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Southwest Airlines cancels more than 2,200 flights, reason unclear

Commentators and third parties quickly characterized the flight cancellations as a response to Southwest’s new vaccine mandate. The airline’s labor leaders deny this.

(CN) — Southwest Airlines canceled more than 360 flights Monday, pushing the total number of flights canceled by the airline over 2,200 since the weekend began.

After cancelling more than 800 flights on Saturday, the Dallas-headquartered firm claimed in a tweet that air traffic control and “disruptive weather” were to blame for the cancellations. But Delta, United and other U.S. airlines did not cancel nearly as many trips this weekend.

For example, 1,124 Southwest flights were canceled Sunday, while the second-highest number of flight cancellations by a U.S. carrier came from American Airlines, which reported a relatively meager 167 cancellations, according to tracking service FlightAware.

A Sunday statement from the Federal Aviation Administration was interpreted by some social media users to be an oblique response to Southwest’s comment.

“No FAA air traffic staffing shortages have been reported since Friday,” the FAA Twitter account wrote.

On Oct. 4, Southwest announced that all employees must be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 by Dec. 8, or be approved for an exemption for medical or religious reasons, in compliance with President Joe Biden’s Covid Action Plan.

Social media users were quick to speculate that Southwest pilots and other employees have walked out in defiance of their employer’s announcement last week. Politicians and commentators took this theory and ran with it.

“Reminder: @SouthwestAir accepted $3.2 BILLION from taxpayers. That money kept its pilots employed during the pandemic. It also made @SouthwestAir the first airline to post a profit,” tweeted New York Times columnist Andrew Sorkin on Sunday. “And now, apparently, many of those pilots don’t want to help society by getting vaccinated.”

Republican congressional representatives, including Chip Roy of Texas and Andy Biggs of Arizona, tweeted in support of any Southwest employees opposing the airline’s vaccine requirements.

“I don’t know if even a single @SouthwestAir pilot or other employee — or air traffic control — are rebelling,” Roy wrote Monday. “But I hope so. And I want them to know they have support.”

Other, less politically sensitive explanations for the flight disruptions are at hand.

The leadership of the Southwest Airlines pilots’ union published a statement Sunday denying that the cancellations were the consequence of a formal labor effort.

“I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise,” wrote Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association.

Murray blamed the cancellations on a logistical infrastructure he characterized as fragile.

“[Southwest] has claimed that the immediate causes of this weekend’s meltdown were staffing at Jacksonville Center and weather in the southeast U.S., but what was a minor temporary event for other carriers devastated Southwest Airlines because our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure,” Murray continued. “Our operation and our frontline employees have endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures.”

The FAA announcement issued Sunday had also emphasized the slowdowns at Jacksonville’s air traffic control center.

“Flight delays & cancellations occurred for a few hours Friday PM due to widespread severe weather, military training & limited staffing in one area of the Jacksonville en route center,” reads the FAA statement. “Some airlines continue to experience scheduling changes due to aircraft and crews being out of place.”

Southwest relies on a point-to-point transportation system in which planes travel from destination to destination without stopping at a “hub” airport. As a result, it is susceptible to compounding consequences caused by flight delays, which can keep aircraft far off schedule.

Other large U.S. air carriers, such as American Airlines and United Airlines, maintain larger fleets of aircraft than Southwest and fly their planes between hub airports to destinations, insulating them from the ripple effects of slowdowns and delays.

Late Monday afternoon, Southwest Airlines issued a statement affirming that the cancellations were related to delays on Friday.

“On Friday evening, the airline ended the day with numerous cancellations, primarily created by weather and other external constraints, which left aircraft and crews out of pre-planned positions to operate our schedule on Saturday. Unfortunately, the out-of-place aircraft and continued strain on our crew resources created additional cancelations across our point-to-point network that cascaded throughout the weekend and into Monday,” reads the announcement. “Southwest teams have been working diligently to restore stability to the network, and we are experiencing less disruptions on Monday. We hope to restore our full schedule as soon as possible. As a note, the operational challenges were not a result of Southwest employee demonstrations.”

These drier explanations for the cancellations, which stranded thousands of fliers over the last three days, failed to curry as much engagement or visibility on social media platforms as did posts attributing the delays to the politically divisive issue of vaccine mandates.

On Friday, Oct. 8, the Southwest pilots’ union sued the airline in a Dallas federal court, alleging in part that the company’s Oct. 4 vaccine mandate “unlawfully imposes new conditions of employment and … threatens termination of any pilot not fully vaccinated” in violation of federal labor law. 

The union argues that, because the policy was rolled out unilaterally and provides new grounds for termination that had not been negotiated for during collective bargaining, it violates the Railway Labor Act.

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