Southwest Air’s storm chaos to continue as flight schedules cut

Bloomberg

Southwest Airlines expects the flight chaos caused by the massive winter storm that battered the US to continue for at least another few days as the government questioned whether the airline is complying with its customer service plan.
“In all likelihood we’ll have another tough day tomorrow as we work our way out of this,” Chief Executive Officer Bob Jordan said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “This is the largest scale event that I’ve ever seen.”
Southwest plans to operate just over one-third of its typical schedule in the coming days to allow crews to get into the right positions, Jordan said, adding that the reduced schedule could be extended.
Dallas-based Southwest cancelled almost 3,000 flights on December 26 and had hundreds of others run late, disrupting more than 80% of its schedule as operational woes mushroomed in the wake of the storm.
The trips wiped off the books meant that Southwest was responsible for almost three-fourths of cancellations in the US. That made the biggest discount carrier an unhappy outlier in the US industry, where recovery was the watchword after a holiday weekend of travel tie-ups.
The US Department of Transportation said it was concerned by Southwest’s “unacceptable” rate of cancellations and delays as well as reports of a lack of prompt customer service.
The DOT said it will examine whether the cancellations were controllable and if the company is complying with its customer service plan.
Southwest did apologise for the disruptions, saying that although the airline was fully staffed for the holiday, 23 out of its 25 top airports were affected by the storm.
“With consecutive days of extreme winter weather across our network behind us, continuing challenges are impacting our customers and employees in a significant way that is unacceptable,” the airline said in a statement. The storm “forced daily changes to our flight schedule at a volume and magnitude that still has the tools our teams use to recover the airline operating at capacity.”
Travellers took to Twitter to vent about the turmoil, whose arrival in the midst of a busy holiday punctuated a dismal year for the US airline industry. With Southwest’s stock down 16% this year through December 23, the stock is headed toward a third straight annual decline, the worst such run since a similar stretch that ended in 2008.
The storm over the weekend affected a wide swath of the US and Canada, with record snow totals in the Midwest and Buffalo, New York — the area hardest hit by the storm where as many as 27 people have been reported dead.
Southwest cancelled 67% of its flights on Monday, according to flight tracker FlightAware, even more than the 42% of flights abandoned on Sunday. By contrast, Delta Air Lines Inc — which dumped 21% of flights on December 25 — had to drop only 8% of its flights on Monday. FlightAware said 18% of Southwest’s flights were running late.
Unlike competitors that use a so-called hub-and-spoke system to funnel passengers to large airports, Southwest is focused on point-to-point service, flying the same aircraft — Boeing Co 737s — on trips that may hopscotch around the US.