Southwest Airlines is accustomed to soaring above its competitors.
For many of its 51 years in operation, the Dallas-based airline has earned superior ratings for customer satisfaction, on-time flights, and accurate baggage handling—all delivered with a fun-loving attitude.
The “maverick” airline clawed its way to the top, becoming the nation’s largest domestic carrier in 2003.
But suddenly, Southwest is standing out in unenviable ways.
A powerful winter storm began sweeping the nation on Dec. 21. It knocked all airlines off-kilter for a few days. But Southwest alone suffered a staggering blow. It hobbled for a week.
During the last 10 days of 2022, Southwest canceled more than 16,700 flights, about 37 percent of its schedule. Residual troubles continued into early January, with abnormally high numbers of delayed flights.
Hidden Underlying Factors
Employees paint a picture of a company that lost its mojo by forsaking many principles that made it great.Some spoke publicly in online posts; others granted interviews to The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity, fearing professional repercussions.
They say Southwest’s employee-empowering atmosphere suffocated under the weight of a bloated, insular corporate structure. Higher-ups dismissed or discounted employees’ concerns—an underlying cause of the meltdown.
Some workers worry that the fallout could be long-lasting, possibly threatening Southwest’s existence.
Southwest, asked to respond to workers’ criticisms, stated that the company had “nothing to offer” besides statements on its website.
“Emerging from some of the most challenging days in our company’s history, we are highly focused on our customers, our recovery, and our plan going forward,” he wrote, adding that the company had restored its reliable performance.
The company has taken some immediate steps to shore up its operations and to make longer-term improvements, Jordan said.
‘Flightmare’ Was Foretold
SWAPA’s president, Capt. Casey Murray, foretold the holiday meltdown several weeks before it happened.“I fear that we are one thunderstorm, one ATC [air traffic controller] event, one router brownout from a complete meltdown,” Murray said in early November 2022, according to a SWAPA post. “Whether that’s Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or New Year’s, that’s the precarious situation we’re in.”
He made that prediction after seeing systems failures dating to at least 2014. That’s when “The Midway Meltdown” struck at Chicago’s Midway Airport.
That year, 16 Southwest planes sat parked, with passengers aboard, for hours on Jan. 2–3. News reports said the airline blamed bitterly cold temperatures and aircraft de-icing problems.
Afterward, flight crew scheduling processes remained bogged down for days. According to an internal memo dated Jan. 6, 2014, schedulers’ phone lines had been overloaded despite being “fully manned.”
Lengthy discussions followed The Midway Meltdown, enough to fill reams of paper.
“You could take everything that was said, and you could put it over the other meltdowns leading up to the Christmas Flightmare of 2022. And it’s the exact same statements,” Murray said in a Jan. 9 video. “And there has been little action but lots of words.”
For years, he said, the company has neglected four areas: people, processes, infrastructure, and information technology.
Ex-CEO Blamed
Just two years after The Midway Meltdown, another notable technology failure hit.A burned-out computer router touched off 2,300 flight cancellations and 8,000 delays. After that five-day disruption in the summer of 2016, two labor unions called for Gary Kelly, then CEO, to be fired.
Kelly had been at the helm for a dozen years at that time.
Union leaders claimed that Kelly, an accountant and former CFO, obsessed over profits at the exclusion of almost everything else. The company’s computer system was held together with piecemeal repairs when it needed a full-scale overhaul, SWAPA said.
After a series of systems flare-ups, the company moved on without addressing the root causes, pilots said.
A 35-year Southwest pilot, Larry Lonero, describes that pattern in a recent Facebook post entitled, “What happened to Southwest Airlines?”
It has been shared more than 104,000 times since Lonero posted it on Dec. 28.
He and other pilots lay much of the blame for the meltdown at Kelly’s feet.
Kelly was a friend of the airline’s co-founder, Herb Kelleher, a company video says, casting him as an acolyte.
But Lonero and others say Kelly’s number-cruncher style contrasted with Kelleher’s folksy, in-the-trenches approach.
Kelleher was CEO from 1981-2001. His successor, Jim Parker, served only three years, followed by Kelly in 2004.
Kelly, who stepped aside last year but remains chairman, spent little time with frontline employees, Lonero and others say; Kelly’s lieutenants followed suit.
“They all disengaged the operation, disengaged the employees and focused more on Return on Investment, stock buybacks and Wall Street,” Lonero wrote.
That approach worked for the first eight years of Kelly’s tenure, Lonero wrote, “because we were still riding the strong wave that Herb had built.”
Pandemic Masked Issues
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21 badly hurt all airlines. It also delayed the inevitable meltdown at Southwest, according to Lonero.Because all U.S. airline traffic slowed to a crawl, “this helped conceal the serious problems in technology, infrastructure, and staffing that were occurring and being ignored” at Southwest, he wrote.
A Southwest tribute video credits Kelly for his part in upholding “a streak of 47 consecutive years of profitability, a record unmatched in commercial aviation,” until the pandemic hit.
