Understanding the Southwest Airlines Meltdown

I was unaware that Southwest, unlike most other airlines, does not have arrangements with other carriers to re-book passengers on cancelled flights on other companies’ flights.

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You beat me by 2 hours with this post !!!

Me and my wife have our luggage back. Our luggage was sent to Syracuse NY and baggage handlers contacted me 3 days ago, and I requested they return it to Austin-Bergstrom airport. We were at the gate at 3:30AM when our 5:30AM Christmas Day flight was canceled.

Southwest does have the best people in the airline industry, this was a huge systemic failure that is the responsibility of the CEO and Board of Directors.

Founder and former chairman Herb Kelleher talked about how critical relations with employees and unions heads were, and you can see from the above video one airport (Denver DEN), had a cascading effect through the whole system. If software system had held up, peer to peer flights could have redirected around problem airports, but failure of the scheduling software magnified the problem.

The following are some great videos on Southwest founder David Kelleher (1931-2019)

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Another great interview of Herb Kelleher

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From Southwest Airlines pilot union website I found link to this article

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and this from sw pilots aimed at Gary Kelly, current chairman of the board ( and former CEO).

It is too soon to judge as a get woke, go broke situation … but is certainly " tending toward woke, mishandling many many totes"!

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