Passengers are still stranded, and Southwest Airlines is still scrambling.
Dallas-based Southwest Airlines canceled another 2,500 flights for Wednesday after five horrific days of air travel where more than 10,700 flights were cut following icy and windy weather that crippled key hubs last week and then created a cascade of crew scheduling issues that only got worse over the next few days.
After trying through Christmas to rebook passengers and reroute pilots and flight attendants lost in the confusion of technology meltdowns and interrupted flight plans, the company canceled two-thirds of its schedule until it can get enough crew members and planes in place to restart operations.
Southwest is attempting to reset operations, the company told staff in a message late Monday night, reducing daily flights from about 4,000 to around 1,300 nationwide.
Canceling that many flights puts further strain on the nation’s air travel system that was already dealing with heavy passenger demand during the holidays.
Southwest stopped selling tickets for most of the country in the coming days to prevent customers from booking travel that will likely be canceled.
“Due to our limited schedule and large number of re-accommodations, inventory available to book flights across our network is very low, but we are still operating flights,” Southwest spokesman Chris Perry said in a statement.
Southwest hasn’t said how long the pain could last. It already canceled more than 1,300 flights for Thursday.
Southwest has canceled more than 10,700 flights since last Thursday, and thousands more cancellations are coming in the next few days as it tries to find a way to get pilots and flight attendants in the right place.
The meltdown is likely to cost Southwest Airlines hundreds of millions of dollars. A similar cancellation event caused by crew scheduling issues in October 2021 cost Southwest $75 million. That two-day event included about 2,000 cancellations.
In addition to potentially refunding more than 2 million passengers for their canceled flights, Southwest said it will also “honor reasonable requests for reimbursement for meals, hotel and alternate transportation.”
Chief operating officer Andrew Watterson said the company’s scheduling software was overwhelmed by the delays and cancellations caused by storms that rolled through the country in the middle of last week.
“The extreme cold weather made us limit the amount of time our ground operations staff were exposed,” Watterson said in the message to employees. “We started to see equipment freeze, jet bridges freeze, fuel congeal, and as a result, we had to modify our network, sometimes shutting down crew bases operations for a while.”
Cold weather in Denver was worsened by heavy winds, said Tom Kines, a senior meteorologist with Accuweather. “For most areas, it wasn’t all-time cold, but it was unusually cold and it was also unusually windy to go along with the cold.”
That bad weather at a few busy airports caused an avalanche of scheduling issues for the carrier as it scrambled to find out which pilots and flight attendants could fly while many hit federally mandated limits on hours.
“We had aircraft that were available, but the process of matching up those crew members with the aircraft could not be handled by our technology,” Watterson said. “As a result, we had to ask our crew schedulers to do this manually, and it’s extraordinarily difficult.”
Union leaders have blasted Southwest Airlines because this is not the first time the company’s crew scheduling systems have broken down during weather disruptions. The company has seen a string of heavy delay periods stretching back to spring 2021, all starting with moderate weather problems that cascaded into shortages of pilots and flight attendants.
Company leaders, including the CEO, have made updating technology a priority since the travel industry started to recovery from the downturn of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Southwest had a meltdown in June and airlines really struggled with staffing coming out of the pandemic,” said Scott McCartney, a former Wall Street Journal travel columnist who teaches at Duke University. “They completely undershot, and they offered assurances that they were really ready for the holidays and clearly they weren’t.”
Southwest has hired nearly 12,000 workers so far this year as it tries to get back to pre-pandemic staffing levels.
Southwest has plenty of flight attendants and pilots available to work. Union leaders said crew members have been waiting on hold with telephone support for five to eight hours trying to get new assignments while sitting in hotel rooms ready to fly.
And while the carrier tries to reset, passengers across the country are stranded with thousands of flights suddenly unavailable. Seats on other airlines such as American, Delta and United are nearly sold out and the tickets that are available are selling for high prices.
A staffing meltdown of this proportion raises the question of whether Southwest has grown too large to operate its business model of flying point-to-point between U.S. cities, McCartney said.
“There are real questions about the complexity of airlines and how big is too big,” McCartney said. “We’ve seen a lot of consolidation in the industry, so Southwest is now approaching 800 airplanes, and they want to get to 1,000 within five years.”
“With the way they operate their systems, each airplane you add, it adds more and more complexity.”
Company executives and outsiders have said that the crisis has been worsened by the point-to-point flying model. Southwest’s network design has planes flying between several cities during a planned trip. Other large carriers use a “hub-and-spoke” model flying between a major hub and smaller cities, then back to the hub. That can help isolate bad weather events to one region of the country.
Over the last 20 months, Southwest has been sidelined by small storms in Florida, air traffic control issues and staffing shortages from COVID-19 infections.
Other airlines struggled with weather in the middle of last week, but all of them but Southwest were able to recover by Sunday. Fort Worth-based American Airlines canceled 25 flights as of Tuesday afternoon while United had 72 cancellations and Delta had 35, according to Flightaware.com.
More than 200 flights were canceled coming in and out of Dallas Love Field on Tuesday, about half of the company’s operations here, according to Flightaware.com. There were more than 340 cancellations in Denver, the airport with the most Southwest flights, and more than 240 at Chicago Midway, another key airport for Southwest. In all, the company cut 2,615 flights Tuesday.
“We’ve had bad storms but nothing that has disrupted an individual airline so extensively as what we are seeing with Southwest,” said Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry consultant and president of Atmosphere Research Group. “I’m just dumbstruck by some of the decisions Southwest made and didn’t make during the course of this weather crisis.”
Also on Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Transportation said it will “examine whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan.”
“The department will take action to hold Southwest accountable if it fails to fulfill its obligations, and we will stay engaged with Southwest Airlines to make sure the airline does not allow a situation like this to happen again,” a U.S. Department of Transportation spokesperson said in a statement.
Federal lawmakers and politicians, including Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Dallas, took aim at Southwest on Tuesday for canceling flights, a lack of preparedness and taking federal $5.6 billion in federal grants to help keep it running during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There’s no doubt that this is someplace we’ve not been before,” Southwest CEO Bob Jordan said in his message to workers. “This is a very tough place to be, but we will get out of it, and we will focus on our tools, our processes, winning our customers back, winning you back and making sure that we are reliable and stable.”
