DALLAS (AP) – When Southwest Airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights over the weekend, citing bad weather and air traffic …
DALLAS (AP) – When Southwest Airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights over the weekend, citing bad weather and air traffic control issues, unsupported claims blaming vaccine mandates began to rise.
Conservative politicians and experts, including Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, claimed the flight disruptions were due to pilots and air traffic controllers quitting their jobs or calling in sick to protest federal vaccination regulations.
The airline, its pilots union, and the Federal Aviation Administration denied that.
“The weekend challenges were not the result of employee demonstrations from Southwest,” said Southwest spokesman Chris Mainz on Monday.
Still, Twitter posts claiming that the airline’s employees were “standing up to medical tyranny” and participating in a “mass disease outbreak” amassed thousands of stocks. Vague and anonymous messages on social media speculated that Southwest was hiding the real reason for its interference. And anti-vaccine rally calls like #DoNotComply, #NoVaccineMandate and #HoldTheLine were among the top 10 hashtags tweeted over the weekend related to Southwest, according to a report by media intelligence company Zignal Labs.
Even if flights appeared closer to normal on Tuesday, the Texas-based airline remained at the center of the recent frontline in the Culture War with the vaccine mandate, the challenges of which were taken advantage of by opponents of the vaccine requirements.
Neither the company nor its pilots union has produced any evidence to back up their explanations as to why nearly 2,400 flights were canceled Saturday through Monday. Southwest just said that bad weather and air traffic control issues in Florida on Friday resulted in cascading outages that left planes and pilots out of position for their next flight.
The crisis peaked on Sunday when the airline canceled more than 1,100 flights, or 30% of its flight schedule. As of Tuesday evening, it had canceled fewer than 100 flights, or 2% of its flight schedule, despite more than 1,000 flights being delayed, according to the FlightAware tracking service.
“When you’re behind, it only takes days to catch up,” CEO Gary Kelly told CNBC on Tuesday. “We fell significantly behind on Friday.”
Southwest struggled with delays and cancellations all summer. A senior executive admitted to staff on Sunday that the airline is still understaffed and may need to cut flights in November and December.
Despite repeated inquiries, the company and the union have declined to say how many employees have missed their jobs during the crisis. They said absenteeism rates are similar to a typical summer weekend, but they haven’t released any numbers to back up that argument. It is also unclear how many Southwest pilots are unvaccinated.
“We don’t know, and the company doesn’t know,” said Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association.
Meanwhile, speculations by prominent conservative politicians and experts have come to nothing. Many shared the unsubstantiated theory, but few provided details, facts or examples of employees who left their jobs to protest the vaccine.
“Joe Biden’s illegal vaccination mandate at work!” Cruz tweeted on Sunday. “Suddenly we are missing pilots and air traffic controllers. #Thank you, Joe. “
The Republican senator wrote in another tweet on Monday that he met with leaders of pilot unions last week who “expressed deep concern about vaccine mandates.” A Southwest Pilots spokeswoman said no one at the union had spoken to Cruz. A Cruz spokesman did not respond to email questions from The Associated Press whether the Republican senator knew firsthand that pilots or air traffic controllers were skipping their jobs.
US Republican MP Andy Biggs from Arizona and US Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin also posted the rumors on social media without providing evidence.
Vague, familiar-looking “friend of a friend” stories are a dangerous form of misinformation because they “feel like inside information is being passed on by people directly involved in the action,” said Rachel Moran, a misinformation researcher at the university of Washington.
Similar unsupported claims circulated online in August when social media users falsely claimed that flight delays and cancellations from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport were the result of vaccination regulations. In September, false internet rumors surfaced that 40% of employees at the defense company General Dynamics had refused the vaccine and threatened to quit.
Some Twitter users linked Southwest’s flight problems with news that the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association asked a federal judge in Dallas on Friday to block the airline’s vaccine mandate. The union said that under federal labor law, Southwest must negotiate with the union before making changes to working conditions. The judge has not yet decided.
When White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked Tuesday to respond to allegations that vaccine mandates reduced the workforce and disrupted the supply chain, he struck Cruz – and sarcastically called it “world-renowned business, travel – and health experts ”. before defending Biden’s policies.
“I know there has been a bit of a buzz around Southwest Airlines for the past few days,” said Psaki. “We now know that some of these claims were dead wrong and, in fact, the problems were completely unrelated to vaccine mandates.”
Biden’s order, which is still in progress, would require employers with 100 or more employees to get vaccinated or tested for COVID-19 on a weekly basis. However, airlines are government contractors because they perform jobs like emergency flights for the Department of Defense, which brought Afghan refugees to the US in August. This means that airlines are subject to a stricter standard under the Biden Regulation: mandatory vaccinations without opting out for the test.
Following the example of other airlines, Southwest informed employees last week that they must be vaccinated by December 8th.
While some airline and other large corporation employees have opposed vaccination requirements, comments on social media have created an exaggerated sense of dissent, according to Moran, the University of Washington’s misinformation scientist.
“In reality, it’s a fairly small number of people who are protesting employment-based mandates for the vaccine,” Moran said. “People are more prone to misinformation in times of crisis, and this labor shortage and supply chain delays either create a real sense of crisis or are manipulated by misinformation disseminators to make it appear that we are heading for a crisis.”
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Swenson reported from New York. Amanda Seitz of Columbus, Ohio contributed to this report. David Koenig can be reached at www.twitter.airlinewriter
Copyright © 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written, or redistributed.
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