Making travel plans? Southwest’s holiday meltdown could be a sign of more air travel drama to come
(Illustration by Jim Cooke / Los Angeles Times; Photos by Howard Lipin, KC Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune and AP Photo)
Thousands of canceled flights. Countless separate bags. Millions of angry passengers.
Southwest Airlines’ costly holiday blowout highlighted how quickly airline operations can go off the rails, especially when you add bad weather to the complex calculation of how to get crews on the right planes at the right time.
The Dallas-based airline is committed to doing better. Southwest’s chief executive said the company would invest more than $1 billion to upgrade its IT system and on Thursday during the first quarterly investor call since the fiasco, company executives .
But as climate change continues to make once-extreme weather events more routine, and airlines pack more passengers onto planes to increase efficiency and lower prices, a single outage could throw the entire system into chaos.
“It’s a commodity where everybody can fly and most people do,” said Ernest Arvai, president and co-founder of AirInsight, an aviation news and advice site. “But if something goes wrong, there’s not enough slack left in the system to accommodate everyone quickly.”
The Southwest is paying dearly for the December disaster.
The company said on Thursday that an $800 million financial hit from the episode caused a net loss of $220 million for the final three months of 2022. Some travelers have since shunned the airline, which will cause another loss in the quarter. first this year, said chief executive Bob Jordan.
While widely considered a major factor in the carrier’s slow recovery from weather-related flight cancellations, Southwest’s unique point-to-point system is a way for the airline to set itself apart in a competitive market.
Flying from one destination to another, rather than the traditional hub-and-spoke network used by many major airlines, allows Southwest to offer nonstop flights to many locations across the U.S. that are not currently served by direct flights from other major airlines. said Laurie Garrow, professor and aviation expert at Georgia Tech.
The lack of hubs also means Southwest can spread out labor costs instead of needing large numbers of employees during peak periods in places where many planes arrive at the same time. If a location has less demand than expected, it is easier to move planes than to move an entire hub.
However, the hub-and-spoke network is more resilient because there are more pilots and crew members in a single location. If something happens to a flight, there are crew and aircraft nearby to help with a faster recovery.
In Southwest’s case, the complexity of its point-to-point system collided with the antiquity of its crew scheduling system, leaving the carrier struggling longer than other airlines to return to normal operations. the Southwest pilots union and aviation experts said.
Southwest Airlines Pilots Assn. said the processes used by the airline to connect crews to planes have eroded over the years, leaving pilots stranded in hotel rooms or transferred via other passenger flights to their destination even at the best of times.
“We’re a very complex network,” said Capt. Casey Murray, president of the Southwest pilots union. “It is much more difficult not only to manage, but also to recover.”
While the airline’s point-to-point network is “the magic that has allowed Southwest to succeed” and grow, Murray said the company has not invested in infrastructure or processes to make it more resilient to major disruptions.
A Times analysis of the late December performance of Southwest and American Airlines, the nation’s largest carrier, showed that before the Dec. 18 storms, Southwest had a lower cancellation rate (0.05%) than American (1.18%).
Through December 23, under storm conditions, Southwest’s cancellation rate reached 34.63% while American’s was at 30.91%. That was the highest cancellation rate for American — after which the airline largely recovered.
But Southwest’s cancellations continued to climb to an all-time high of 76.22% on Dec. 26, long after the bad weather had passed. Southwest continued to cancel over 50% of its flights until the rate suddenly dropped to 1% on December 30.
During the meltdown, Southwest was also forced to fly more than 630 flights without passengers to restore crew and planes, adding to the financial blow of the episode.
“We cannot continue to be unreliable and not provide our customers with a sense of that reliability,” Murray said. “The future of Southwest Airlines is in jeopardy.”
And that future may not just be in the Southwest.
Shortly after the December debacle, the federal transportation department announced it was looking into the incident. In a statement to The Times on Wednesday, a department spokesman said the agency is in the “early stages of a rigorous and comprehensive investigation” and that the department has made clear to the airline that it will face consequences if it does not make timely refunds. and refunds to customers.
The transportation department is also looking into whether Southwest executives “engaged in unrealistic flight scheduling” — meaning the carrier scheduled more flights than it could have handled under the circumstances — which is considered an unfair and deceptive practice. under federal law, the spokesman. said.
Southwest’s stated efforts to fix its problems with new software and systems are a good step, but it may not happen immediately, AirInsight’s Arvai said.
“All we need is one giant storm and are we going to have a repeat of what happened a few weeks ago?” he said.
In the future, Southwest may want to cancel more flights ahead of bad weather to prevent the domino effect that happened this time, Georgia Tech’s Garrow said.
“There’s a huge incentive for Southwest to get this right,” she said. “Making some of the long-term infrastructure investments will help, but I think the real test is whether you’re able to bring your operational performance back up to the level of your competitors.”
But the tight margin for error in the airline industry means Southwest won’t be the last airline in the future to face extreme disruption. Fuller planes mean there are fewer seats open to accommodate those passengers.
“The problem is, when the disruption happens, how big is the disruption and how quickly can the airline turn around with minimal cancellations, minimal delays and return to normal operations?” said Ahmed Abdelghany, associate dean for research and professor of management at operations. at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “At this level, we don’t have a way to completely eliminate this problem from the system.”
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
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