And, despite COVID, Kelly was proud that “Southwest never laid off a single employee in 50 years,” the video says.
However, some workers still resent Kelly for notifying 7,000 employees that they could be laid off in December 2020. The pandemic was raging then. The airline industry was hemorrhaging money as it flew near-empty airplanes.
Employees wonder where that money went. They also viewed the layoff announcement as “another nail in the culture coffin,” as one interviewed pilot put it because that went against Kelleher’s “employees first” principle.
Another COVID issue that wounded employees’ morale was the company’s announcement that it would enforce the government’s vaccine mandates in late 2021.
Leaders said the government forced that upon the company, but employees say Kelleher would have told the government: “go pound sand.”
Ultimately, the company granted religious exemptions to many workers. Employees doubt anyone was fired over the jab mandate. Still, a pilot said that by going along with the vaccine requirement, the company “violated the special trust and confidence” that workers placed in Southwest.
Adding to employee frustrations: labor contracts representing about 40,000 of the airline’s 66,000 workers remained unsettled long after their “amendable” dates, SWAPA said.
Lack of Investment Denied
As the pandemic waned and air travel ramped up again in 2021-22, “the lack of attention to the operation was waiting to show its ugly head” at Southwest, Lonero wrote.That October, another operational meltdown hit. The public widely assumed it happened because pilots and others were staying home to protest against the mandated COVID shots.
But Murray, the SWAPA president, declared there were “no work slowdowns or sickouts.” Instead, the airline’s computer system was ailing again, he said.
“A minor temporary event for other carriers devastated Southwest Airlines,” Murray wrote in a statement on Oct. 10, 2021, “because our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure.”
He said disruptions had been “unending” since early June 2021 because of “widespread IT failures.”
“Our pilots are tired and frustrated because our operation is running on empty due to a lack of support from the company,” Murray said.
He demanded “accountability for those responsible for this months-long debacle.” He said immediate actions were needed to protect the airline, its employees, and its customers.
Months later, in early 2022, Jordan became CEO.
Aware that Jordan started with the company in information technology, Murray and many others were hopeful that the new CEO would make the necessary IT upgrades.
But correcting “two decades of neglect” would take time, Lonero wrote. It ran out.
Conditions Lined Up
In late December 2022, a “cyclone bomb” set off a cascade of failures inside Southwest, the SWAPA report says, explaining how this single bad winter storm buckled the company’s vintage 1990s crew-scheduling system.Bitter cold, blizzard conditions, and power outages swept much of the United States.
Still, pilots such as Lonero believe that if Southwest’s internal systems had been up to snuff, the weather-related disruptions would have been limited to a day or so.
Southwest executives also planned poorly for the weather event, union leaders claim.
“When you’re dealing with sub-zero temperatures, driving winds, and ice storms, you can’t expect to schedule planes as if every day is a sunny day with moderate temperatures and a gentle breeze,” Randy Barnes, president of the union representing 17,000 ground crew workers, said in a statement.
In advance of the storm, Southwest management pre-canceled flights at only one airport, Denver, SWAPA said.
Barnes thinks Southwest should have considered curtailing “the entire schedule.” Weather forecasts predicted inhospitable conditions for many critical cities in Southwest’s network.
SWAPA was asked to meet just once with managers about the storm, on Dec. 20.
The Turning Point
When the storm hit Denver on Dec. 21, conditions turned out worse than expected.“A freezing whiteout” whipped through. Winds gusted up to 37 mph. Visibility dropped to a quarter mile. Temperatures dipped to minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit.
Under those conditions, flights were “significantly delayed getting in and out,” which caused “a back-breaking strain on Ground Operations,” SWAPA said. One pilot questioned whether the company has enough “good” de-icing trucks.
Because of the delays, flight attendants and pilots were disqualified from working past federally set time limits. That led to more cancellations.
Meanwhile, Denver ground crews were told they would be fired if they refused to work overtime or called off sick without presenting a doctor’s note.
Chris Johnson, a vice president of ground operations, sent this “state of operational emergency” declaration to tamp down absenteeism.
But such an order violates employees’ contractual rights and places unreasonable demands on workers, Barnes said.
In a union podcast, Barnes said there is no truth to rumors that Johnson’s memo angered grounds crews into walking off the job. Still, employees say that memo exemplifies tensions that simmer internally while Southwest projects an image of “the LUV airline” with a heart-shaped logo.
Ground crew members include ramp agents, who do hard physical labor. With hourly pay starting at $20-$30, these “rampers” are responsible for tasks such as loading and unloading luggage and cargo in all types of weather.
When blistering heat or frigid weather strikes, outdoor workers cannot move as fast as an “efficiency expert” says they should, according to an ex-ramper. He said that, even though the experts “have never done our jobs,” the company seems to rely upon their word as gospel.
Schedules need to allow time for employees to take breaks and “cycle in and out” during extreme weather, Barnes said. “The airline needs to do more to protect its ground crews,” he said, pointing out that some workers suffered frostbite during the meltdown.
