![]() What about staffing? Because we heard, as we were coming out of the pandemic, that air travel bounced back much more quickly than hiring. I have an appointment today with Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, and I am very happy that he's been responsive and is willing to speak with me. Do you think there's a role for the government to play in fixing this problem, short and long term? Department of Transportation has called this unacceptable. So the management is trying to find a way to reset it, but that's a very difficult task and - which is why it's taking many days of cancellations to provide recovery. MONTGOMERY: Absolutely, because now we're having to cancel flights just to get the operation back in sync. SHAPIRO: Oh, so in maybe a counterintuitive way, canceling more flights ahead of time could lead you to not have to cancel quite as many flights after the storm hits. However, if you can't get back up and running, obviously, you're just making the situation much worse. Whereas Southwest has held on and really been hesitant to cancel - somewhat understandably at times. You know, you'll see other airlines doing much more cancellations when storms are predicted. I think it has to do with proactively and preemptively canceling more in the eye of the storms. And when one of those systems fails, yes, it becomes difficult to recover. We have point to point and almost a hybrid of hub and spoke a little bit with some mega stations throughout the system to facilitate things like nonstops. MONTGOMERY: So we do have a different system. Is that part of what made this so problematic for Southwest? So, like, United has a hub in Chicago, and Delta has a hub in Atlanta, but Southwest tends to go from point A to B to C to D rather than all returning to the central home base. SHAPIRO: I've also been hearing about the difference between the hub-and-spokes model that many airlines use and Southwest's model, which is a little bit different. And that's why flight attendants have been on hold. If you have 1,200 flight cancellations and you need to talk to even half of those flight attendants, that becomes an incredibly taskful (ph) thing to do, and you can't get it done in time. Most of the notifications required, you actually have to talk to a crew scheduler. And the way that they have to notify their flight crews is a manual process. MONTGOMERY: It's just about the systems not being able to handle the mass amount of cancellations and rescheduling that needs to occur. Can you explain, like, what exactly it is that went wrong, what it is that Southwest does differently from the others? And today, we have this situation where we don't even need to say the evidence anymore. And eventually, we're going to have a system failure so grave that something of this magnitude could happen. This is something that TWU Local 556 has told the company over the years - the pilots union has said the same thing - that we need to invest in our IT infrastructure, that the systems we have in place cannot handle the operation that we utilize today. MONTGOMERY: This is basically the house of cards has fallen. So what made Southwest different from all the other airlines in this storm? That is more than - 10 times more than the next airline. ![]() Because yesterday, Southwest canceled almost 3,000 flights. Let's try to pull back the curtain on what's going on. SHAPIRO: You said this is embarrassing and disheartening. Flight attendants have sent us their screenshots of their holding times, and it's has been anywhere from three, eight, 12 and, most egregious cases, 17 hours. We also have had to wait on hold for unbelievable amounts of time for instructions from crew scheduling. They have had to spend the night, in best-case scenario, on cots, which is horrible, in-flight attendant lounges and in worst-case scenarios, just, you know, alongside passengers. Our flight attendants have been without hotels. SHAPIRO: I mean, we've heard reports of flight attendants themselves having to sleep in airport terminals. It's so embarrassing and so disheartening. SHAPIRO: In the close to 30 years that you've been a flight attendant, have you ever seen anything like this? ![]() Southwest employees are also trying to make sense of the situation.Īnd Lyn Montgomery is president of the Southwest Flight Attendants Union. ![]() today according to the tracker FlightAware. Southwest accounts for almost 90% of all canceled flights in the U.S. But when you look in detail at who is flying again and who isn't, one airline stands out. When you combine one of the worst winter storms in recent memory with the busiest travel period of the year, you're going to have a lot of travel delays. ![]()
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