunk to a new low due to 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.”
When asked about the lack of lines at the Southwest counter, Hister said that people weren’t complaining because there wasn’t long lines. So, maybe you know, the efforts to redeem themselves are working.”
Southwest’s plan for irregular operations was at its breaking point because of the extreme winter conditions, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.
The airline says that an internal process requires multiple departments to manually change the schedule and that works “the vast majority of the time.”
The crew scheduling system tool in the Southwest software makes it difficult to rebuild a network when something goes wrong.
“It can’t see the best way to fix anything when flights are canceled,” said Brian Brown, president of Transport Workers Union Local 550, representing Southwest dispatchers and meteorologists. “It requires a lot more human intervention and human eyesight or brainpower and can only handle so much.”
The result is that airline officials “don’t necessarily know where our crews are, where our planes are,” Brown said. Federal rules try to limit inflight safety professionals from excessive fatigue and crew schedulers are checking to make sure pilots and flight attendants meet them.
Southwest Airlines breakdown was described by Elaine Chao, who served as secretary of transportation in the Trump administration.
“Their system really has completely melted down,” Buttigieg told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. The department will be held accountable for their responsibilities to customers, and they will have to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.
What are Southwest Airlines offering in the midst of heavy-ion collisions? Comment on a grieving bride’s husband’s wife’s flight
She said Southwest agreed to rebook her on a January 2 flight but it would have been too late. She and her family and friends lost money on food and accommodations after the wedding was postponed.
She said that the flight was canceled after the captain told them that it was on time and that they would not board.
Other US airlines flying in the same weather conditions recovered days earlier from the storm disruptions that slammed much of the Lower 48 in the days leading up to Christmas.
As a result of the situation, American Airlines and United Airlines have capped the prices of certain Southwest Airlines flights.
I would avoid expensive hotels and restaurants if Southwest reimburses as much as they say they will. Use Google Hotels to find nearby hotels near the airport where you are stranded.”
There are a few ‘free things to do near me’ that you can do on the internet. I would not book any expensive excursions for you that you could not afford, because I don’t think Southwest will reimburse tours.
But it was a breakdown of the airline’s old computer system used for crew scheduling that has turned otherwise challenging weather-fueled disruptions into what experts have called an “unprecedented” airline meltdown.
On the tragedy of Wednesday night, a South Carolina woman was surprised to learn that his suitcase had been delivered to Denver, where it was minus 3 degrees
The family had packed their winter coats and had only warm weather clothes to wear when they got to Denver but it was still minus 3 degrees. After they got back home to Memphis, they stood in line with other travelers to check on their luggage and found out that it had been in Denver the whole time.
She assumed she’d never see her bags again given the chaos she’s seen this week. But on Wednesday night, to her shock, the luggage was delivered to her door.
Southwest said in an apology statement that passengers could apply online for baggage returns, flight refunds and travel expenses from this week’s disruption.
The company has faced criticism for its outdated scheduling software and communications systems, and the impact that has — not just on passengers but also its employees.
“I had to pull him off my plane, when he was trying to go home to see his family, so he could go work another flight just because he was at the airport,” she says.
Randy Barnes, president of the Transport Workers Union’s Local 555, which represents Southwest employees, said in a statement Wednesday that many Southwest ground workers had to work 16- or 18-hour shifts during the holiday season and were getting sick and experiencing frostbite.
One of the most powerful things about social media is that it can take you right into the heart of a situation: A Lizzo concert, a political rally, a Florida emu farm, a picnic where a young man expresses his devotion to corn…
Getting Closer to the Houston Airport: The Houston Airport as a Flavoured Southwest Airlines Experience is Magnifying the Black Eye on Social Media
Hillary Chang is a long time Southwest Airlines fan. “I am a very loyal Southwest customer,” says Chang, who travels frequently with her boyfriend. “I have a Southwest credit card. We actually only fly Southwest.”
Chang never expects to see her suitcase (or her ring box) again. She said people keep asking her to stay positive, but if they saw what she saw at the Houston airport they wouldn’t. “I can hope that maybe it will appear in a few weeks, but at this point, I think mentally I just have to be like, ‘It’s gone and that’s OK.'”
The Houston airport is what she says it looks like. It’s sufficient enough to make any frequent flyer’s blood run cold.
