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It’s hard to imagine a worse way to end 2022 than the way the low-cost air carrier Southwest Airlines did. A winter storm that rolled across the country in late December caused havoc with flights, and everything else, because of snow, wind and frigid temperatures.
Thousands of flights across every airline and airport were canceled by the storm. The terrible conditions caused numerous problems, but as the weather softened, most airlines quickly recovered.
Southwest’s problems were just beginning.
Between Dec. 22 and Dec. 29, the airline canceled more than 15,000 flights, according to FlightAware. At Bill & Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock, Southwest canceled 34 departure flights and 31 arrival flights.
The airline got caught, experts said, because of outdated technology, staffing problems and bad luck.
“With consecutive days of extreme winter weather across our network behind us, continuing challenges are impacting our customers and employees in a significant way that is unacceptable,” the airline said Dec. 27. “Our heartfelt apologies are just beginning.”
The company said it was fully staffed and ready to go when the weather hit. After it hit, the airline struggled because planes and pilots and crew were out of sync — meaning a plane was ready to fly but there weren’t available pilots or vice versa — and customer service quickly became overwhelmed.
The meltdown, as the debacle is being called, was no surprise to Southwest pilots. Casey Murray, the president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, wrote in a Dec. 30 op-ed piece that the company had become too focused on metrics instead of taking care of its employees and customers.
Murray said that on a Nov. 14 podcast he had all but predicted a meltdown.
“I fear that we are one thunderstorm, one ATC [air traffic control] event, one IT router failure away from a complete meltdown,” Murray said. “Whether that’s Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year, that’s the precarious situation we are in.”
Murray isn’t taking a victory lap for being right, as he wrote in his op-ed.
“Sadly, Southwest’s pilots were right all along. But being right doesn’t make us feel better. Being right doesn’t help hundreds of thousands of stranded customers; it won’t replace the missed holiday or lost time with family and friends. We are truly sorry that Southwest’s bean counters didn’t listen to us.”
Maybe the December meltdown will be the clarion call Southwest needs. CEO Bob Jordan said the company had a strategic plan to “modernize” operations so it could recapture its previous levels of reliability.
“You know, we’ll move forward with lessons learned here, as we always do,” Jordan said on the company’s media page. “We have plans to invest in tools and technology and processes, but there will be immediate work to understand what happened.
“We always take care of our customers. That’s our 51-year history here. Likewise, I know that we have work to do to restore your confidence in Southwest. You have our word that we will commit to the necessary resources to quickly examine and bolster our strategy for continuous improvement in our processes, our systems, and more.”
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg wrote a letter to Jordan on Dec. 29. It was a proper scolding.
“The level of disruption Southwest customers have experienced over the Christmas holiday and into the New Year is unacceptable,” Buttigieg wrote.
“While weather can disrupt flight schedules, the thousands of cancellations by Southwest in recent days have not been because of the weather. Other airlines that experienced weather-related cancellations and delays due to the winter storm recovered relatively quickly, unlike Southwest. As Southwest acknowledges, the cancellations and significant delays at least since Dec. 24 are due to circumstances within the airline’s control.”
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