Holiday flight disruptions the latest embarrassment for Southwest Airlines

Abnormally harsh winter weather, combined with the usual heavy holiday travel crush, has led to widespread airline flight cancellations and delays in recent days. But Southwest Airlines got hit much harder than its competitors, adding to a recent pattern of operational problems.

Southwest, one of the major carriers operating out of Sky Harbor with nonstop flights to around 60 destinations, has accounted for well more than half of the industry’s recent delays and cancellations. That prompted a pledge from the U.S. Department of Transportation to investigate the matter — and a public apology from the airline.

Southwest said it entered the Christmas weekend “fully staffed and prepared” when it was hit by the severe weather that forced it to reposition crews and adopt a reduced schedule. It plans to operate only about one-third of its flights for the next several days.

“This too shall pass,” said Christine Hoskins, 70, as she waited Tuesday afternoon outside Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport's rental car center. "It is what it is."

It was her sixth hour of waiting, as her husband tried booking a vehicle to drive to Albuquerque following Southwest's cancellation of their flight. Accompanied by seven pieces of luggage, Hoskins and her husband were trying to get home after visiting their daughter for Christmas.

Southwest issued a “heartfelt apology” to customers and a vow to “make things right” for passengers as well as affected staff members. The airline, one of Arizona’s larger employers, has more than 4,700 employees assigned to Sky Harbor, where it operates out of 32 gates. Southwest employs about 75 people at Tucson International Airport, where it has four gates.

While the latest wave of delays and cancellations is highly unusual in severity, it is not an isolated incident. Southwest has had several operational snafus over the past year or so, including two separate disruptions in 2021 that each grounded more than 1,000 flights. One, in June, was tied to weather and “network connectivity” problems. The other, in October, was blamed on weather.

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In January 2022, Southwest canceled more than 5,600 flights, according to the company's latest annual 10-K financial report. Most of those cancellations were attributable to staffing challenges stemming from the omicron variant of COVID-19 and weather, according to the report. Those cancellations drove "an estimated $50 million negative impact to January 2022 operating revenues," the report concluded.

Southwest ranked third worst in promptness in 2021, with 75.8% of its flights arriving on time, of 10 major domestic airlines tracked by the Department of Transportation. It also had the third-highest rate of flight cancellations that year, 2.2%.

Southwest also was third-worst for on-time arrivals in the latest month tracked by the department, August 2022. In addition, of the 10 airlines, it had the third-highest flight-cancellation rate that month.

“It’s very frustrating," said Ann Anderson, 50, who was waiting in the snaking line at the Sky Harbor rental car center Tuesday after a family visit for the holidays. She had arrived at the airport before dawn for a scheduled flight back home to Los Angeles. Southwest had a car reservation for her, but she expressed worry there would be no cars available by the time she made it to the service desk.

"I wish they had told us sooner because they knew they were going to cancel,” Anderson said.

Is Southwest different from other airlines?

Amid the recent disruptions, some analysts have criticized Southwest’s preference to operate more direct flights on tight schedules with shorter turnaround times. However, the average Southwest flight goes for 2.1 hours and travels 790 miles, and those figures aren’t much different from industry averages of 748 miles and 2 hours.

Stressed and possibly antiquated phone and computer systems might be a more significant factor.

“It’s phones, it’s computers, it’s processing power, it’s the programs used to connect us to airplanes,” Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Pilots Union, told CNN. “The airline cannot connect crews to airplanes.”

If so, that must be a huge source of frustration for Southwest, which said it has committed “significant resources” over the past several years to upgrading its information technology system.

During 2021, for example, the company "achieved the long-awaited milestone of getting all of its aircraft into a single system for aircraft maintenance and record-keeping,” Southwest said in its most recent 10-K annual report.

“This was the company's largest technology initiative for 2021 and was one of the most critical system updates the company has undertaken in the history of its maintenance program," according to the report.

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The airline also might be facing some growing pains. At the end of 2021, Southwest flew to 121 destinations, having added 14 last year alone. Several of the newer routes link to international destinations.

Southwest has been flying since 1971 and was profitable for its first 47 years. The pandemic pushed it into the loss column in 2020 as revenues fell by more than half. Since then, Southwest has regained its profitability momentum with net income of $759 million over the first nine months of 2022.

At the Sky Harbor rental car center Tuesday, Tucson resident Peter Gallo, 79, said that he had not been able to get through to anyone on Southwest’s customer service line. Even so, his situation was better than that of many Southwest customers, he said.

After Southwest canceled the flight Gallo and his wife were supposed to take home from Las Vegas, Gallo booked with JSX, which describes itself as a "hop-on jet service," to make it to Sky Harbor. They plan to drive a rental car the rest of the way home.

“I feel sorry for people stuck at the airport back East. We can’t complain,” said Gallo, a retired American Airlines pilot.

Federal regulatory probe coming

The Department of Transportation said it is concerned by Southwest’s “unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays and reports of lack of prompt customer service." The department’s Office of Aviation Consumer Protection will conduct the investigation. The rates of cancellations and delays are "unacceptable and dramatically higher than other U.S. carriers," a department spokesperson said.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg spoke with Robert Jordan, CEO of Southwest, on Dec. 27 and conveyed the message that he expects the airline to live up to commitments it has made to passengers, including providing meal vouchers, refunds and hotel accommodations for those experiencing significant delays or cancellations that resulted from the airline's actions.

Buttigieg also spoke with union leaders representing Southwest flight attendants and pilots. He was told that "many flight attendants and pilots are stranded alongside passengers, sleeping on cots or having to book their own hotel rooms," the spokesperson said.

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The department said it will review whether the cancellations were controllable, and it vowed to monitor whether Southwest has been complying with its customer service plan — one tenet of which is to notify customers reasonably promptly of flight cancellations, diversions or delays or 30 minutes or more.

“At the airport, including the departure gate and flight information display screens under our control, we will make every reasonable effort to notify you of the updated status of your flight within 30 minutes of our being made aware of such flight-status change,” the company’s plan asserts.

Flood of airline complaints

Last month, the Department of Transportation announced what it called “historic” enforcement actions against six airlines that require mandatory refunds and modest fines.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the department has received a flood of complaints from air travelers about airline cancellations, other significant flight changes and the lack of timely refunds.

"A flight cancellation is frustrating enough, and you shouldn’t also have to haggle or wait months to get your refund,” said Buttigieg in a prepared statement.

Frontier Airlines was ordered to pay $222 million in refunds and hit with a $2.2 million fine. That was the largest enforcement action and the only one involving a U.S. airline.

The others were Air India ($121.5 million in required refunds and a $1.4 million penalty), TAP Portugal ($126.5 million and $1.1 million), Aeromexico ($13.6 million and $900,000), El Al ($61.9 million and $900,000) and Avianca ($76.8 million and $750,000).

Reach the writer at russ.wiles@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Holiday flight disruptions latest embarrassment for Southwest