But Southwest can’t do that as easily without disrupting multiple flights and routes, Mr. Hub-and-spoke airlines can shut down specific routes when bad weather hits, and with good planning, the companies can have crews and planes in place to restart operations when conditions improve. While Southwest does have a large presence at certain airports, it uses a “point to point” approach in which planes tend to fly from destination to destination without returning to one or two main hubs. Most carriers operate on a “hub and spoke” basis, with planes returning to a hub airport after flying out to other cities - United has hubs, for example, at the airports serving Newark, Houston and Denver. Buttigieg said in a statement Tuesday that he had also spoken to Southwest’s chief executive, Mr. “We are going to make sure that we keep Southwest Airlines executives accountable for what’s happening so that the airline that we helped make successful is going to be reliable and stable once again,” Ms. She said that Southwest’s technology was a major cause of the meltdown and that her union had long pressed the company’s leaders to improve it. Lyn Montgomery, the president of Transport Workers Union Local 556, which represents Southwest Airlines flight attendants, said she had spoken Tuesday with Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, to discuss the breakdown at Southwest. Many of the industry’s problems can be traced to staffing shortages that were caused in part by early retirements and buyouts that the industry offered workers after ticket sales collapsed in 2020. Southwest canceled more than 2,900 flights on Monday scrapped about 2,500 each day for the next two days, more than 60 percent of its schedule and said it could take days to fully restore normal operations.Īll airlines have been under fire from lawmakers and regulators for delays and cancellations since demand for travel recovered from the pandemic in 2021. Thousands of travelers were stranded at airports, and many said Southwest had done little or nothing to get them to their destinations. “This is the worst round of cancellations for any single airline I can recall in a career of more than 20 years as an industry analyst,” Henry Harteveldt, who covers airlines for Atmosphere Research Group, said. The bad weather, coming a few days before Christmas, hit the airline harder than the rest of the industry because of inadequate computer systems that made it hard for the airline to get crews to waiting planes and put passengers on alternative flights, and a flight model that allowed problems at one airport to cascade to others.
But not Southwest Airlines, which days later is still struggling from what executives and analysts describe as its biggest operational meltdown in its five-decade history.
Follow Thursday’s updates on flight cancellations here.Īfter a winter storm pummeled many parts of the country, most airlines quickly bounced back from delays and cancellations.
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