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When Southwest Airlines Co. LUV 0.93%increase; green up pointing triangle reassigns crews after flight disruptions, it typically relies on a system called SkySolver. This Christmas, SkySolver not only didn’t solve much, it also helped create the worst industry meltdown in recent memory.
Airline executives and labor leaders point to inadequate technology systems, in particular SkySolver, as one reason why a brutal winter storm turned into a debacle. SkySolver was overwhelmed by the scale of the task of sorting out which pilots and flight attendants could work which flights, Southwest executives said. Crew schedulers instead had to comb through records by hand.
The airline has said SkySolver works well during a more typical disruption and had helped it manage recent hurricanes and snowstorms. But the scale of this past week’s storm, coupled with a network that still hasn’t been fully restored in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, gummed things up. Even as it tried to solve one set of problems, new ones would emerge.
Crews and planes were out of place. Phone lines jammed up, and Southwest pilots and flight attendants trying to get assignments couldn’t get through to the scheduling department. Some shared screenshots on social media that showed hold times of eight hours or more—which meant they could wait a full workday for instructions while flights were stuck for the lack of a crew. The airline was scrambling just to figure out where its crew members were located, union leaders said.
“There just was not enough time in the day for them to work through the manual solutions,” Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson said in an interview.
Southwest prides itself on a laid-back culture and exceptional customer service. Now that reputation has been badly damaged. It canceled more than 13,000 flights since Thursday, stranded passengers and bags across the country, snarled Southwest’s crew members and drew fire from federal officials. Chief Executive Officer Bob Jordan, who has been in the job for less than a year, publicly apologized. Mr. Watterson has been in his job since October. Both are longtime company executives.
The storm hit cities like Denver and Chicago that are at the heart of Southwest’s operation, and where many of its employees are based. To be sure, many of the challenges Southwest faced were similar to those encountered by other airlines: Ground equipment and jet bridges froze, fuel congealed due to the subfreezing temperatures and staff needed to rotate inside more frequently. But rival airlines recovered more rapidly.
In the wake of the mess, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and federal lawmakers have stepped up calls for more stringent consumer protection measures. Southwest’s shares have fallen 11% this week, outstripping declines for other airlines. Citigroup Inc. analysts said that fourth-quarter earnings for the airline could take a 3% to 5% hit.
“We’ve talked a little over the last year about the need to modernize the operation and invest,” Mr. Jordan wrote Monday in a memo to employees. “This is why.”
In a November meeting with reporters, the CEO noted the airline had expanded faster than its technology. “I do think the scale and the growth of the airline got ahead of the tools that we have,” he said.
This isn’t the first time that a disruption has ballooned at Southwest, and the carrier’s struggle to put its operations back together shows how its increasingly complicated network needs a better technology foundation. Union leaders have criticized the airline for being too slow to make changes, and Southwest executives have said their systems are being updated.
Southwest’s pilots union for years complained that SkySolver often spits out fixes that don’t make much sense, sending crews on circuitous journeys around the country as passengers to meet flights, a practice known as “deadheading.”
In one example during the storm, the system assigned a pilot to deadhead on a flight from Baltimore to Manchester, N.H., and then back to Baltimore the next day, without ever flying a plane, according to Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association labor union.
“The company has had its head buried in the sand when it comes to its operational processes and IT,” Mr. Murray wrote in a message to members Monday...
At least you can see hurricanes coming.
The new Omicron variant did more than prompt governments to quickly close borders and tighten Covid-19-related travel restrictions. It signaled that health disruptions are here to stay as a normal part of travel concerns, right along with storms, strikes and terrorism.
For travelers, this means that you must now consider a new set of risks before making your trip, especially when going abroad. Travel can spread disease. There’s also uncertainty over testing and quarantines.
If you miscalculate or misstep, or just end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, you could be stranded, perhaps for weeks. Such a high penalty may make some people change where and how often they venture away from home.
“The casualness of travel is gone. I don’t think it’s coming back,” says Jay Sorensen, president of travel consulting firm IdeaWorksCompany.
He thinks 2019 will be viewed as the high-water mark for jumping on a plane spur-of-the-moment and taking a trip to another continent without care or concern.
