When wind speeds of up to 100 km / h at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport reached just before Halloween, American Airlines canceled dozens of flights. Then it canceled dozens and dozen more. Not just at DFW, but also in Tampa and Philadelphia, where the winds were calm and the skies clear and American Airlines flights were canceled this week because the airline had high winds last week. When storms hit Jacksonville, Florida before Columbus Day, Southwest Airlines canceled flights not only in Jacksonville but also in sunny San Diego. Together, the two Texan airlines spent the two holiday weekends suspending more than four thousand flights across the country and delaying hundreds more take-offs.
How can there be such a massive cascade of delays and cancellations nationwide due to limited events in one area? And how can it happen to just one airline while others continue to take to the skies? Some observers suggested that more than thunderstorms and high winds were to blame. Senator Ted Cruz and Congressman Chip Roy, whose borough includes parts of Austin, both suggested that Southwest employees quit their jobs around Columbus Day to protest the airline’s vaccine mandate. “Joe Biden’s illegal vaccination mandate at work!” Cruz tweeted. Right-wing rebel suspected the the same kind of sickout happened at American on Halloween weekend.
These rumors are false. Southwest and American, and the Southwest Pilots Union, have vigorously denied staff failing to show up on duty because of the vaccines. But while vaccine mandates didn’t cause the terrible, unhappy weekends in Southwest and American, the pandemic actually did. And it could continue to wreak havoc on both airlines as the busy vacation travel season approaches.
Isolated weather The event usually doesn’t run through an airline’s network as much as the October incidents at Southwest and American. But nothing was typical of airlines during the pandemic, and some of the changes both airlines made to weather a disastrous time for their industries made them particularly vulnerable to a meltdown. The main changes were the downsizing.
Southwest had around 60,000 workers on the job before the pandemic, down from around 54,000 today. At the same time, American’s workforce shrank from nearly 134,000 to just 103,000. The job losses, mainly caused by voluntary leave and early retirement packages, affected all types of workers from both companies, including pilots, flight attendants and ground crews. Yi Goa, professor of aviation management at Purdue University, says it is difficult to bring back members of ground staff such as baggage handlers. “People who have lost their jobs found wages elsewhere and may not want to come back,” he says.
This type of staff shortage is a problem in all American businesses, and while both Southwest and American are working to bring some employees back, both have asked the existing employees to fill more ground – or sky – than before. In 2020, Southwest undertook the most aggressive year-long expansion in its fifty-year history, adding seventeen new destinations. With business travel all but gone during the pandemic, many of these new destinations have been leisure travel hotspots like Palm Springs. American underwent similar expansion for similar reasons, as well as to offset lost revenue on its much larger international airline network, which suffered from national quarantines. American added non-stop service to vacation-friendly destinations in the United States and Mexico, including Chetumal in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. “People were interested in the beach, sand, and sun,” says Robert Mann, a veteran of the aviation industry who runs the consulting firm RW Mann & Company. Yet this expansion created its own problems. “American now has a larger domestic network with fewer pilots flying it,” says Mann.
That has led American pilots and other workers to argue that the company is making them too thin. In September, the American Airlines pilots union called for the dismissal of American Airlines flight operations managers because too often the managers failed to bring pilots and planes together, resulting in many flight cancellations across the network.
The same operations managers were misled when the wind lashed the DFW runways last week. Approximately 1,600 people work in a $ 88 million, 149,000 square foot, tornado-proof operations center in Fort Worth that serves as mission control for the Americans. When riot broke out in Dallas, the runways closed and the number of departing flights limited, American was unable to move flight crews from DFW to other destinations. As a result, operations managers tried to find reserve crews who could manned flights in other cities. You couldn’t find enough. The Associated Press checked internal American reports and found that about two-thirds of the October 31 cancellations were due to a shortage of flight attendants. The rest was due to a lack of pilots.
Since American uses DFW as its central hub, problems spread to the system there. On October 31, two days after Dallas windy conditions resulted in cancellations, American Airlines passengers found their flights were being canceled at other hubs, including Philadelphia, Charlotte, Los Angeles and Miami. These cancellations may have been preventative – an attempt to reset the system by holding service back until people and planes arrive where passengers are waiting. But such a reset also leads to more cancellations, which spread from hub cities to feeder airports. Last Monday, four days after the initial wind incident, flight cancellations were reported for planes arriving at LAX – 1,200 miles from Dallas – from places like El Paso, Denver, Austin and Honolulu. The entire system was still plagued by what had happened days earlier in Texas – all because the pilots and flight attendants who were supposed to be there couldn’t get there. Only an influx of employees, including 1,800 flight attendants on leave, took place on 1. By then, 2,400 flights were canceled within four days.
The collapse was similar to what happened to Southwest around Columbus Day. The two airlines have designed very different networks, with Southwest using a point-to-point or city-to-city model rather than the American hub-and-spoke system. Still, Southwest’s problems occurred in the worst possible place – Florida. Reportedly, half of all Southwest aircraft land in the Sunshine State on a given day, and a quarter of crew changes take place there. When thunderstorms around Jacksonville and Orlando caused delays on Friday, October 8, Southwest was further behind schedule than other airlines whose fleets are less concentrated in Florida. Those delays worsened and turned into cancellations on Saturday October 9th as Southwest tried to get planes and crews to the right locations. By Monday October 11, the cancellations had spread across the country, reaching 2,500 flights.
Southwest pilots, who work for a company long known for loving (or “loving”) its workforce, responded to this mess by making a similar claim of operational mismanagement to American pilots a month earlier. Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said in a statement that “our operations have become brittle under the slightest pressure and have suffered massive outages,” adding that “the frontline workers have been uninterrupted for months before the Columbus and endure endless disturbances’ day problems.
One way to increase an airline’s operations is to keep more reserve crews on standby across the country. Complex math is required for this. Airlines decide months in advance where and when their planes will fly. Once the aircraft are assigned, the crews are assigned. Pilots and flight attendants typically bid two months in advance for the flights they want to operate and receive their orders a month later. The resulting schedule includes crew hours for a whole month. The schedule also provides for reserve crew members to be on standby in case they need to replace crew members who are unable to perform certain flights for a variety of reasons, including federal restrictions on the number of hours crew members can be in the sky.
With both Southwest and American out of their normal reserves, the recent weather disruption has made it much more difficult for them to get back to normal operations, Southwest openly admits. “We have a staff margin that is much, much smaller than historical trends,” says Southwest spokesman Brad Hawkins. “If something goes wrong, you quickly run to your reserves.”
But as one of the busiest seasons for flying – historically anyway, but who knows in these varied times – both the Southwest and Americans say they hope to do better. Southwest will double its reserve workforce by the end of the year and perhaps by the end of the pandemic, Hawkins says. American officials say the airline will continue to add flight attendants and be fully staffed by December. It’s just in time for Christmas, but maybe too late for Thanksgiving. So buckle up.
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