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Southwest Airlines leadership was at fault for thousands of flight cancellations and delays from Dec. 24 to Dec. 29, the U.S. Department of Transportation says.
“While weather can disrupt flight schedules, the thousands of cancellations by Southwest in recent days have not been because of the weather,” Secretary of Transport Pete Buttigieg said in a Dec. 29 letter to Southwest CEO Bob Jordan.
The airline has admitted “the cancellations and significant delays at least since Dec. 24 are due to circumstances within the airline’s control,” Buttigieg wrote. He and Jordan had discussed the issues in the wake of consumer complaints about the airline, which fall under Buttigieg’s purview.
He noted the airline’s staff was working “extremely hard, under trying circumstances.”
While all U.S. airlines were forced to cancel flights amid a massive, fierce winter storm that began affecting travel on Dec. 22, other airlines “recovered relatively quickly, unlike Southwest,” Buttigieg wrote.
Further, Buttigieg faulted the airline’s top-level management: “These frontline employees are not to blame for mistakes at the leadership level.”
A major cause of the problems, according to union leaders, was the airline’s failure to upgrade antiquated systems that are used to assign flight crews to aircraft. This deficiency has been noted for years and caused a series of “mini-meltdowns” previously, Southwest employees told The Epoch Times in an article published Dec. 29.
The airline, in a statement released on Dec. 30, declared that it had returned to “normal operations,” after seven days of high cancellations.
In public statements earlier this week, airline executives said employees had been working nonstop to dig the airline out of massive problems the cancellations caused.
As of 10:30 a.m. Eastern on Dec. 30, the airline had canceled only 41 flights, fewer than 1 percent of its total, according to FlightAware—a huge turnaround compared to a day earlier.
