New York, USA.- The United States Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, asked Southwest Airlines on Wednesday to compensate customers stranded by flight cancellations and assured that large-scale disturbances have ceased to be a meteorological problem and demonstrate a “failure of the system” within the company.
“We’re past the point where you could say it was a weather issue. Don’t get me wrong, this all started with that one big storm. We watched the winter weather hit the country and severely disrupt all airlines,” Buttigieg said. in an interview published by ABC News.
“So what this indicates is a system failure (at Southwest), and they have to make sure that these stranded passengers get where they need to go and that they are provided with adequate compensation, not just for the flights themselves.”
Families hoping to catch a Southwest Airlines flight after days of cancellations, misplaced luggage and lost family connections have been hit with another wave of canceled flights by the company.
More than 2,500 Southwest Airlines flights had been canceled as of Wednesday morning, according to the FlightAware tracking website.
Exhausted travelers sought passage by other means using different airlines, rental cars or trains, or simply gave up.
According to the FlightAware tracking service, more than 91 percent of all canceled flights in the US on Wednesday morning were from Southwest, which has been unable to recover from ferocious winter storms that battered much of the country over the weekend. .
Southwest’s operating systems have been uniquely affected, so much so that the federal government is now looking into what happened at the Dallas airline, which has also frustrated its own flight and ground crews.
In Congress, the Senate Commerce Committee promised an investigation against the airline. Two Senate Democrats have called on Southwest to provide “meaningful” compensation to stranded travelers, saying the airline has the money because it plans to pay $428 million in dividends next month.
In a video Southwest posted late Tuesday, CEO Robert Jordan said the company would be operating reduced hours for several days, but hoped “to be back to normal before next week.”