Implosion Begins
On Dec. 22, waves of flights were canceled just before their scheduled departure times—or afterward. “The network was struggling to recover from the events of the night before,” the SWAPA report says.Each delay or cancellation is processed through the company’s dispatch center, where a worker inputs flight changes into “The Baker.” That system is supposed to “optimize” changes to aircraft and passenger routings, SWAPA said.
New flight details from The Baker are forwarded to a crew-scheduling department. Workers use a computerized system to assign pilots and flight attendants to aircraft. SWAPA’s report refers to this system as “SkySolver.”
SkySolver cannot handle more than 200-300 cancellations at once, SWAPA said. During the meltdown, the system was overloaded repeatedly. At times, cancellations reached 500-600 per hour, SWAPA’s data shows.
Phone Lines Jammed
Schedulers had to put together rescheduling solutions manually.Chaos erupted. The airline lost track of its pilots and flight attendants. Some employees describe making valiant efforts to cobble together enough crew members to staff flights. As holiday travelers pleaded, these workers hoped to prevent the trips from canceling.
But their efforts were thwarted, even at airports where the weather was not causing problems.
That’s because crew schedulers’ phone lines were jammed, just as they had been at The Midway Meltdown in 2014—except worse.
Employees’ phone calls to schedulers waited on hold for many hours, sometimes into the double digits. Some crew members who called the company’s headquarters were told that no one could help.
Some flight attendants, afraid they would be “written up” if they left after their flights were canceled, remained overnight at airports.
An off-duty flight attendant said she was willing to report for work during the meltdown. But she discovered that things were such a mess, “I couldn’t have helped even if I wanted to.”
She said that a canceled flight stranded a co-worker in Sacramento, California. But that employee got a call the next day from a scheduler who said: “We need you at the gate in Philadelphia ... you’re supposed to be in Philadelphia.”
Getting Back On Track
During the meltdown, about 1,000 pilots endured duty days longer than 15 hours, SWAPA said, “with many put on continuous duty overnight awaiting a schedule change.”Pilots began reporting that they received “wildly inaccurate” information about personnel assignments, resulting in “needless confusion and delay” as pilots tried to reconcile their crew lists.
The airline resorted to flying more than 500 trips with no passengers, just crew, SWAPA said. This was done to ferry pilots and flight attendants to other destinations and “re-align” them with aircraft. Sadly, stranded passengers watched these empty flights depart while their own flights were canceled, SWAPA said.
On Dec. 26, Southwest slashed its schedule by more than half “to get crew back on track.”
That day, the airline publicly admitted fault in a statement on its website: “We recognize falling short and sincerely apologize.”
Previous company statements focused on the weather and said Southwest was “uniquely affected” because of its “size and structure.” The airline is the nation’s largest domestic carrier.
Some employees suggested that “structure” refers to Southwest’s flights running from “point-to-point” rather than out of hubs.
What Happens Next?
By Dec. 30, Southwest had worked its way back to near-normal numbers of flights while still struggling with cancellations and massive numbers of customer requests for refunds, rebookings, and mishandled luggage retrieval.Airline systems have “so many moving parts, they’re like an intricate clock,” a pilot said. Keeping track of all the aircraft, gates, bags, customers, employees, and equipment presents a monumental challenge.
But instead of having a finely tuned system to do so, Southwest has operated under “a tech deficit,” pilots and others say.
They say similar issues could be smoldering at other airlines and the agency overseeing them, Federal Aviation Administration.
Case in point: An FAA computer issue forced the grounding of all U.S. airlines for several hours on Jan. 11.
As Southwest tries to move forward, it is suffering greatly. Meltdown losses could reach $825 million. Millions of people are mad over ruined holiday plans. But customers have been known to flock back to businesses despite vows to “never” patronize them again. Brand loyalty can endure while memories fade.
Still, employees fear that, if no one is held accountable for the meltdown, Southwest’s customer base and talent pool will dry up, sending the airline into a deeper nosedive.
Workers say that Southwest must repair its reputational damage to attract “the best and the brightest” to work on its technology, fly its planes, and interact with its customers.
But knives are out. A pair of federal investigations and two separate lawsuits from shareholders and customers could pry loose more underlying deficiencies, employees fear.
From their viewpoint, the meltdown was primarily a product of the company’s skewed priorities, including focusing on stock prices while ignoring workers’ concerns about IT and other issues.
But, they say, all of that is intertwined with the company’s hot pursuit of high scores for ESG: “environmental, social and governance.”
That complex rating system can influence how investors, lenders, and government agencies deal with a company. It’s like a complicated version of the individual credit scores that affect consumers.
ESG engenders “woke policies” such as punishing employees for using the wrong pronoun when talking about a transgender person, one pilot said. Such priorities distract from the airline’s mission: “Get people and their bags from one place to another, safely, and have some fun along the way.”
And that, the pilot said, is where the airline needs to direct its focus.
He thinks Southwest will survive only if meaningful changes are made. For him, that includes unleashing its core group of employees, imbued with Kelleher-ian “Warrior Spirit,” to help Southwest soar once again.
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