Southwest Airlines says it will trim back its December flight schedule in an attempt to avoid the meltdowns that have characterized operations over the last few months.
Southwest Announces Preemptive Flight Cancellations As Precautionary Measure
While the plan was for its fourth quarter schedule to be down only 5% from 2019 levels, Southwest now says it will modify its schedule in avoid a snowball effect when bad weather or other disruptions hit its network. The result will be a paring back of the December schedule which will ultimately mean the fourth quarter schedule will be down 8% from 2019 levels.
Southwest continues to insist, publicly at least, that its most recent operational meltdown was caused by bad weather in Florida. But while bad weather in Florida did lead to flight disruptions, it was Southwest’s lack of backup staffing that ultimately doomed operations for several days after, leading to thousands of flight cancellations and delays.
Yesterday during a third quarter earnings call, outgoing CEO Gary Kelly took the blame on himself, admitting “I would be the first to admit that things are messy…I pushed a little too hard there in the third quarter with capacity.” He also admitted, albeit vaguely, that the problem goes beyond bad weather:
“And the burden to manage through all of this falls to our people and we’ve gone from not enough to do to too much to do in a very short period of time.”
With the reduction in flight schedules and fuel prices rising, expect higher prices for airfare. Incoming CEO Bob Jordan shared that after a brief dip in bookings due to Delta-variant COVID-19 concerns, leisure and business bookings have returned:
“The resurge in COVID cases cost the quarter about $300 million, and that aside, the quarter would have been solidly profitable. As cases have come down and subsided, booking trends have recovered nicely on both the leisure and the business front and booking trends for the holidays are in line with 2019.”
Jordan also added that Southwest is in the process of hiring more than 5,000 additional employees.
CONCLUSION
Southwest Airlines will trim its schedule in December in hopes of avoiding the sort of operational meltdown that has continued all summer and into autumn. The carrier puts on an optimistic face for the future, but its path forward remains unclear until its employee backlog is filled.
Just another American business that can’t meet the needs of its customers or shareholders because of a lack of staff?
How did things get this bad this fast?
I don’t believe their latest melt down was do to a lack of staff, they don’t seem to have any problems this week. On another website an individual broke down the top 8 US airlines operations in Florida. Out of Southwests entire US operations only 17% of their total daily flights touch Florida. There are other carriers with a much higher percentage of their operations in Florida but none of those carriers experienced the meltdown Southwest experienced. What happened to Southwest is clear although both Southwest and their pilots union continue to deny it. It is clear there was some sort of job action whether planned or unplanned there was some type of job action that snowballed out of control resulting in massive delays and cancelations.
How does weather in Florida cause several cancellations and numbers extended delays in Hawaii a few hours later? There is no way either the aircraft or the pilots operating flights out of Hawaii were in Florida 6 to 8 hours earlier.
I think the meltdown was do to the vaccine mandate which Southwest has now backoff from. For Southwest to still continue to push their lie and blame their meltdown on ATC is ridiculous.