More than 10,000 canceled flights in just a few days, chaos at the airports and persistent disruption: Southwest Airlines, much more affected than other US airlines by the extreme cold snap in the United States, came under fire from critics.
“It’s a real debacle,” lamented Mike Sage, who had hoped to return to Florida on Monday after spending Christmas with his children in Connecticut.
This traveler is unable to contact Southwest via phone, internet, or app.
At the airport, after a two-hour queue, he got a new reservation for Saturday. But when he handed over the ticket, the employee whispered: “I would be you, I wouldn’t count on that too much (…). We have crews stuck all over the place, pilots sleeping on the ground at airports,” he says. the.
70% of flights canceled
The other big airlines in the country have also faced difficulties, Delta and United, for example, having canceled 1,835 and 1,257 flights respectively between Thursday and Monday, according to the Flight Aware site.
But with rising temperatures, activity resumed on Tuesday: American, United, Delta and JetBlue thus recorded cancellation rates of 0% to 2%. Not in the southwest.
After canceling more than 70% of its flights on Monday, the company cut more than 60% again on Tuesday, warning that only about a third of its planned routes would take off “over the next few days.”
The management has apologized for a situation that it describes as “unacceptable”. “We were fully staffed and prepared” as the holiday weekend approached, Southwest says on its website.
A deeper crisis
But extreme cold and heavy snowfall that battered the United States for several days, killing at least 50 people, severely disrupted activity.
For the unions, however, the company’s failures stem from deeper causes: the combination of a more dispersed route network than other large US carriers, often revolving around a few key airports, and a outdated employee assignment system.
In these conditions, the crews are sometimes “in the wrong place, without a plane,” the vice president of the company’s pilots union, Mike Santoro, told CNN.
The software “doesn’t know where we are, where the planes are. It’s frustrating for the pilots, flight attendants and stewardesses, and obviously for the passengers,” he added.
Source: BFM TV
