Southwest Airlines Cancelled 2/3rds of flights

Good work, Mike

Uh, not us, and I checked my spam folder too. Where did you hear this?

I received one with the innocuous title of "Irregular Operations."  Here is what it said,

"We sincerely apologize if your recent travel plans have been impacted. Our Purpose is to connect People to what's important in their lives, and we know your time is valuable. Due to adverse weather events and their resulting effects, we are currently experiencing operational disruptions and are working diligently and safely to restore normal flight schedules as quickly as possible.

"As we do this, your flight may be impacted, and we encourage you to check your flight status regularly for more details.

"If your flight is canceled, you should receive a notification. Please visit our Travel Disruption page for options: Southwest.com/TravelDisruption. If you have not received a notification, no action is needed but continue to check your flight status regularly.

"If your flight was canceled and you would like a refund, please submit a request here. We will work to process your refund as soon as possible.

"When significant adverse weather conditions occur, the impact on our operation is widespread. Reaccommodation becomes challenging with fewer flights operating, and, as a result, it takes time to help each Customer, which causes our Customers to encounter long hold times and long lines. While we can’t always predict the challenges brought about by the busy holiday travel season, we apologize that the irregular operations may have interrupted your travel plans."

I received a text message about my cancellation last night at 11 pm (Denver time) after having received a boarding pass about eight hours earlier.  Thank you so much, Southwest Airlines.

It’s all about flight crews and scheduling, has nothing to do with weather at this point.

I drove and it was a pain in the ass. I live in Toronto and we go to see my wife's family in Appalachia, so we have to cross the border twice.

We usually use the Peace Bridge in Buffalo (it's slightly quicker), but that was closed because of all the snow they had over the weekend. The Blue Water Bridge to Sarnia was also closed because of the snow they had up there.

Which leaves Windsor. We took the Ambassador Bridge, and it was a mess.

On the plus side, I haven't driven through Michigan since legalization. Loved all the billboards for "O-high-oans" to stop and buy some legal marijuana.

2 days of driving is the shitty alternative 

It's incredulous to me that WN (Southwest) hasn't changed their strategy of how they route airplanes through their network.

Last Tuesday, I was on the DEN-DTW leg of a Southwest flight that went ONT-OAK-DEN-DTW-BWI-PWM over the course of the day.  They literally started a plane in SoCal and ended it in Maine, same flight number and airplane the entire way, the plane making 5 different stops along the way.  Most of their airplanes are scheduled to do stuff like this daily.

Problem is: if there's an issue in Denver/upstream, then all the downstream flights get affected, even if there are no operational issues at those airports.

Most other airlines leverage their hub-and-spoke model: Delta will fly a plane on a given day, say, GRR-DTW-STL-DTW-STL.  That way if there is weather in DTW (their hub) or STL (the spoke that plane hits multiple times in one day), it doesn't really affect other flights/cities.  They could cancel those 2 middle flights and the airplane is still in the right spot for the last flight.

This is an operational/logistical change that really HAS to happen for Southwest.  They have evolved to being a bit of a hub-and-spoke airline anyway.  Their current routing structure doesn't isolate risk.

One absurd stat: Southwest has cancelled 90%+ of their flights the last 2 days at my hometown airport of Burbank, where their non-stops are almost exclusively to west of the Rockies locales.  It's been sunny and 70 in Burbank for a week!  

The company is using software that doesn't work terribly well, to say nothing about staffing shortages.  Planes and crews seem to not be meshing terribly well.

My then-GF, now wife and I got screwed by the massive Southwest computer system crash in July 2016. She was flying out of DTW and I was flying out of BWI, and we were supposed to meet in Denver and then fly to San Francisco together. In the middle of the night before we were supposed to leave, SW's computer system crashed, and they ended up cancelling hundreds if not thousands of flights starting on our departure date. My flight out of BWI was cancelled, stranding me there, while the GF did make it out of DTW, but ended up stranded in Denver as the Denver to SFO flights were all cancelled. They wanted to rebook us on flights two to three days later, completely destroying our long weekend vacation, but thankfully we were able to make other arrangements (she got a United fight to SFO, I took the MARC/Metro combo from BWI to Reagan and caught a Delta flight that connected, ironically, through DTW), and we both got to San Fran later that day, before being able to take our original SW return flights.

