A harsh note from the union representing Southwest Airlines pilots throws down the gauntlet, blaming the meltdown on “pride” and “avarice” by management and predicting a total collapse if concrete changes are not made as a result of this month’s meltdown.
Southwest Captain, President Of SWAPA, Predicts Collapse Of Southwest Within Five Years, Laments Pride And Avarice
Captain Casey A. Murray, President of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA), penned the following note to Southwest pilots:
I can’t express my appreciation for the dedication and professionalism each of you has shown through this leadership vacuum and failure from the top on down at Southwest. Each communication from SWA’s “leadership” is more tone deaf than the last. And each meltdown has become worse than the last.
Pride and avarice have replaced our once vaunted culture. “Pride” in ignoring solutions that have been, and continue to be, offered to support the house of cards that our operation has become. And even though irrefutable analytics and data have been provided by SWAPA again and again, pride in their outdated processes and technology continues to drive our management. A former VP of Flight Ops once stated “SWAPA has no levers to pull here, but I can” as he dismissed solutions offered by your Union. “Avarice” as evidenced by how our management chooses to continue to reward shareholders instead of stakeholders — the very same stakeholders that the Company relies on to recover the operation during and after every meltdown.
My message from last year, Investing in the Operation lists decades of acknowledgements by management of the exact same failures that defined this meltdown.
SWAPA anticipated that operational challenges might force the Company to offer another Ops Issues MOU like last year, so we polled the membership in November to measure support. Overwhelmingly, you replied that you had no interest in an MOU that was merely a one-time buy off unless the Company included Contract 2020 scheduling efficiencies to help guard against exactly what is happening today. Our Negotiating Committee met with Labor Relations just last week and not once did the Company make an offer, despite the looming forecast. At 1600 on Christmas Eve, I received a call from Mr. Kuwitzky about bonus pay retroactive to December 22. Shortly thereafter, the Company changed their offer to retro from the 20th and forward-looking incentive pay through January 3.
SWAPA’s governance process, as the Company is well aware, requires that any agreement of the Association has to be vetted and voted on by the BOD and time is necessary for that. It is bad practice to do so in such a compressed timeframe, but in an emergency, we can if needed. Your BOD worked through Christmas Eve and Christmas Day addressing it and guiding our committees to support our Pilots. NC Chair Jody Reven has been in contact with Mr. Kuwitzky today, but unless he commits to some Contract 2020 scheduling asks to help mitigate the chaos to your QOL during potential future meltdowns in writing as part of any MOU, then I fear we can’t get there from here.
SWAPA has provided endless data over the past several years to provide solutions, so I want to frame this a different way. We all know that the Company has had its head buried in the sand when it comes to its operational processes and IT. Worst of all, through the numerous and ever-increasing meltdowns that we have endured during the last 20 months (much less the last decade) Southwest has had enough crews in place to operate the planned schedule. It’s not until SkySolver and scheduling roulette begin that the network spirals out of control. The Company’s failed solution? Hire more. Add reserves. Optimize and reassign Pilots online. We aren’t undermanned. We’re undermanaged. Even with the correct number of Pilots on any given day, the house of cards fails, and fail it does with ever-increasing frequency and severity.
Back to this past week, not only was this storm forecasted, but this meltdown was predicted.
Minneapolis and Detroit had lower temperatures, higher winds, and more precipitation, yet Delta managed their hubs with minor delays and cancellations. United had a fraction of the delays and cancellations than SWA in Denver and recovered O’Hare days before we stabilized Midway. So what is the root cause? Pride, avarice, and complete failure and responsibility of management from the very top. Southwest, the once LUV airline, placed blame on you. From your very own VP of Flight Ops who wrote “low Open Time pick up rates and increased sick usage” to the VP of Ground Ops who wrote a six-paragraph diatribe blaming his ramp staff and threatening termination in three of those six paragraphs.
At this point, I’m concerned for our airline. I’m concerned that our CEO hasn’t been in contact with your president or anyone from SWAPA during this crisis. We won’t survive another 10 years as a company if this continues, and maybe no more than five. I’m more concerned for our more junior membership who have 20, 30, or 40 years of a career left here. I’m concerned that this leadership team has been trained to fail by those who came before them. So far, they have shown a complete inability to address ANY of the failures that continue to plague our airline day-in and day-out. They can’t say that SWAPA has not offered to help nor offered solutions. We have been sounding the alarm for years. Here are just two of dozens: Normalization of Drift and An Open Letter to SWA.