Travel experts say the rapid reaction of various governments increases the risk of getting stuck in another country. It also appears to be the new standard procedure for any kind of new health risk.
Israel, Morocco and Japan closed borders before the severity or risk of the Omicron variant was clear. The U.S. banned entry for citizens of some African countries and on Monday changed testing requirements for all people entering the country. The new rule requires a negative test within one day of travel instead of three days before takeoff, throwing a curveball at travelers already abroad.
“Travelers will likely have to bake into their travel plans a possibility that a variant will all of a sudden be discovered and start spreading like wildfire,” says Sumedha Senanayake, director of global intelligence for Crisis24, a firm that advises big companies on risks for traveling employees.
The International Air Transport Association, an airline group, clearly sensed the change with a Nov. 26 statement blasting quick border-closing decisions as a threat to air-travel recovery.
“Governments are responding to the risks of the new coronavirus variant in emergency mode, causing fear among the traveling public,” says Willie Walsh, the director general of IATA and former British Airways chief. “As quickly as possible we must use the experience of the last two years to move to a coordinated, data-driven approach that finds safe alternatives to border closures and quarantine. Travel restrictions are not a long-term solution to control Covid variants.”
Other travel groups quickly sensed a change. The American Society of Travel Advisors, which represents travel agents, called on the Biden administration to revisit the new, stricter travel rules as soon as possible. Existing testing and vaccination requirements should be enough to combat viral spread, ASTA says, “without destroying an entire sector of the U.S. economy in the process.”
Of course, most countries have made these tough calls that often end up giving priority to people’s health over the financial well-being of the travel industry. This pattern is likely to continue, travel-risk experts like Mr. Senanayake say, raising the risk of getting delayed or stranded.
There’s also widespread confusion and hassle over what you need to cross borders these days. There’s no uniformity in what countries require in terms of vaccination, documentation or specific Covid tests and how soon before-flight tests need to be performed.
“If there was uniformity, a lot of this would be a lot easier. But there is never going to be uniformity,” Mr. Senanayake says.
The new restrictions haven’t prompted airline panic. OAG, which tracks airline schedules, says industry capacity world-wide, measured by the number of seats in schedules, is down only 0.5% this week compared with the previous week.
Mr. Sorensen issued a report last week to travel-industry clients suggesting that airlines, hotels and others are going to have to bear more risk of disruption if they want people to keep traveling. Change-fee penalties and nonrefundable reservations got temporary waivers during the pandemic, but they have already started creeping back in, making the consumer largely responsible for losses from unexpected disruptions.
Instead, he thinks travel companies are going to have to bear more risk to entice travelers, either by making eservations refundable or by providing insurance that will accommodate health risks and fears at airline expense.
“If there’s a whole lot of pain and effort required to get there, why do I want to go there?” Mr. Sorensen says.
Travel insurance is one tool that can give travelers some protection against the costs of disruption. If you happen to test positive abroad and need to quarantine in a hotel for 14 days, unexpected costs can be huge. When flights shut down, you may need to find a new way home that becomes a lot more expensive.
Squaremouth, a travel insurance comparison and sales site, says sales rose 53% after news broke of the Omicron variant. That compares with a jump of 20% following news of the Delta variant. Travelers are learning to quickly seek protection...
There's a lot of hype, but Dr. Peter Hotez, at the video, says he's not panicked, as he's not seen anything as infectious as the Delta variant so far. Still, the U.S. has imposed travel bans on eight African nations, and the U.K. announced travel curbs on six nations as well.
The World Health Organization said a newly identified coronavirus variant in southern Africa was “of concern” on Friday, as countries around the world moved to restrict travelers arriving from that region to keep it from crossing their borders.
So far, only a few dozen cases of the new variant have been identified in South Africa, Botswana, Belgium, Hong Kong and Israel. There is no proof yet that the variant is more contagious or lethal, or could diminish the protective power of vaccines, but uncertainty on those questions was one factor in the speed of countries’ move toward restrictions.
On Friday evening, the World Health Organization gave the new version of the virus the name Omicron and called it a “variant of concern,” its most serious category. “This variant has a large number of mutations, some of which are concerning,” the W.H.O. said in its official description. “Preliminary evidence suggests an increased risk of reinfection with this variant.”
