The US Department of Transportation calls the company’s rate of cancellations and delays and the lack of appropriate responses to customers “unacceptable.”
More than 10,000 flights canceled in a few days, chaos at airports and a persistent mess: Southwest Airlines, much more affected than other American airlines by the extreme cold wave in the United States, found itself under the fire of criticism.
“It’s a real debacle,” lamented Mike Sage, who hoped to return to Florida on Monday after spending Christmas with his children in Connecticut.
Unable for this traveler to reach Southwest by phone, internet or app.
At the airport, after a two-hour queue, he did get a new reservation for Saturday. But handing him the ticket, the employee whispered to him: “I would be you, I wouldn’t count on it too much (…). We have crews stuck everywhere, pilots who sleep on the ground in airports”, says he.
70% of flights canceled
The other major airlines in the country have also faced difficulties, Delta and United, for example, having canceled 1,835 and 1,257 flights respectively between Thursday and Monday, according to the Flight Aware site.
But with the rise in temperatures, activity resumed on Tuesday: American, United, Delta and JetBlue thus posted cancellation rates of 0% to 2%. Not at Southwest.
After canceling more than 70% of its flights on Monday, the company cut more than 60% again on Tuesday, warning that it would only take off about a third of its planned routes “over the next few days”.
The management has apologized for a situation which it describes itself as “unacceptable”. “We had all the necessary personnel and were prepared” as the Christmas weekend approached, Southwest assures on its website.
A deeper crisis
But the extreme cold and heavy snowfall that hit the United States for several days, killing at least 50 people, severely disrupted activity.
For the unions, however, the company’s failures stem from deeper causes: the combination of a more dispersed network of routes than that of other major American companies, which often revolve around a few key airports, and a system of employee assignments exceeded.
Under these conditions, the crews are sometimes “in the wrong place, without a plane”, explained the vice-president of the union of the company’s pilots, Mike Santoro, on CNN.
The software “doesn’t know where we are, where the planes are. It’s frustrating for pilots, stewards and stewardesses, and obviously passengers,” he added.