At the end of the day, regardless of what those vice presidents above said, you are the last line of defense to our safety culture. You have demonstrated your professionalism and commitment to your customers and safety through enormous adversity, and it needs to be recognized and rewarded. We need to be a part of the solution to the current threat to our airline and our careers. Until that happens, I fear the final meltdown may be right around the corner.
Important takeaways:
- Southwest pilots predicted precisely this collapse
- Southwest did as well, but refused to cut a deal with pilots that may have made more pilots willing to work extra hours
- The problem is not employees. If anything, Southwest has too many employees but has failed to invest in its antiquated crew scheduling systems, which simply cannot handle a winter weather event
- Murray predicts, “We won’t survive another 10 years as a company if this continues, and maybe no more than five.”
Certainly, any effective union president will never let a crisis go to waste, but here there are more than general grievances: much of it charts very specific errors in judgment by Southwest leadership. The larger emerging takeaway from all this is that the Southwest meltdown was 100% preventable.
CONCLUSION
The Southwest captain and SWAPA President has penned a long and somber note to pilots. Per Murray, everyone at Southwest saw this meltdown coming but the leadership failed to have the vision to tackle the core problems that led to it.
image: Southwest Airlines // H/T: View From The Wing
Unions take any opportunity to bash their employers and management.
What a broken record.
Regardless of one’s opinion on unions, this is alarming. When the head of the PILOT’S union is making a public statement calling out the mismanagement of one of the world’s largest airlines, something’s gotta change. Obviously you can’t run an airline without enough pilots, and there’s a huge shortage of qualified pilots in the US at present. If this were 2002 or even 2012 it wouldn’t be as big a deal. But Southwest at this point is “too big to fail” thanks to all the consolidation in the last 15 years.
I can smell the hostile takeover/activist investor pressure brewing right now…
Since pilots are generally tied to an airline for a career, due to their seniority system, they probably want their company to succeed.
I can tell you many of my colleagues have wanted to openly bash senior leadership, because nothing else seems get their attention. However, since there is no union, there really aren’t real protections offered that can protect white or blue collar employees if senior leadership screws up on thr regular.
Union rule 1: It’s never our fault.
Union rule 2: In case of emergency, cite rule 1.
Union people love to throw “muh professionalism” around but are always the first to run to the media to smack talk every non-union entity in the company.
Wow, good to know. I never realized the unions control employee moral through pay, benefits and quality of life. Somehow I always thought that was managements job?!?! It’s also good to know that the unions control the IT software used to control the operations, policies for weather disruption and their recovery. Can you please tell me why we need management then if the unions are accountable for everything?
Unions have a huge influence on morale at the company especially with public statements telling their employer…”I told you so.”
Unless pilots are working right up to their 117 limits then they aren’t doing the most they can to resolve the situation.
And has anyone from the union walked into the ops center in Dallas and offered to help?
Or does “The Contract™️” prevent proactive participation in operational recovery?
Former SWA pilot here. Yes, the union has offered many, many times to provide insight and ideas to many corners of the operation, especially operations and crew scheduling. SWA has always rejected their offers.
What type of insight?
Did that insight come with commitments from the union to participate in managing the operation especially during disruption?
The reason’s the unions say ” told you so” are most likely because they did. The union’s and their constituents have a vested interest in the company succeeding. If the company doesn’t succeed, they don’t have a job, or at least get shoddy pay/benefits. Most CEO’s are only looking for the next quarter so they can get their insanely lucrative bonuses. If the CEO screws it all up the company goes under, they get their golden parachute, and the CEO gets another job his buddy set him up with.
#FIREBOBJORDAN and boot Gary Kelly as Executive Chairman. They both have been whistling past the graveyard. Let 87 year old Bob Crandall run SWA.
This is one where the truth is there but it lies in-between the two competing narratives. Nobody denies that WN has incredibly outdated systems. And that needs to be fixed, stat. But will they not last 10 years? Or even 5? Nonsense. Pure union-grade BS. They’ll stop the bleeding and get things back in line, just as Spirit did earlier this year. And, the average pax (particularly those not affected by this, which is a lot), will have forgotten all about it within the next couple of months. However, WN needs to revamp their ways of operating – because repeated meltdowns can indeed take an airline down. As long as it’s an outlier, it will go away. But if it becomes a regular thing, I may have to take back what I wrote about about da union guy.
