At one point last week, 88% of Southwest Airlines flights through Philadelphia were canceled. Nationally, they were canceling 2,000 to 3,000 flights a day, right in the middle of the holidays.
The airline is back to normal operation now, but what happened?
“We had never seen a meltdown like this,” said Temple University associate professor of travel and tourism Benjamin Altschuler, calling it the “perfect storm for the perfect storm.”
He said one part of the meltdown could be attributed to the winter storm that slammed the Midwest and Northeast, followed by some of the coldest temperatures during the holidays over the last 30 years.
“This winter storm was something that was kind of a once-in-a-lifetime sort of event,” said Altschuler. “Every year where these sorts of storms roll through bad weather, things kind of get a little bit messed up.”
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But Altschuler said Southwest’s way of connecting flights, called a point-to-point model, and its automated internal crew organization systems and technology are antiquated by today’s standards, exacerbating the airline’s issues over the holidays.
“Let's call it a 1997 problem … the system that Southwest has been using to put together crews and things like that is a system that is at least 20 to 25 years old,” said Altschuler.
Altschuler said the airline’s technology is meant to automatically adjust crews to flights as necessary when flights are delayed or canceled.
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“We talk about juggling crews. We're talking about pilots. We're talking about flight attendants, all the things that make these airlines tick and allow flights to move from different places,” he said. “It's literally a progressive puzzle that is consistently changing.”
Unlike Southwest, most airlines use a hub-and-spoke system, allowing for a large number of crew members from an airline’s hub airport to be available for assigning to a flight when necessary.
“That makes the puzzle that much harder to juggle when things start to go wrong, because we don't have people in the places they are supposed to be. We don't have a hub where we know we can pull pilots and crews together quickly,” said Altschuler.
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“The [Southwest] system just can't handle that. And the point-to-point model, in this case, failed spectacularly.”
Altschuler shared much more about the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the airline industry in these situations, his view of Southwest’s need to take full responsibility, the role of government involvement in Southwest’s situation, and how the airline moves forward from this debacle.
Listen to Altschuler’s full KYW Newsradio In Depth conversation with Matt Leon below, and subscribe to KYW Newsradio In Depth on the Audacy app or wherever you get your podcasts.