Southwest’s canceled flights are more than just bad weather, unions say

Southwest, which canceled 5,500 flights on Monday and Tuesday alone, according to flight tracking service Flight Aware, attributed the spate of cancellations to winter weather in a statement Tuesday. “Having weathered consecutive days of extreme winter weather across our network, the ongoing challenges are affecting our customers and employees in an unacceptable way. And our sincere apologies for that is just beginning,” the airline said. But since the major competing airlines have only canceled about 2% of their flights, there must be more to this story.

Almost 20,000 flights in the United States have been canceled since December 22, according to Flight Aware, and there is no end in sight to the disruption. By early Tuesday afternoon, Flight Aware recorded nearly 5,000 more canceled flights and over 3,500 scheduled flights for Wednesday. Bad weather conditions turned travel upside down during the busy Christmas weekend, with heavy snowstorms and strong winds battering airports across the country, with the Midwest and East Coast being particularly hard hit.

Southwest’s CEO described Monday’s fiasco as a “tough day” and the “biggest event” he’s ever seen in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

But staff and union groups have criticized the airline for refusing to update its software and leaving pilots and attendants stranded during the chaos, adding to the challenges the storm is already bringing.

“As of this writing, it’s safe to say that Southwest has a systemic problem when it comes to struggling through weather events,” said Michael Massioni, vice president of TWU Local 556, a union representing Southwest’s flight attendants wealth.

“It’s not so much the weather event, it’s the aftermath. After the network was disrupted, we don’t have the technological tools to regain control,” he said.

Thus, the airline’s critics say the writing was on the wall long before a winter storm uncovered it.

“They don’t know where we are”

The problem, workers and union officials say, is that Southwest has taken a low-cost approach in more ways than one. “Last week’s storm was the catalyst for this, but what went wrong was that our IT infrastructure for our scheduling software is severely outdated,” said Michael Santoro, vice president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, a union that told CNN on Tuesday.

Southwest has for years relied on outdated software to track aircraft, pilots and flight attendants, and each employee’s flight plan, Santoro said, and has refused to invest in upgrading equipment that could easily fail in the event of a major emergency. TWU’s Massioni said the same software has been used since the late 1990s.

“They don’t know where we are, where our planes are,” Santoro said. He added that the company has had a “meltdown” of flight delays and cancellations once a year for at least the past five or six years, but he’s never witnessed an incident like the one that is currently leaving passengers and staff stranded across the country .

“It’s embarrassing,” he said. “We have over 10,000 pilots who aren’t all flying at the same time, but imagine everyone is in the wrong city, doesn’t have hotel assignments, and is trying to find hotels.”

Massioni called Southwest’s behavior last week “almost unforgivable” as unions have been asking the airline to modernize its equipment since at least 2015.

“We’ve been talking to them about this for years. And yet here we are, they still haven’t invested in their people and their technologies to help us get us through these kinds of times,” he said.

Stranded Employees

This isn’t the first time Southwest has struggled with onerous delays and cancellations that have left employees stranded. In October 2021, the airline canceled over 1,800 flights due to inclement weather and air traffic control issues, leaving some employees without hotel rooms and nearing contractual and federal work hours limits.

This time, the airline failed to improve the situation for employees. Massioni said the past week has been “brutal” for Southwest employees and many of the airline’s 18,000 flight attendants have been stranded in cities without hotel bookings, forced to sleep on airport floors and put in “countless” illegal days of duty. Stranded employees must call Southwest’s hotline but are lucky if they get a response, Massioni said, as current wait times range from three to 15 hours.

Airport employees are hardly better off. Last week, Southwest Vice President Chris Johnson sent a memo to ramp agents at Denver International Airport, who declared an “operational emergency” while noting an unusually high number of employees who had recently called in sick. Johnson said the airline would introduce “mandatory overtime hours” for all employees in light of the emergency, who could be fired if they didn’t comply.

In its Tuesday statement, Southwest said it was “extremely grateful” for its employees, but acknowledged how some workers felt disadvantaged by the chaos.

“We will work to make things right for those we have let down, including our staff,” the airline said.

The Southwest is under federal scrutiny for its failings during this holiday season. The Ministry of Transport announced on Twitter on Monday that it was “investigating” whether the cancellations were really out of Southwest’s control or whether they could have been avoided, while criticizing the airline’s “unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays.”

On Tuesday, SWAPA President Casey Murray told the AP that unless changes are made to the software system, Southwest’s problems could linger for a long time. “The airline cannot connect crews to aircraft. I’m worried about this weekend. I’m worried about a month from now,” he said.

Note: This article was updated December 27 with comments from a speaker representing Southwest Airline flight attendants.