Earlier on Friday, the European Commission proposed that its member countries activate the “emergency brake” on travel from countries in southern Africa and other affected countries to limit the spread of the variant.
“All air travel to these countries should be suspended until we have a clear understanding about the danger posed by this new variant,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm, said in a statement. “And travelers returning from this region should respect strict quarantine rules.”
In the past, governments have taken days, weeks or months to issue travel restrictions in response to new variants. This time, however, restrictions came within hours of South Africa’s announcement. At least 10 countries around the world had announced measures before South African scientists finished a meeting with World Health Organization experts about the variant on Friday.
The United States and Canada announced restrictions on travelers arriving from countries in southern Africa. Other governments that halted or restricted flights from South Africa included Bahrain, Belgium, Britain, Croatia, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malta, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore.
The new variant, initially called B.1.1.529, has a “very unusual constellation of mutations,” according to Tulio de Oliveira, director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research and Innovation Sequencing Platform. On the protein that helps to create an entry point for the coronavirus to infect human cells, the variant has 10 mutations, many more than the highly contagious Delta variant, Professor de Oliveira said.
Still, even epidemiologists who have been the most outspoken in supporting precautions against the virus urged calm on Friday, noting that little is known about the variant and that several seemingly threatening variants have come and gone in recent months.
“Substantively NOTHING is known about the new variant,” Roberto Burioni, a leading Italian virologist, wrote on Twitter, adding that people should not panic...
Bunch of highways closed over night, not least of all the I-5 over the Grapevine.
I'm glad I'm not traveling.
A fast-moving winter storm barreled into Southern California early today, bringing snow that closed the 5 Freeway in the Grapevine, Angeles Crest Highway and the 15 Freeway in the Cajon Pass and rain that flooded freeways across L.A. County. https://t.co/81bdle4bLh
Grapevine/Tehachapi: I-5 Grapevine remains CLOSED from 3 mi north of the Jct of SR 126 /at Parker Rd/ to 5 mi south of the Jct of SR 99 /at Grapevine Rd. State Route 58 remains CLOSED from 4.1 mi east of Edison at Towerline Rd to 1 mi west of Mojave. No estimated time of opening pic.twitter.com/RkdBS7NYSd
Ever dreamed of forcing the head of an airline into the tightest seat? These 6-foot-3 CEOs insist they fly in coach at least part of the time. https://t.co/lBY6aN2jfe
Before Belen Aldecosea flew home from from college to South Florida, she twice called Spirit Airlines to ensure she could bring along a special guest: Pebbles, her pet dwarf hamster. No problem, the airline told her.
But when Aldecosea arrived at the Baltimore airport, Spirit refused to allow the tiny animal on the flight.
With her only friends hours away at campus, Aldecosea was stuck. She says an airline representative suggested flushing Pebbles down an airport toilet, a step that Spirit denies. Panicked and needing to return home promptly to deal with a medical issue, Aldecosea unsuccessfully tried renting a car and agonized for hours before doing the unthinkable.
She flushed Pebbles.
“She was scared. I was scared. It was horrifying trying to put her in the toilet,” Aldecosea said. “I was emotional. I was crying. I sat there for a good 10 minutes crying in the stall.”
Aldecosea, 21, of Miami Beach, is now considering filing a lawsuit against Spirit over the conflicting instructions that wound up pressuring her into making an anguished decision with a pet certified by her doctor as an emotional support animal. She shared her story with the Miami Herald weeks after the story of an emotional support peacock — denied entrance to a United Airlines flight — went viral on the Internet.
This case is much different, said her South Florida attorney, Adam Goodman. “This wasn’t a giant peacock that could pose a danger to other passengers. This was a tiny cute harmless hamster that could fit in the palm of her hand,” he said.
A spokesman for Spirit acknowledged the airline mistakenly told her that Pebbles was allowed. But he denied that a Spirit employee recommended the option of disposing of her pet in an airport restroom.
“To be clear, at no point did any of our agents suggest this guest (or any other for that matter) should flush or otherwise injure an animal,” spokesman Derek Dombrowski said...
Actually, it was LAX to LAX, round-trip, eight hours --- because one passenger was able to board without at ticket.
