Southwest appears back on track to normal schedule

Southwest Airlines said it expected to return to normal operations Friday after slashing about two-thirds of its schedule in recent days, including canceling another 2,350 flights Thursday.

And it appeared early Friday that the carrier was making good on its prediction.

As of 5 a.m. EST, Southwest had scrubbed only 39 flights, according to flight tracking website FlightAware.com.

"We are encouraged by the progress we've made to realign crew, their schedules and our fleet," the carrier said in a statement posted on the company's website Thursday. "With another holiday weekend full of important connections for our valued customers and employees, we are eager to return to a state of normalcy."

Southwest is struggling to recover after being overwhelmed by a winter storm that left hundreds of pilots and flight attendants stranded out of position to operate flights. The airline early Thursday cut 58% of the airline's daily scheduled trips, according to FlightAware, although that represented an improvement from previous days. 

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An estimated 1 million passengers have been affected by the scotched flights. Overall, Southwest has canceled more than 13,000 flights since its meltdown began on Dec. 22. Its planes have 143 to 175 seats and were likely nearly fully booked around the Christmas and New Year's holidays.

Southwest officials initially blamed the travel chaos on the harsh winter weather that affected the Southeast and other parts of the U.S. last week. But in an interview with CBS News Streaming, U.S. Captain Michael Santoro, vice president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, also pointed to what he described as the Dallas carrier's "outdated" scheduling technology, saying the software was unable to handle the flood of passenger flight cancellations caused by the winter storm. 

Snowball effect

The system also failed to process the reassignments of Southwest crew as the company tried to reschedule flights, he added.

"You get this snowball effect where it can't keep track of where pilots are, flight attendants are and airplanes are," Santoro said.

Southwest has since acknowledged that it has inadequate and outdated technology that can leave flight crews out of position when bad weather strikes.

Other airlines are back to full strength. Delta, American and United together canceled around 30 flights by late morning, according to tracker FlightAware.

"We've let our customers and employees down"

About the only good news for Southwest passengers was that 98% of flights that took off Thursday managed to land within 15 minutes of schedule, meeting the government's definition of an on-time arrival.

The airline has declined requests to make executives available for comment and did not provide an update about operations on its website. Its main public outreach has been to post video statements by CEO Robert Jordan and other top executives.

In a video apology Wednesday, Southwest Chief Commercial Officer Ryan Green highlighted new features on the company's website where affected travelers can go to rebook flights, request refunds and submit information on missing bags. He also acknowledged that "we've let our customers and employees down" while pledging to take corrective measures.

Jordan faces a crisis just 11 months after becoming CEO, replacing longtime leader Gary Kelly. Southwest had 88 planes and 7,000 employees when Jordan joined 35 years ago. Now it has more than 700 planes and more than 60,000 employees.

Speaking to reporters a month ago at Southwest headquarters in Dallas, a relaxed and jocular Jordan spoke in glowing terms about the airline's culture and customer service. He outlined five priorities, including modernizing the airline's technology for scheduling pilots and flight attendants.

"I do think the scale and the growth of the airline got ahead of the tools that we have," he said. "No fault of anybody — takes investment — and we'll get all this done."

Jordan didn't give a timeline or dollar figure for that investment, or explain why the airline had not already done the work. But his comments about Southwest's archaic crew-scheduling system seemed to foreshadow one of the major causes of the current meltdown — the airline's inability to get pilots and flight attendants in position when there is a disruption to the operation.

"We have a lot of crews moving all over the country," Jordan said. "If they get reassigned — they need to go to a different city or different flight than they thought, or they get reassigned to a new hotel — somebody needs to call them or basically in the airport chase them down and tell them what their re-route looks like.

So at our size and scale, that's just not OK."

Lawmakers in Congress have vowed to investigate what happened at Southwest.

Questions over reimbursing passengers

Southwest added a page to its website specifically for stranded travelers, and it invited customers to submit receipts for unexpected expenses. The airline said it would consider reimbursing "reasonable" expenses for meals, hotel rooms and alternate transportation incurred between Dec. 24 and Jan. 2. Consumer advocates criticized the use of the word "reasonable" as too vague.

Thousands of customers have been unable to reach the airline this week, as Southwest's phone system was overwhelmed. Pilots and flight attendants also reported being put on hold for hours.

Investors appear to think Southwest might finally be getting a handle on the crisis: The company's shares rose more than 3%, but they're still down 8% for the week.

The airline has not given an estimate for how much revenue it has lost and how much extra cost it will incur. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and some members of Congress are demanding that Southwest pay stranded travelers for hotel rooms, meals and replacement flights they booked on other airlines.

One indication of the price tag: Southwest said a disruption in October 2021 cost it $75 million. That meltdown was far smaller, resulting in about 2,000 canceled flights over a four-day stretch. Back then, as this week, Southwest's solution was to cut its schedule to stabilize the operation.

Southwest has been the most profitable U.S. airline so far this year, earning $759 million in net income through September.

Raymond James airline analyst Savanthi Syth said Thursday that she still expects the company to post a small profit in the fourth quarter, but that some consumers are likely to switch from Southwest to other airlines over the next few months when booking travel.

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