Union blames the company….yawn
Well the company is who caused this disaster soooo..
This airline is toast…it’s going to be handed over to one of the Big 3…or all of them at the same time. Just wait and see, DOT will engineer this hostile coup…
Are we supposed to believe that higher pay magically fixes what happened over the last 7 days? That somehow the airline just didn’t offer enough overtime pay during this event, or that they didn’t offer enough in the latest contract?
The airline industry as a whole is failing on so many levels and you can’t keep blaming pay. There’s a lack of regulations, a lack of enforcement of basic rules for passenger conduct and a lack of accountability for companies that treat customers like garbage.
As long as these companies focus on shareholders more than customers these problems will continue until we start seeing planes fall out of the sky.
Unions are one trick ponies.
It’s all about more money for less work.
Same with CEO’s! Looks like they’re in the same boat!
I have a good friend who is a pilot and my running joke with him is that I fly as many block hours as he does in a month and I still have a full time job to do.
So no, not a single line pilot at any airline works as many hours as the CEO.
And if any line pilot did…they’d die of exhaustion.
I would be more than happy to put in the hours a CEO puts in. After a year, I would have made a lifetimes worth of money and could retire! And if I got fired, I would still have a lifetime’s worth of money to retire!
Where was Southwest senior management on Fri Dec 23? I’ll tell you. THEY WERE HOME WITH THEIR FAMILIES!!! Did I say it loud enough? That is the big picture! No one in SWA management addressed any issues prior to Dec 26th.
Where does the union say pay fixes the issue?
Where does the union say pay fixes the issue?
Yeah. Started a long time ago but became front and center this summer. I switched all my SWA flights for United due to ongoing cancellation issues. As a 10+ year A+ list flyer, I became tired of older planes, never any wifi and pricing that was no longer advantageous compared to the others. Add in the increasing flight delays and cancellations, I was done. And apparently, so is this airline after this debacle. As a business traveler, I’m not going back.
Ignoring what you think about unions, the pilot isn’t wrong that shareholder greed is largely to blame here. As this has been going on it’s clear that WN’s issues are largely stemming from outdated scheduling systems making it impossible to schedule crews and track bags. Yet, instead of upgrading these systems to avoid the collapse they face now they just declared a dividend on December 6th.
In order to declare a dividend, the board/an officer has to certify that a company has the excess cash in order to do so. Clearly, that wasn’t the case with that WN or else they wouldn’t be in this situation. The SEC should put a hold on this dividend (which hasn’t paid out yet) until WN implements the necessary changes (as directed by the DOT) to prevent this from happening again and every passenger screwed over by WN management choosing greed over operational resilience is made whole. If there’s any money left over after that, then the shareholders can get their dividend.
Sadly we hear too many stories about corporate greed and complete disengagement of executive management who will never understand the real issues until they climb down off their thrones in the corporate offices and join the boots on the ground for a walk in their shoes. Why it takes a disaster to see a disaster is incomprehensible. How they can ignore repeated, factually-based, and verified concerns by those boots on the ground is as inexcusable as it is ignorantly myopic. Yet, here we are starring down the gullet of the beast they created, horribly under-prepared to rise to the challenge. You just can’t expect real results when your solution is akin to offering a ravenous grizzly a piece of beef jerky in one hand while a T-Bone steak is tied around our neck. Easy choice for the grizzly.
The pilot union has some blame here in regards to the outdated scheduling systems they refer to.
6 years ago SWA pilots were offered a PBS built using the fastest and fairest algorithms available anywhere. One that left exactly as much open time as that contract allowed while giving the pilots complete schedule awareness at their seniority during bidding, thereby improving QOL..
But alas,
These Pilots preferred the old line bidding system they can game, and which leaves piles of open time they don’t have to pick up so they can to fly less and earn more..
There is definitely greed at play..
Very interesting comment. Is there anywhere I can find out more about this?
Ok first let’s talk about PBS or preferential bid system. Traditionally airlines have published large bid packages that contained a bunch of pre-built schedules or lines of flying. Pilots would then bid for those lines based on seniority. Because these schedules were pre-built it meant that they could not take into account things like vacation and training which would then result in those conflicts being removed from the pilots schedule and placed in open time. It also meant that even the most senior pilots may not get the exact schedule they wanted if their didn’t happen to be a line with it.
