unaligned

Southwest slashed another 2,500 flights on Wednesday, sending more frustrated customers scrambling to find seats on other airlines. The Dallas-based carrier’s cuts amounted to 60% of its schedule and nearly 90% of overall cancellations in the US on Wednesday, marking another day of disruptions even as weather conditions and operations at other airlines improved. Close to 60% of Southwest flights were already canceled for Thursday. It scrubbed less than 1% of the schedule for Friday, but the carrier still has to accommodate the thousands of travelers left stranded by its meltdown. Airlines have canceled thousands of flights since last week when severe winter weather roiled holiday travel around the US, but Southwest’s outsized disruptions have drawn scrutiny from the Biden administration and lawmakers. Southwest has blamed its performance on its internal technology platforms that were overloaded by schedule changes. That forced pilots and flight attendants to reach out to scheduling services by phone for new assignments, hotels and other accommodations. Hold times lasted hours, crews and unions said. “There are hoards of Teams working on solutions right now and have been for days and days,” Southwest CEO Bob Jordan said in a staff message on Tuesday. “Ultimately, though, this stops with me. I’m accountable for this and I own our issues and I own our recovery. I want you to know that as well.” <br/>

Southwest CEO Bob Jordan told employees he is “accountable” for the airline’s dramatic flight cancellations that have stranded thousands of passengers and employees across the US. In a message to Southwest employees sent Tuesday, Jordan again apologized for the disruptions and said teams are working to fix the situation and have been for days. The airline canceled thousands of flights daily this week after a winter storm swept the nation over the Christmas weekend, while other airlines have recovered. “Ultimately, though, this stops with me,” Jordan said in the message, which was seen by Bloomberg News. “I’m accountable for this and I own our issues and I own our recovery.” <br/>

After Southwest made it through Thanksgiving with few flight cancellations, Bob Jordan, the company’s CE, was in a celebratory mood. At a meeting with Wall Street analysts and investors this month at the New York Stock Exchange, he said the company’s performance had been “just incredible.” But a few weeks later, over the Christmas holiday, Southwest’s operations went into paralysis, forcing the company to resort to mass cancellations. The debacle has raised questions about Jordan’s performance and has prompted employees and analysts to ask why the company has been slow to fix well-known weaknesses in its operations. Other airlines fared far better during the extreme cold weather over Christmas weekend than Southwest, which after days of disruption canceled more than 2,500 flights on Wednesday, vastly more than any other US airline, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking service. The airline has already canceled more than 2,300, or 58%, of its flights planned for Thursday. Travelers, lawmakers and even employees are increasingly demanding answers from Southwest and Jordan. While the company has repeatedly apologized for its performance, it has provided few details about how things went so wrong and what it is doing to right its operations. The company said on Wednesday that Jordan and other executives were not available for interviews. In a video posted on Southwest’s website late Tuesday, Jordan, who became CE in February after three decades at Southwest, implied that the airline was caught out by a rare event. “The tools we use to recover from disruption serve us well 99% of the time,” he said, “but clearly we need to double down on our already existing plans to upgrade systems for these extreme circumstances.”<br/>

Five days after severe winter weather wreaked havoc on holiday air travel across the United States, most major carriers are back up and running. Delta, American Airlines and United each canceled fewer than 40 flights on Wednesday, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking service. Delta had the fewest with only 15 cancellations. At Southwest, it was a very different story. More than 2,500 flights, or 62% of its planned flights on Wednesday, had been canceled, according to FlightAware. And Southwest said Wednesday that it planned to fly one third of its scheduled flights for the next several days as it tries to return to normal operations, meaning it would continue to cancel close to 2,500 flights a day. Some passengers, unable to rebook Southwest flights, rented cars or spent hundreds of dollars to buy tickets on other airlines. So what caused the meltdown? Southwest uses a “point-to-point” route model that often lets passengers fly directly from smaller cities and regions without having to stop at a central hub like Denver or New York. Point-to-point flights cut travel times by eliminating the intermediate stop — typically a big advantage for travelers who are not flying from major metro areas. Other large carriers like United and American rely on a “hub-and-spoke” model in which planes typically fly from smaller cities to a hub airport where passengers change planes. For example, a passenger flying on a United plane from Oklahoma City to Phoenix may have to stop in Denver for several hours. Southwest flies routes directly from Oklahoma City to Phoenix in less than three hours. With a hub system, there’s a ready pool of crew members and pilots who can report to work at a major airport, said Mike Arnot, an industry analyst. That makes it easier to regroup after a storm, he said. Planes also are kept closer to their home airports, rather than being spread across the country. It’s harder to have a reserve of standby crew members and pilots when airlines serve many smaller markets. There is not usually excess crew in places like Syracuse, N.Y., Mr. Arnot said.<br/>

