Southwest predictably did blame the winter storm, and there are reasons the weather would affect Southwest more than other airlines. Instead of using a hub-and-spoke system in which planes tend to leave from and return to the same hub, Southwest planes hopscotch across the country. When things get shut down, planes and crews are all over the place.
Southwest is thus “uniquely vulnerable to weather problems, especially one as geographically extensive and as intensive as this storm has been,” airline analyst Henry Harteveldt told The New York Times. He added, “I don’t recall seeing an airline experience such a massive operational problem as we are currently seeing at Southwest.”
On a Southwest-focused subreddit, a poster identifying themself as a Southwest employee offered another explanation, writing, “This shitstorm is because the crew scheduling software went belly up and it almost all has to be unraveled over the phone with crew members calling scheduling. If we had better technology which eliminated the need for phone calls, this would have been fixed by now.”
They went on to advise people booked on Southwest flights, “If you are able to find alternative transportation to your final destination- DO IT. Another airline, bus, train, Lyft, rental car, ANYTHING. Southwest WILL NOT be able to get you to your destination anytime in the next few days.” And checked bags, they said, might take a month to reach their owners.
The problems from the winter storm and the Southwest-specific problems, though, are heaped onto bigger problems in the airline industry. In August, a group of aviation unions called for a ban on stock buybacks until the airlines increased staffing levels enough to fix ongoing operational problems. United, Southwest, American, and Delta combined put more than $39 billion in stock buybacks between 2014 and 2019 at the expense of investments in the operations of the airlines themselves and their workforce. A pandemic relief package in 2020 kept workers in their jobs and put a pause on stock buybacks, but a lot of damage had already been done.
“We paused the greed in aviation for a little while with legislative constraints tied to COVID relief,” Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, said in a statement accompanying that call to continue the pause on stock buybacks “But the greed that ran rampant before COVID created a system that was already stretched thin with minimum staffing and high overtime hours. We can’t allow executives to send one dime to Wall Street before they fix operational issues and conclude contract negotiations that will ensure pay and benefits keep and attract people to aviation jobs.”
Later in August, storms were blamed for the cancellation of a large number of flights—and Nelson told The Washington Post that staffing shortages were also responsible. “You can’t lose one person,” she said. “It’s stretched very thin, so there are just fewer employees responding to customer needs and demands and handling the issues.”
So yes, there was a major winter storm that led to cancellations for very good reasons at a very big travel time. And yes, Southwest has some specific reasons for a slow recovery. But the airline industry as a whole is also asking too much of a workforce that it stretched thin very intentionally to maximize profits, and that has to be a factor in any discussions of why the experience of flying is so terrible these days.
