Has Southwest Airlines Finally Crossed the Line?

A massive influx of flight cancellations by Southwest Airlines has drawn national scrutiny, including from the Senate, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and President Joe Biden himself.

Over 15,000 flights were canceled by all airlines between last Thursday and Christmas Day, CNN reported, with Southwest accounting for a major number of them. Flight tracking website FlightAware showed an additional 2,509 cancellations on Southwest on Wednesday morning, accounting for 62 percent of all expected flights.

"Thousands of flights nationwide have been canceled around the holidays," Biden tweeted on Monday. "Our Administration is working to ensure airlines are held accountable."

A White House spokesperson told Newsweek that Biden's tweet is their only comment on the situation at this time.

Biden echoed a DOT tweet singling out Southwest that called the number of cancellations and delays "unacceptable." The department is now investigating whether the cancellations were "controllable" based on the company's own customer service plan last updated in August.

According to that plan, Southwest says it uses an automated system to notify customers of flight delays, cancellations or diversions 30 minutes after being made aware of such developments. It also mentions delivering baggage on time and allowing customers to cancel reservations within 24 hours of booking and receive a full refund.

"From what I can tell, Southwest is unable to locate even where their own crews are let alone their own passengers—let alone baggage," U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday.

He went a step further on Wednesday on Good Morning America, calling the cancellation crisis a "meltdown."

"The Secretary also spoke with union leaders that represent Southwest's flight attendants and pilots," a spokesperson for the DOT told Newsweek. "They conveyed to him that many flight attendants and pilots are stranded alongside passengers, sleeping on cots or having to book their own hotel rooms."

Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan said he was "truly sorry" for the ongoing situation and pledged to do more to solve this "giant puzzle." Southwest is the largest airline in 23 of the top 25 travel markets in the U.S., he said.

Even the airline's own pilots have called the situation "embarrassing."

"The problems at Southwest Airlines over the last several days go beyond weather," Senator Maria Cantwell, chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, said Tuesday in a statement.

"The Committee will be looking into the causes of these disruptions and its impact to consumers. Many airlines fail to adequately communicate with consumers during flight cancellations. Consumers deserve strong protections, including an updated consumer refund rule."

The statement follows urging from Cantwell and fellow Democratic Senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal in November, urging the DOT "to strengthen and expeditiously finalize" a rule fairly compensating consumers for cancellations or significant delays—in the form of costs incurred from hotels, meals and transportation in the event of a cancellation or significant delay due to a problem within the airline's control.

A Southwest spokesperson told Newsweek on Wednesday that the airline plans to operate a reduced schedule by flying roughly one-third of their schedule for the next several days.

The airline has implemented a website where customers can contact Southwest to rebook or request a refund. Teams are also assisting customers with reuniting with their lost or missing baggage. Another website is aiding customers with rebooking.

A lack of investment and an older system

Dr. Hani S. Mahmassani, the director of the Northwestern University Transportation Center, told Newsweek that Southwest's issues are due to multiple factors.

Aside from IT and communications systems not meeting challenges, he said Southwest lacks state-of-the-art analytics, especially for schedule recovery operations that have forced the airline to deal with a major complex problem manually, rather than with deployed advanced scheduling.

"Schedule recovery decision support systems have been around the industry for at least the past 20 years," Mahmassani said. "Southwest as far as I know has not invested in these."

Southwest also appears to have the smallest operations research, or analytics, group of any of the other major airlines, he added.

Bob Jordan said in his video statement that Southwest is different from other airlines due to the lack of a hub. Mahmassani said other major airlines all built their networks around one to five major hubs, with one or two mega-hubs like Atlanta for Delta, or Chicago for United.

"Southwest was conceived to keep operating costs low...as the network grew, adding destinations, that original model did not scale up very well...and made scheduling generally more challenging," Mahmassani said.

Kara Kockelman, a professor of transportation engineering at the University of Texas, told Newsweek that Southwest has been "crippled" by its lack of hubs and that they could make "a huge difference" to future services.

"Public shaming has worked before with other carriers, so maybe it will help get some rights restored or compensation made (for Southwest consumers)," Kockelman said.

Asked if this Southwest situation crossed a line due to responses from those as high up in stature as the president, Mahmassani said all of these disruptions that we have seen—and will continue to see—could have been averted or mitigated with better ongoing planning and investment.

"It would have been preferable if the politicians invested in the underlying infrastructure and systems when things are going well instead of remembering the transportation systems/supply chains/railroads/infrastructure when things go wrong...We take our networks for granted—they work well most of the time, but they are increasingly brittle, vulnerable, and lack resilience," he said.

"The Southwest debacle is yet another reminder of the larger problems facing our infrastructure networks," he added.