The Southwest Airlines meltdown that’s stranded thousands of passengers across the US has its root in outdated technology that analysts and its unions have warned about for years. “People have a right to be really angry and annoyed,” Cowen Inc. analyst Helane Becker said Wednesday. “They should have invested years ago in these systems and they just didn’t.” Southwest’s travails are dragging on with more than 2,500 flights canceled Wednesday and a similarly bleak outlook for Thursday, while its rivals have largely recovered from the arctic blast that swept the nation Christmas weekend. The “heartfelt” apologies offered by the airline and CEO Bob Jordan may be cold comfort to passengers who have been stranded at airports, missing luggage or holiday time with their families. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told Jordan on Tuesday that the department, expects that Southwest meet its obligations to passengers and workers and take steps to prevent a situation like this from happening again. Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, said her panel will be investigating. Southwest’s system — flying point to point instead of the hub-and-spoke regime used by rivals — is a point of pride, deeply embedded in its five-decade history and helps it reach many medium-size markets. But the behind-the-scenes technology that makes it possible to schedule crews and aircraft all proved brittle this week, just as it did in a similar systemic collapse in October 2021. When the computers weren’t up to the task, humans had to step in hunt down pilots and flight crews by telephone. “The fact is this is not the same airline that Herb Kelleher built where planes went point-to-point,” said Randy Barnes, president of TWU Local 555, which represents Southwest’s baggage handlers and other ground workers. “We are now experiencing the same problems as the more traditional airlines,” Barnes said in a statement, adding that “if airline managers had planned better, the meltdown we’ve witnessed in recent days could have been lessened or averted.”<br/>

The head of Russia's state-controlled airline Aeroflot called on the Russian government to "balance the interests" of Russian and foreign airlines in order to support the domestic aviation sector, in an interview with Russian news site RBC published on Wednesday. Aeroflot CEO Sergei Alexandrovsky said it is "important that the state balances the interests of Russian and international carriers. Because it is obvious that foreign carriers now have much more opportunities and advantages in these conditions". Russian airlines stopped flying to most overseas destinations after Western countries imposed unprecedented sanctions, including bans on Russian carriers, after Moscow sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24. Routes to Turkey and Middle Eastern countries popular with Russian tourists have been preserved. Alexandrovsky said that competitors, including Turkish Airlines and Emirates had benefitted most from the situation, and called for a degree of what he called "state protectionism" to safeguard domestic aviation.<br/>

Jetstar has apologised after holidaymakers heading to Bali from Melbourne were turned around four hours into their flight because the airline failed to get approval from Indonesian authorities to use a different plane. Flight JQ35 left Melbourne for Denpasar on Tuesday at 11.02pm – after being delayed for almost five hours – but was then sent back to Melbourne once it had already flown across Australia and was above the Timor Sea near Broome. By the time passengers arrived back in Victoria’s capital, they had spent about eight hours in the air. The route from Melbourne to Denpasar usually takes five hours and 40 minutes. A Jetstar spokesman on Wednesday said the airline had upgraded the plane from an Airbus A321 to a larger Boeing 787 to carry more customers during the busy holiday season, but “due to a miscommunication, the aircraft swap was not approved by the local regulator in Indonesia”. “As soon as we became aware, the flight returned to Melbourne, and we have rebooked passengers on a flight later today,” the spokesman said. A spokesman for Jetstar said hotel rooms were offered to all those affected, but some passengers disputed that.<br/>