Scenes of thousands of passengers stranded at airports have been met with increasingly peeved statements from Biden administration Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who appeared on Good Morning America this morning to deliver the message that his department expects Southwest to make good on its promises to compensate those affected, not only with full refunds but with meal vouchers, hotel rooms, and related transportation.
Most notably, Buttigieg again identified the cause of the cascading cancellations as being not merely a weather-related issue, but the airline’s own foul-up. That means the Transportation Department will be expecting Southwest to abide by the most generous tier of compensation.
While a great many flights were cancelled due to holiday weekend bad weather, Southwest now appears to be a victim of its own scheduling strategies and infrastructure. Southwest famously does not use the hub system used by other airlines, instead using more complex routing that sees each flight making multiple shorter hops. The system is more efficient and therefore cheaper in most circumstances; in a wide-ranging weather event that sees numerous airports close at the same time, however, those short-hop planes may find themselves stuck at any point in their longer routes.
But the bigger problem, according to a self-identified Southwest employee, is that the “crew scheduling system went belly up” in the face of those widespread cancellations, which rely on crews themselves to report any deviation from their software-expected availability via phone call. With thousands of crews stranded after thousands of flight cancellations, those phone lines are reportedly so overwhelmed that most stranded crews haven’t even been able to check in.
It’s the central theme of capitalism, pandemic-era or not; if you design systems meant to squeeze maximum efficiency while spending the minimum possible on robustness, those systems will fail during unexpected stresses because that’s what they’re built to do.
Southwest Airlines has long enjoyed high customer satisfaction ratings compared to its peers for a very long time now; it’s unclear whether this truly enormous and systemic screw-up will translate into a more cynical customer base. It’s also unclear when flights will be back to normal, but it won’t be today. Or tomorrow.
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