Ms. Chrissy wasn't pleased, and for good reason.
a flying first for me: 4 hours into an 11 hour flight and we are turning around because we have a passenger who isn’t supposed to be on this plane. Why...why do we all gotta go back, I do not know
Chrissy Teigen tweet-storms about surviving her epic 8-hour flight to nowhere. She was supposed to be going to Tokyo, but ended right back in L.A., because of an apparent mix-up. https://t.co/yTOTYCGfMQpic.twitter.com/mAgkC480lX
The Angels just finished up a 10-day road trip, hitting Tampa Bay and Miami on the last two legs. (They finished 4-6 for the trip.)
While at the Marlins, Fox Sports West showed the most spectacular views of Miami during the little snippets after the commercial breaks. It's so beautiful. I'm blown away. I want to go there as soon as I can.
And so, imagine my interest reading this piece at yesterday's New York Times travel section. I've never been to Florida. It wasn't all that high on my list for vacation spots, but Miami sure did move up the rankings after the Angels' three-day series.
ON ROUTE 66 IN NEW MEXICO — Bob Pack forgot to bring his James Taylor CDs. Still, he and his brother and sister were having a blast, rolling among the sandstone mesas, ghost towns and kitschy tourist attractions.
They reminisced about family trips as children back in the 1950s, Mr. Pack and his sister, Joann, said, and not even their brother’s “annoying” habits of chewing tobacco and telling dirty jokes could ruin the drive. “I wanted to see West Texas one more time,” he said over breakfast at the Route 66 Casino Hotel.
Over in Arizona, Kay McNellen, a 23-year-old actress from San Diego, said she took to the highway almost every weekend these days, just to see how far she could drive. She has motored across the Mojave Desert, admired Sequoia National Forest and Instagrammed the Grand Canyon. “This is a better view than Netflix will give you,” she said.
The great American road trip is back.
It’s partly that gasoline this driving season is cheaper than it has been in 11 years, according to the AAA motor club, and that the reviving economy is making people more willing to part with their money. But there is more than that at play here. This may be a cultural shift, as Americans experiment with the notion that maybe money can, in fact, buy happiness, at least in the form of adventures and memories.
It is a change that appears to have taken root in the years since the 2008 financial crisis. “Postrecession, people are focused on memories that cannot be taken away from them, as opposed to tangible goods that expire and wear out,” said Sarah Quinlan, a marketing executive at MasterCard Advisors. “There’s a sense that you can take away my job, you can take away my home, but you can’t take away my memory.”
Whatever their motivation, Americans last year drove a record 3.15 trillion miles, according to the Department of Transportation, beating the previous mark, set in 2007. So far this year, both travel and gasoline consumption are up again.
The desire to get behind the wheel still comes as something of a surprise. The conventional wisdom was that driving mileage had probably peaked in 2007. The demographic bulge represented by the baby boomers is aging out of the driving years; people typically drive less as they hit retirement.
At the same time, millennials were not sharing the passion for the open road that previous generations of young adults had. Many, in fact, preferred to live in the nation’s downtowns, eschewing personal cars in favor of shared Ubers, or walking to their work and play.
But it turns out that both generations are driving more than anyone expected. “A lot of millennial behavior was really deferred assimilation,” said Steven E. Polzin, a transportation researcher at the University of South Florida. In other words, just like Mom and Dad, they were destined for a more traditional lifestyle — the marriage, the home, the garage — they just took a little longer to get there.
One such millennial is Jenna Bivone, a 29-year-old website and app designer, who two years ago left downtown Atlanta to live on the outskirts of the city with her boyfriend. “We used to walk everywhere, but the rents were too high and we wanted some land for my dog,” she said. “In a more suburban area we found good schools, stuff like that for future plans.”
Now she has a daily commute of at least a half-hour each way, and on weekends she and her boyfriend drive around Georgia and neighboring states looking for the best hiking. Over the last three years they have taken road trips in Wyoming and Colorado to hike in the national parks.
“When we travel we want to go to places we might never see again,” she said. “We’re not going to be young forever.”
