In an exclusive Newsweek essay, a Southwest Airlines pilot shares an insider's perspective on the recent chaos at the airline.
As anticipation was brewing for the arrival of Christmas this past December, millions of people packed their suitcases and were eagerly awaiting their travel plans on Southwest Airlines. Tickets were booked for holiday gatherings, weddings, celebrations of life, college breaks, reunions, vacations, and many other personal reasons. As often happens during wintertime in North America something else was brewing: a snowstorm that came to be known as Elliot.
In November 2022, the president of our union Southwest Airlines Pilots' Association declared that Southwest Airlines was." The outdated pilot scheduling system was an obvious flaw to pilots, and SWAPA has brought concerns about the lack of scheduling automation to the company's attention for years. Now, allow me to explain the significance of flight delays on pilots: when a major airport, like Denver, begins to slow its operation down due to weather, flights that are dispatched into that airport are often ground-stopped at their point of origin.
In addition to actual flying limits, there are duty day limits, which include the time spent from getting to the airport to sleeping in a hotel. These limits are regulated, imposed, and monitored for everyone's safety. I mean, would you want the pilots landing your plane under adverse conditions after sitting in an airport on duty for 18 hours? I wouldn't.
A Southwest Airlines passenger jet lands at Chicago Midway International Airport in Chicago, Illinois, on December 28, 2022. The perfect storm of fierce snow squalls, howling wind and sub-zero temperatures forced the cancellation of thousands of flights in recent days, including around 5,900 on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to tracking site FlightAware.com.
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