“We were fully staffed and prepared for the approaching holiday weekend when the severe weather swept across the continent, where Southwest is the largest carrier in 23 of the top 25 travel markets in the U.S. In a statement Monday night posted online, Southwest Airlines leaders wrote, “our heartfelt apologies for this are just beginning.” The United States Department of Transportation announced it plans to review the company and determine whether the trouble was “controllable.” "When bad weather hits, and you have staffing issues like they did, it creates a situation that is near impossible to recover from, and it couldn’t have happened during a worse possible week," Scott Meyerowitz, executive editor of The Points Guy, told NBC News.ĬNBC reported Southwest also had fuel and staffing issues in Denver. In normal times, this can allow Southwest to operate more flights each day compared to other carriers, said Scott Meyerowitz, executive editor of The Points Guy travel site.īut if an airport goes offline because of weather, and a flight cannot reach its destination, the point-to-point system has a cascading cancellation effect, he said. So heading into 2023, Southwest staff is scrambling to coordinate their crews and their planes across the country while the other airlines are operating closer to usual. A major pro of the “hub-and-spoke” system, however, is when there is a problem, crews and planes are still grouped in the regional “hub” cities. It requires more connecting flights which may irritate passengers with layovers during calm times. That system differs from other airlines which use a “hub-and-spoke” system, routing planes through several regional hubs. However, when a problem arrives like this winter storm, crews and planes are scattered throughout the country and the whole system gets thrown off. Unlike most major airlines, Southwest operates a “point-to-point” route system, which offers a higher percentage of direct and non-stop flights by picking up different crews along the way. 1 priority, as quickly as we could,” said McVay. “So we’ve been chasing our tails, trying to catch up and get back to normal safely, which is our No. Jay McVay, a Southwest spokesperson, said the cancellations snowballed because flight crews and planes were out of place. In press statements, Southwest leaders say the problem is not staffing but logistics and operations. In multiple interviews, representatives for flight attendants, staff, and pilots associations lay the blame on several factors: an outdated scheduling system, the company’s unique “point-to-point” route system, and the inciting incident of a large winter storm. Southwest Airlines Cancels More Flights and Draws Federal Investigation
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