Michael McNulty, a 67-year-old biotech executive from San Francisco, might not agree with the last part of her statement. Last year he bought a used Ford Airstream B-190 motor home on Craigslist for $13,000 as an experiment. He and his wife are enjoying the road trips, he said, and they are gradually extending their radius.
“The kids’ colleges are paid for, and they are out of the house,” he said. “We have been all over the world, and now we are seeing the U.S.A.”
Mr. McNulty did all the driving to the Grand Canyon for an extended weekend in April, and he prepared to drive all the way back home, 14 hours, in one day. The reason was simple, he said. “We’re going to go for it on Tuesday,” he said, smiling, “because I have to get back to work on Wednesday.”
The phenomenon is being further amplified by, of all things, a desire in some families for cross-generational adventures that harks back to a halcyon age of bundling everyone into the station wagon, counting license tags from faraway states, and mediating back-seat fights over who started the fight. Baby boomers, it seems, want to bond with their grandchildren on the road. Rental-car companies are reporting increased demand for bigger vehicles to accommodate the generations...
While a TSA agent pawed my hair bun this weekend, presumably on high alert for improvised explosive bobby pins, I pondered the latest news on the Somalia airplane terror attack.
Intelligence officials released video footage of airport employees in Mogadishu handing a laptop to a jihadist suspect before he boarded Daallo Airlines Airbus Flight D3159 last week. The device allegedly contained a bomb that exploded on the plane, which created a massive hole out of which the bomber was fatally sucked. Two other passengers were injured in the blast before the pilot successfully made an emergency landing.
Several airport workers have now been arrested and the FBI is in Africa assisting the investigation.
The Somalia incident is not the only suspected in-flight inside job of late. Investigators believe a ramp worker at Egypt’s Sharm el Sheikh airport was recruited by ISIS to plant a bomb on the Russian airliner that crashed last fall in the desert of the Sinai Peninsula. All 224 passengers and crew members aboard Metrojet Flight 9268 perished.
America can rest easy knowing that TSA aggressively tackled my harmless chignon like the Denver Broncos on Super Bowl Sunday.
But as the TSA carries out its multibillion-dollar charade of homeland security on babies’ bottles of breast milk, veterans’ prosthetic devices and suburban moms’ updos, who is screening the screeners?
Fog and storms triggered major flight delays in pockets of the U.S. ahead of Christmas, while airlines were bracing for a winter storm predicted to sweep across much of the country over the weekend.
A line of storms stretching from Louisiana to New York held up arrivals on Thursday at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the busiest U.S. airport by traffic, by an average of 2½ hours as of 2 p.m. local time, the Federal Aviation Administration said on its website.
At least 11 people were killed across the South as springlike storms mixed with unseasonably warm weather and spawned rare Christmastime tornadoes, according to the Associated Press.
Delta Air Lines Inc., which operates its largest hub at Hartsfield-Jackson, was the most affected carrier, with a third of its mainline flights nationwide delayed, according to FlightAware.com, a tracking service.
The Atlanta-based carrier said it had started to cancel some flights as the storms forced planes to divert from Hartsfield.
While earlier delays at airports around Washington and New York caused by the weather had abated by early afternoon, Delta said they could return because of air traffic congestion in other parts of the country.
Nationwide, 3,049 flights were delayed and 349 canceled as of 5 p.m. Thursday on the East Coast. That came after weather issues in the Northeast and parts of the Midwest had triggered the above-average delays and cancellations earlier in the week. Almost 11,000 total flights from Tuesday through Wednesday were delayed, and around 750 canceled, according to FlightAware. On typical winter days, there are about 4,000 delays and 150 cancellations in the U.S.
Dozens of regional jet flights operated on behalf of major airlines by SkyWest Inc. and other carriers have been canceled, according to FlightAware, as well as more than 60 Southwest Airlines Co. services.
American Airline Group Inc. said it had canceled four mainline flights, alongside 84 flown by regional partners. United Continental Holdings Inc. said it wasn’t experiencing major disruptions...
Many parts of the country are getting hammered by powerful weather systems during Christmas week. It’s raining in the East and the South, but the worst weather is in the West. Powerful Pacific storms threaten millions with rain and snow, while some areas in northern California are already being hit with snow. John Blackstone reports from Mill Valley, California.
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