“People who lost work found wages elsewhere and may not want to come back,” he says. Yi Gao, a professor of aviation management at Purdue University, says members of ground crews, such as baggage handlers, are proving hard to bring back. The job losses, which came mainly through voluntary furloughs and early-retirement packages, affected all types of workers at both companies, including pilots, flight attendants, and ground crews. In that same time, American’s workforce shrunk from nearly 134,000 to just 103,000. Southwest had about 60,000 workers on the job before the pandemic, but has just about 54,000 today. And it might continue to wreak havoc on both airlines as the busy holiday travel season approaches. But while vaccine mandates didn’t cause the terrible, no-good weekends at Southwest and American, the pandemic actually did.
Southwest and American, as well as Southwest’s pilots union, have forcefully denied that employees didn’t show up for duty because of the vaccines. Right-wing rabble-rousers surmised that the same kind of “sickout” happened at American over Halloween weekend. “Joe Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate at work!” Cruz tweeted. Senator Ted Cruz and Congressman Chip Roy, whose district includes parts of Austin, both suggested Southwest employees had walked off the job around Columbus Day to protest the airline’s vaccine mandate. How can such a massive cascade of delays and cancellations happen nationwide because of limited events in one area? And how can they happen to just one airline while others continue taking to the skies? Some observers theorized that something more than thunderstorms and high winds was to blame. Combined, the two Texas carriers spent the two holiday weekends grounding more than four thousand flights across the country and delaying hundreds more takeoffs. Similarly, when storms hit Jacksonville, Florida, ahead of Columbus Day, Southwest Airlines canceled flights not just in Jacksonville but also in sunny San Diego. Not just at DFW, but also in Tampa and Philadelphia, where the winds were calm and skies were clear, and American Airlines flights were still being canceled this week because, the carrier said, of the high winds last week. Visit SFGate, San Francisco at Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.When winds gusted up to nearly sixty miles per hour at Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport just before Halloween, American Airlines canceled dozens of flights. Southwest, however, is not alone in struggling with labor and other challenges facing the airline industry in this late-pandemic era. American Airlines recently announced that they will cancel about 1% of their scheduled flights throughout the month of July. Whatever factors are leading to the delays and cancelations, Southwest customers - many of whom are flying for the first time since the start of the pandemic - are angry. And "(w)hile this is officially being blamed on weather," Schlappig goes on to note, "it clearly also reflects the extent to which Southwest's operation is being pushed to the limit right now." One Mile at a Time's Ben Schlappig notes that, "When things go wrong in the airline industry there tends to be a domino effect." But this weekend's air travel headaches are specific to Southwest. Louis, some aviation observers are skeptical that Southwest's schedule issues are entirely the "proactive cancellations" the airline claims. But while there are thunderstorms forecast for swaths of the country, including Denver, Orlando, Chicago and St. The airline, one of the country's largest domestic carriers, is blaming weather for the widespread service disruption, according to. Flight Aware shows another another 307 flights canceled on Saturday, which amounts to 9% of all Southwest flights.īy Sunday morning, the situation appeared to be improving, with only 38 flights currently canceled (about 1% of the airline's schedule), though that number may rise through the day, as it did yesterday. According to the aviation blog One Mile at a Time, 48% of Southwest's schedule was either delayed or canceled on June 25.
26-For the second time this month, Southwest Airlines again canceled and delayed thousands of flights this weekend.