Former airline, business travel columnist stuck in Southwest Airlines chaos

Then as we approached 6 p.m., I looked out the window near Gate A1 and saw the large Boeing 737 at the gate. Bam. We have a plane. But then the gate agent makes an announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are just waiting for the pilot.” We have no pilot. Then, less than two minutes later, the same agent says the flight was now canceled. My second canceled flight in two days. Hundreds of angry passengers converge on the already frazzled gate agents who now found themselves in the crosshairs of tearful, profanity-spewing Southwest passengers.

During my first six or so years as a Washington Post writer, I covered the airline industry and wrote a business travel column called ‘Business Class.’ For 15 years before that, I covered the airline industry for other publications including USA Today and Business Week magazine.

I have covered massive layoffs, downsizings and mergers within the airline industry going back to TWA and US Air and US Airways. I have written about the unprecedented grounding of the nation’s airlines and fallout as a result of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. I have chronicled winter storms, hurricanes and other weather disasters that crippled airlines and their operations.

But I have never seen anything like what I saw during Christmas weekend.

Southwest canceled thousands of flights earlier this week, accounting for more than 90 percent of all U.S. airlines flight canceled. The cancellations lasted more than a week.

Southwest announced, via a widely distributed press release on Thursday, that it plans to return to “normal operations” on Friday and expects “minimal disruptions.”

The airline blamed its operation problems on a severe winter storm that pummeled its operations. But other major airlines, both larger and smaller than Southwest, were able to operate the majority of their flights through the storm. It seems Southwest’s problems were more than just weather. The Washington Post obtained a Dec. 21 internal memo regarding the airline’s Denver operations — among the airline’s largest operations in the country — which saw an “unusually high number of absences” among ramp employees who were using sick or personal days. In three of the four bullet points in the memo, the airline threatened “termination” for those employees who “alleged” sickness and could not provide a doctor’s note, tried to use a personal day or who refused to work mandatory overtime.

Then, a day later, Southwest sent a similar memo to its agents at BWI, also obtained by The Post.

“These memos show Southwest was dealing with unprecedented morale issues days before the storm event hit,” said longtime airline analyst Joe Brancatelli.

With its low, nonrestrictive fares and cheerful, animated employees, Southwest for much of the late 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s was more than the go-to company for price-conscious customers; it became a model for many retailers, hotels and other companies that compete for loyal customers and dedicated employees. But longtime airline industry consultant Darryl Jenkins noted that as the airline expanded over recent years, it did so at the cost of updating technology and maintaining employee relations.

“They grew big and became a ‘big boy’ airline. They became so focused on earnings, they failed to modernize,” Jenkins said. “Of all the sad things I’ve seen in the airline industry in 40 years, this is at the top of the list.”

Brancatelli said the airline has been operating with systemwide technology that has not been upgraded since the 1990s. “They haven’t updated their customer service, phone system and crew scheduling systems in decades. And it finally caught up with them,” he said.

Calls and emails to Southwest were not returned.

Ed Stewart, who was Southwest’s main spokesman for 15 years until his 2006 retirement and who now runs an airline consulting company, still boasts about the airline’s employee culture and the employees’ monthly performance bonuses and being the only carrier never to have a layoff. But he said it could take weeks before Southwest executives figure out what went so wrong this past week.

“It was definitely more than just weather. But they need more time to find out what happened,” he said.

After spending Christmas with family in Pittsburgh, I needed to be back in Washington to attend a friend’s funeral on Wednesday. After my first flight was canceled Christmas night, Southwest airport agents encouraged the long line of displaced travelers to go to its website to rebook. But that did not work because all flights were marked “unavailable.” When we called the toll-free number, we got busy signals. When I managed to get through, I was on hold for five hours before I gave up.

Before sunrise Monday, I was dropped off at Pittsburgh International and was greeted by a sea of bodies of people laying across chairs, on their suitcases and across the tiled floors. For many of these travelers, I later found out, it was the first Christmas they spent with family in three years due to the pandemic.

Unlike several other major airlines, Southwest does not have an agreement to fly their displaced passengers on other airlines, so travelers have to purchase tickets on their own.

When the flight was canceled, I looked at other airlines such as American. But they wanted $1,300 to $1,500 for a one-way flight. I then considered an old trick I learned as an airline writer, called hidden-city flights. This is when you book a one-way flight to a destination that connects in the city you actually want to fly into. For example, I found a Delta Air Lines flight into New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport that connected into Washington’s Reagan National Airport. Because I did not have luggage checked (never check bags during the holidays), I could have caught that flight to JFK and simply exited the airport in Washington as opposed to catching the connection to JFK.

That $350 was a little pricey and honestly, I had tired of airlines and airports. So, I opted to rent a car and drive the nearly four-hour trip. I thought that was simple enough since I reserved and got a confirmation number from Enterprise in Pittsburgh. But the next morning, I was called by the manager to tell me none of the rental companies had cars, despite what the websites said and the confirmation number I had printed out. My cousins and I were using our cellphones trying to find me a rental in Pittsburgh. One worker said I might have to tip an agent $150 to get a car. Sigh.

I’m so thankful for Saira Evans, the manager at the Hertz in Monroeville, Pa., who located a car for me, no tip required and called me. I joined the thousands of displaced Southwest passengers who were navigating icy and slushy roads.

I no longer cover the airline industry. For the past 16 or so years, I have been writing about murders, assaults, robberies and other violent crimes as a crime and courts reporter in Washington. Readers have often asked me if I missed covering airlines. My response remains the same: I appreciate covering crime, which for the most part, results in people being held accountable for their actions.