But I could never understand how a computer outage could ground pretty much an entire airline's fleet. You cancel hundreds if not thousands of flights, costing millions of dollars, because you don't have a computer to tell you what to do? Pencil and paper that shit if nothing else. Any infrastructure system that can be completely derailed by a computer outage has serious issues.

I generally like SW (that's really the only issue I've had with them), and they, along with NW/Delta, have been one of the two best airlines I've flown, but these kind of issues are truly unacceptable...

This is my same story.  Southwest has stranded me in Denver with no ability to reschedule a flight until (they say via their scheduling website) late Saturday evening.  I even checked into my planned 3:25 pm flight yesterday, exactly 24 hours in advance, and was confirmed with a boarding pass.  Then last night at 11 pm received the fateful text message.  I tried to connect with them via phone but hung up after staying on hold until midnight.  They have given me virtually no suggestions about how to deal with this.  It looks like every other airline that flies into/out of Denver has available seats so may schedule myself via one of them in order to return to Detroit.

If you have reservations on Southwest flying anywhere this week (especially Phoenix!), I would seriously question your ability to get there!  One media report said that Southwest told them they planned to run only a third of their flights for a few days in order to get things back to "normal."  I say this especially since my flight was originally confirmed about eight hours before getting the cancellation message.  They don't seem to know what they are doing (though that may not be a fair comment).

I've flown Detroit to/from Phoenix many times and I've always gone with either Delta or American, never Southwest.  And I've never had any issues, although this particular storm is quite disruptive. 

Worst case, you can fly to SoCal and drive to Phoenix. Glendale is on the west side so it's an hour less to the stadium from LA than it is to Sky Harbor from LA.  Also check connections to Tucson and Palm Spring, not just LAX/Orange County.

Apparently they are trying to run the largest domestic airline in the country with a scheduling system that requires flight crew to call a phone number if their flight cancels so someone can manually enter the change into the system and then tell them over the phone where they are supposed to go next. I guess this system got overloaded to the point that Southwest flight attendants were posting screen shots of being on hold for 7 hours trying to report and get their updated schedule.

They will likely get things back to running by next week but actually fixing the cause of the problem is likely a one to two year project (not an IT guy but I suspect creating and implementing an integrated scheduling system for an airline operating 4,000 flights a day using various software systems from the 90's is not something quickly completed)

I have generally flown Southwest for the last decade but I think I am out. With no immediate fix available, the odds of the Southwest system collapsing during the next beg weather event are close to 100%. I guess its time to get my status back with fricken United....

Don't blame the IT folks for this failure.  Blame the company leadership that has consistently under-invested in technology for decades.  And BTW, there are many other companies in this and other industries that are similarly rolling the dice.  You cannot save your way to profitability in the long run.  Invest, evolve, or die.

That is 12 good podcasts and a couple books on tape.  I've done similar west coast trips, not horrible.

No kidding.  I'd have driven from 12 out in the first place but that's just me as I've got too much Chevy Chase in me.

Wouldn't want to be a Southwest shareholder right now!  This is undoubtedly the most obvious tip of the management problem iceberg there.

It's hard to disagree after being a victim myself.  On the other hand, Southwest is a critical part of US transportation and I would hope they will figure all of this out very quickly, even though part of the answer will be a long-term investment in their operations.  Southwest leaving the map, via liquidation or merger, would just make fewer flight options available and hike the flight costs for all the remaining options.  Justified thinking anyway!

At least your mother got a text message. We got nothing. Took me three hours on the website to rebook, and we still aren't sure my kid will be going on her trip.

I can't believe that in the days of AWS, Azure, and other cloud providers, their network didn't scale up. It's IT malpractice.

Sorry, JRell.  Hope as long as you want but you know the 5P saying, so start figuring it out now if you really want to go!  You will probably be required to fly into another airport and drive there.