Magnifying the black eye for Southwest is social media. All week, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok have been full of images and videos of people’s harrowing travel experiences, making the scope of the fail far more visceral.
Posts like these have millions of views and comments such as “Don’t fly @SouthwestAir folks” and “Southwest is going to get destroyed over this and rightfully so.”
Richard Aboulafia told NPR that the airline has the best reputation for customer service and management agility. “They’re usually pretty good at responding to crises.”
Can Southwest Deliver? An Open Question for a Family Traveling to LA in the Aftermath of a Big Snowstorm, and how to Plan a Vacation
Chang and her fiancée were stuck in Houston, and realized that they needed to fend for themselves.
They traveled back to LA in a rented car. Chang posted a short TikTok of the road trip, which involved driving through the night in order to be back to work on the morning of Dec. 27. One friend of Chang sent her $50 for gas, wishing the couple well on their long drive after the TikTok yielded some fruit.
I have 50,000 miles with them, and I have been thinking about it. I’m open, but not finished with Southwest. I’m open to dating another airline.”
The big question on everyone’s mind: Can Southwest now deliver? The picture will become increasingly clearer as regular air traffic picks up Friday morning.
If those planes are back up in the air and the mounds of stacked-up luggage are reduced, it certainly would be a relief for passengers — and for the company. It’s got a mark on its back.
Top US government officials are disconcerted, to say the very least, about how Southwest got to this point in the aftermath of a massive winter storm that every other major US airline had under control days ago.
While standing near Hister, Williams said he would use the airline in the future. Southwest is something that I like. I mean, the bags are free,” Williams said.
“It will be a case-by-case basis,” Mr. Mann predicted. Booking an expensive flight might indicate to the airline you had a serious obligation you couldn’t miss, he said. He said to use the Southwest tool and hold onto your receipts, and see how it goes.
Reimbursing passengers for meals and alternate transportation is one thing, but there is also a human cost to the airline’s meltdown, said Katy Nastro, a travel expert with Scott’s Cheap Flights, which alerts members to airfare deals. “Some people don’t get the flexibility of being able to take time off whenever they want,” she said. “Your holiday period is one of the only periods you can rely on and plan and save for a trip.”
Southwest has a vague reimbursement policy that Ms. Nastro wondered if passengers who incurred nonrefundable expenses would be covered. She said that there are a lot of cases like this.
Her flight from Houston to West Palm Beach was not canceled or delayed. But while the Ph.D. student arrived home on time, her baggage still has not arrived; she ended up wearing her mother’s clothes for the holiday. She said that she spent $500 on clothes, toiletries and a suitcase to finish her travels. Ms. Neary said she didn’t expect to see the baggage again weeks after she spoke to Southwest about it. She said by text that it was in Baltimore.
People are stuck at the airport for Christmas. Flight attendants and pilots sleeping on floors. Vast piles of luggage — some with presents inside, some with medication — stuck in the wrong airport. Travelers were stuck on hold for hours.
The president of the union that represents Southwest pilots told NPR he wasn’t surprised by the Christmas meltdown but did call it “catastrophic.”
You can’t get reimbursement for missing Christmas with your family or spending a night on an airport floor with a cranky toddler.
On Tuesday, Southwest informed some passengers affected by its Christmas travel meltdown that they would receive 25,000 frequent flyer bonus points as a “gesture of goodwill.”
The meltdown and operations of Southwest Airlines in light of an employee’s letter to CP-Violating Commissioner, R. E. Jordan
Jordan said that the processes for refunds, reimbursements and waiting to be rejoined with lost bags would be handled with great haste.
“We have folks volunteering to help scans and ships bags at our specific stations”, Jordan said in the Tuesday memo.
Southwest has reduced the number of lost bags since Thursday in half and is on track to have most of the bags shipped to customers by the end of the week, he said.
As for the meltdown itself and how it can be prevented, Jordan told employees, “We owe you those answers.” And said they are “building out an action plan this week.”
The airline is facing a number of investigations and is facing at least one lawsuit over its cancellation of 15,700 flights during the holiday travel season.
The airline’s operations are in a state of disrepair and has violated federal law by not offering passengers prompt refunds for canceled flights, according to the passenger’s lawsuit.