PBS changes all that by harnessing the power of the computer. With PBS pilots bid for specific trips or for trips meeting certain parameters meaning that pilots tend to get schedules far more reflective of what they really want. And because the system knows about things like vacation and training it’s smart enough not assign flying that conflicts with those pre-planned absences. Sounds like a win win right?
Well it can be but as always the devil is in the details. Because it can easily be set up such that it’s still a win for management but a huge loss for the pilots. Let’s take vacation as one example. With PBS you have to assign a vacation day a credit value because one of the things it does is try to load a range of credit into every pilots schedule. That might be 75-85 hours for example. Now pre-PBS a pilot would bid a line worth 85 hours and let’s say vacation touches two 4 day trips worth 24 hours each that then get removed from his schedule. So now the pilot is still getting paid 85 hours but has gained an additional 6 days off through this conflict bidding.
Now let’s look at what happens with PBS. PBS doesn’t allow that conflict so the pilot now loses out on those 6 extra days. And if the value of a vacation day is too low then the system is still going to try and cram in 85 hours of credit. By contrast setting the value higher results in vacation bringing enough credit to the month the the pilot can still in essence capture those 6 extra days that they used to be able to get.
The above is just one example of a wide range of parameters that have to be defined with a PBS system. As I hope I’ve illustrated how you set them up can result in a significant negative impact on the pilot group which obviously they aren’t going to be interested in. Given that nearly everyone else is using PBS these days if Southwest isn’t then there is more too this than just “greedy pilots”.
What about the impact on the current mess? The answer is none because this impacts monthly schedule construction and that’s not what brought the SWA system down. Nor was the problem excessive known open time. The problem as has been made clear in numerous posts is that when the cancellations reached a certain threshold the ability of their scheduling and crew tracking systems to keep up failed. As they lost control it created a cascade failure with the loss of ability to manage their system leading to a host of trickle down cancellations which further overloaded their system leading to even more cancellations until they reached the point where they are now. They could have had PBS and walked into this storm with zero known open time and it wouldn’t have mattered at all. Because it was the trickle down effects of all the cancellations which created the cascade failure.
Marty St.George former senior exec at JetBlue posted a long Twitter thread talking about how this sort of failure develops. He estimated that given the size and complexity of SWA’s system that even if they had a crew solver program that could automate the recovery process (and it appears they don’t) it would take 10 hours for the system to compute a solution. And by that time a good chunk of the solution would be invalid.
So no PBS has nothing to do with where SWA is today.
PBS constructs the monthly pilot schedule. It has nothing to do with the airline recovery from a weather event. Nothing. It won’t tell you where planes are located, where available pilots are located, legal duty times, etc.
You have no idea what your talking about. PBS is a bidding system, it has zero to do with day to day operations.
Not surprised by this. SWA broke their mold of going to out lying fields and small system. They’re more the largest domestic carrier in the country. When the CEO that started the company moved aside the writing was on the wall that the company’s size and lack of growth on internal systems was going to cause issues. They definitely aren’t the parking if the airline industry anymore.
In defense of my old crew scheduling system…
As long as it gets correct data inputs from ACARS, etc. it knows where the crews are.
There are several searches and reports that can tell you what crews are on what flights, at what stations and at what layovers (even hotels).
What it can’t do is tell you the optimal solution for putting things back together.
As the chief pilot at a large regional airline told me in 2021…all the experienced people were retired (or left) during Covid and the people left behind don’t have the same experience and problem solving expertise.
They are also having significant communication problem and that isn’t something related to the crew tracking system.
As for replacing the existing crew system…
It’s a massive, herculean task that is littered with more failures than successes.
AA is still using FOSS. Jetblue still using CrewTrac even after three attempts to replace it. It took Alaska years to implement Jeppesen and even now it still has limitations.
There is no off the shelf system for Southwest and whatever they do will still take years to fully implement.
I think one part of Organization is that they have to have SEAT ASSIGNMENT to passengers instead of the greedy grab while we / you can method.
Now, the word Avarice, I had to look up. Maybe it’s the ‘psychological greed’ that passengers have to run in and grab the first seat they can. Need to assign Seats.
Clearly this SWAPA Prez is ineffective and needs to be replaced. He can’t get Management to heed his advise, and he can’t get the Pilots a new contract.
What good is he doing??