Five days after severe winter weather wreaked havoc on holiday flights across the United States, most major airlines are back up and running. Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and United Airlines canceled fewer than 40 flights each Wednesday, according to flight tracking service FlightAware. Delta had the fewest with just 15 cancellations.
At Southwest it was a whole different story.
More than 2,500 flights, or 62 percent of scheduled flights on Wednesday, were canceled, according to FlightAware. And Southwest said in a statement Wednesday that it planned to fly a third of its scheduled flights in the coming days as it tries to return to normal operations, meaning it would continue to cancel nearly 2,500 flights a day. Unable to rebook Southwest flights, some passengers rented cars or spent hundreds of dollars buying tickets from other airlines.
So what caused the meltdown?
The “point-to-point” model failed
Southwest uses a “point-to-point” route model that often allows passengers to fly directly from smaller cities and regions without having to stop at a central hub such as Denver or New York. Point-to-point flights shorten travel times by eliminating the layover — usually a major benefit for travelers not flying from major metropolitan areas.
Other major airlines such as United and American rely on a “hub-and-spoke” model where planes typically fly from smaller cities to a hub airport where passengers change planes.
For example, a passenger flying from Oklahoma City to Phoenix on a United plane may need to stop in Denver for several hours. Southwest flies routes direct from Oklahoma City to Phoenix in less than three hours.
With a hub system, there is a ready pool of crew members and pilots who can report to work at a major airport, says Mike Arnot, an industry analyst. That makes it easier to regroup after a storm, he said. Aircraft are also kept closer to their home airports, rather than scattered across the country.
It is more difficult to maintain a reserve of standby crew members and pilots when airlines serve much smaller markets. In places like Syracuse, New York, there’s usually no excess crew, Mr. Arnot said.
As a result, Southwest’s cancellations created a giant snowball effect that rippled across the carefully choreographed network, leaving planes and crews scattered across the country, he and other analysts said.
“The only way to reset is to get the planes and crew back to where they should be,” said Mr. Arnot. “And the only way to do that is to cancel a huge amount of flights.”
In a video report on Tuesday, Southwest CEO Bob Jordan likened the airline’s route model to a “giant puzzle” that relies on aircraft and crews staying on the move.
Because Southwest is the largest airline in 23 of the top 25 travel markets in the United States, the storm led to many flight cancellations, putting planes and crew members out of position in dozens of cities, he said.
The airline, he said, was “focused on getting all parts safely back into position to end this rolling battle.”
Technical problems also hurt
Aviation scheduling is a “very complicated system” that must consider union rules, federal regulations and aviation policy when assigning crews and pilots to flights, said Kathleen Bangs, a former commercial airline pilot and spokeswoman for FlightAware.
However, Southwest’s system couldn’t track where the crew members and pilots were after so many flights were canceled, Mr. Arnot said.
Pilots and crew members looking for their next assignment waited hours — nine hours in one case — to talk to staff members at Southwest’s overwhelmed operations center, said Casey A. Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, the union that represents the nearly 10,000. Southwestern pilots. With nowhere to go, hundreds of pilots and crew members slept in airports next to passengers and luggage, he said.
“If one card falls, the whole house falls here in Southwest,” he said. “That’s our problem. We couldn’t keep up with the sequential events.”
Mr Murray said the union had been urging the airline for years to update “IT and infrastructure from the 1990s”.
“We see these meltdowns becoming more severe and more frequent and last weekend was the exclamation point,” he said. The airline also suffered a technological meltdown in June 2021 that resulted in a day when half of its flights were delayed and many were cancelled; it took days for the situation to be resolved. In October of that year, it had similar problems, canceling more than 1,800 flights in one weekend.
Even before this week’s troubles, Mr. Jordan, Southwest’s CEO, had acknowledged that the scheduling system was outdated.
“We’re behind,” Jordan said in November, according to Fortune. “As we’ve grown, we’ve outpaced our tools.”
For example, Southwest doesn’t have a fast, automated way to contact crew members who are being reassigned, he said. “Someone needs to call them or chase them at the airport and tell them,” he said.
Customers had few options
Unlike other major airlines, Southwest has no agreements with other airlines that allow passengers to fly competitor aircraft in the event of a cancellation or significant delay. “Most low-cost carriers don’t have these agreements,” said Mr. Arnot, largely because those deals are expensive.
“If your flight is canceled, you will be compensated,” he said of Southwest passengers. Or passengers are rebooked on the next available flight with the same airline.
For thousands of Southwest passengers, that hasn’t been a viable alternative in recent days.
Katie McNamara, an art director from Brooklyn, was visiting family in Mississippi for the holidays with her husband, Justin, and their two children, who are 8 and 2.
They were supposed to fly back from New Orleans on Wednesday, but when their flight was canceled, they couldn’t find any other flights on Southwest’s website until at least Jan. 31.
They paid $1,500 for four one-way tickets to New York on JetBlue on Friday. Ms. McNamara said she hoped Southwest will cover the extra costs, but waited to call customer service. (The airline directed customers to a website to rebook flights or request refunds.)
“I doubt they’re answering their phones right now,” she said.
Southwest said “requests for reasonable compensation directly related to the trip interruption” will be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
Ms. McNamara, 37, who has used Southwest for years for direct flights to visit relatives in Texas, New Mexico and Mississippi, said the current fiasco won’t deter her from booking with the airline again.
