Tag: Southwest

Southwest Airlines briefly pauses flights nationwide over computer glitch

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Southwest blamed the problem on “data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure,” according to a statement.
“Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost. Southwest Teams worked quickly to minimize flight disruptions,” the airline said.
DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who has pressed airlines to ensure customers receive adequate refunds after flight disruptions, said in a tweet that “We are here to ensure passengers have strong protections when airline failures like this affect their plans,” and directed affected Southwest customers to DOT’s Airline Customer Service Dashboard.
Background: Though so far there’s no indication that Tuesday’s glitch was related to problems with the airline’s internal scheduling software that caused the holiday flight havoc late last year, Southwest continues to face scrutiny for how it handled those flights.
In February, Southwest COO Andrew Watterson apologized to Congress for the holiday meltdown that was triggered by winter weather but dragged on for nearly a week due to issues with the airline’s scheduling and rebooking systems. Watterson in February promised his airline is now “intensely focused on learning from this event by taking immediate mitigation efforts.”
But the top Senate Democrat overseeing the aviation industry, Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) charged that Southwest withheld information from Congress about how it’s handling refunds for customers caught up in its December holiday meltdown, where some 16,000 flights were canceled. Cantwell is seeking specifics on how many passengers were involved, how many were issued cash refunds versus vouchers for future flights, how many were rebooked and when the airline plans to upgrade its internal systems that caused the debacle.
Earlier this month, Southwest released the results of a report detailing failings surrounding the end-of-year meltdown. The report, which was also conducted by an outside consulting firm hired by Southwest, said that “insufficient winter infrastructure” and computer software issues with rescheduling and rebooking passengers and crew were mostly to blame. The airline said a host of steps to improve winter operations will be complete by next winter, while software upgrades are already in place or will be completed by next winter.

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#Southwest #Airlines #briefly #pauses #flights #nationwide #computer #glitch
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 18, 2023
Southwest withholding details on holiday meltdown, senator charges

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“We had constituents where it basically took every ounce of us intervening to get refunds. We want a sense of how many more people are there like that,” she said. She added later that she isn’t interested in “proprietary information.”
Jordan, who was speaking at an industry luncheon in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, said he and Cantwell had a “good meeting” and pledged that his staff will “go deeper” to satisfy her concerns.
“I don’t want to go through the details. It was a private meeting,” Jordan told reporters after the lunch. “And I shared a lot of information with her about where we are in our process. We have time with a senator and her staff, I believe, on Friday, to talk further and understand — go deeper in terms of the numbers. And I’m hopeful for progress there.”
Jordan said that “basically anybody” who dealt with flight issues between Dec. 24 and Jan. 2 was “basically refunded or [we] gave you a travel credit.” He said that as “a gesture of goodwill” Southwest gave out free tickets to many passengers affected by delays and cancellations and that the airline is reimbursing customers who had to buy another airline ticket, stay in a hotel, buy a meal or buy a taxi.
“We are covering all those expenses,” Jordan said, adding that the total cost was “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.” (The airline said in January it has so far lost $220 million and that it expects more to come due to the residual effects of reimbursements and refunds owed to passengers.)
Southwest plans to release a comprehensive report this month on what led to the meltdown. Jordan said Wednesday that an internal investigation and external investigation by the consulting company Oliver Wyman are “wrapping up” and should be made public in a few weeks.
Cantwell also added that the fallout from the scheduling meltdown “is going to be a big part of” a major aviation policy bill lawmakers are working on, which is due in September.
“Obviously the public is very disgruntled over this issue of cancellation fees and timelines,” Cantwell said. “Here’s one of the biggest examples of the flying public being let down so we want to know what are the resolutions to this. Did they get their expenses reimbursed and did they get a refund? Or did somebody just shove some frequent flyer miles at them? So we’re just digging a little bit more to get those answers.”

The Transportation Department is also investigating the matter.
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#Southwest #withholding #details #holiday #meltdown #senator #charges
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 9, 2023
DCW chief says southwest Delhi murder case ‘terrifying’

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New Delhi: Delhi Commission for Women chief Swati Maliwal on Wednesday termed “terrifying” an incident in which a man strangled his girlfriend, stuffed her body inside a fridge, and went off to marry another woman the same day.
The panel has also issued a notice to the police seeking a detailed action taken report by February 17.
The incident took place on the intervening night of February 9 and 10 in southwest Delhi and the accused has been arrested, police had said on Tuesday.
In a tweet, Maliwal said “a few months ago, the heart-wrenching Shraddha (Walkar) murder case shook humanity”.
“Now, a girl named Nikki Yadav was killed by her boyfriend, (he) kept the dead body in a fridge and married someone else the next day. Terrifying, how long will girls continue to die like this,” she said in a tweet in Hindi.
The southwest Delhi incident comes a few months after the grisly Shraddha Walkar murder case.
Aaftab Amin Poonawala, 28, allegedly strangled Walkar, his live-in partner, on May 18 last year and sawed her body into several pieces which he kept in a fridge for almost three weeks at his residence in south Delhi’s Chhattarpur. He later disposed of the body parts across the city over several days.
In the notice, the panel has sought a copy of FIR registered in the matter, details of accused arrested in the matter.

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#DCW #chief #southwest #Delhi #murder #case #terrifying
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

February 15, 2023
Southwest apologizes to Congress for winter meltdown

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Watterson explained that while the airline had “precanceled” some flights ahead of the storm, conditions were bad enough that they couldn’t keep up with even the modified schedule, especially at the key airports of Denver and Chicago, their two biggest hubs through which 25 percent of their crew members move. After that, cancellations mounted and that required a volume of changes to crew schedules that their scheduling technology was “overwhelemd.”
He said the airline is prioritizing “enhancements” to its crew software but defended the soundness of its flight network and said it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in customer reimbursements so far.
But Casey Murray, president of the union for Southwest’s pilots, said the failures on display in December weren’t a fluke, but rather had been building for years.
He said “warning signs were ignored, poor performance was condoned, excuses were made, processes atrophied, core values were forgotten.” He said the organization had become a “stove-piped fiefdom that communicated vertically with little to no horizontal integration,” and called for “bold action immediately.”
Southwest has been under a microscope since December, when a winter storm sparked a cascade of internal failures that meant Southwest had to cancel a majority of its flights for nearly a week as it struggled to match crews to planes across its sprawling network.
Beyond congressional hearings like Thursday’s, the Transportation Department is also keeping a close watch on the airline to ensure it properly reimburses customers for the disruption. DOT has also announced it is separately investigating the airline for whether it scheduled flights that it knew it wouldn’t be able to staff.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called Southwest’s meltdown an “epic failure,” but spent most of his opening remarks taking aim at the DOT and Federal Aviation Administration. He accused the Biden administration of “egregious” regulatory overreach for its probe into the airline’s scheduling practices, saying “a world in which DOT can deem an entire airline schedule ‘unrealistic’ is a world with fewer flights to smaller airports” and “less flexibility and competition for airlines, and ultimately higher prices.”
He also suggested the FAA turn its spotlight back onto itself for its own system failure that canceled thousands of flights and forced the first nationwide airplane grounding since the events of Sept. 11, 2001. He also pointed a finger at DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg for not appearing at the hearing. (The committee plans a separate hearing on the FAA’s failures next week.)

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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 9, 2023
Southwest hires its first new lobbyist in years amid multi-prong controversies

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While a winter storm just before last month’s holidays forced other major airlines to cancel or delay flights, Southwest canceled more than 16,000 trips as it struggled to recover from the storm. | Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photo
Southwest Airlines has brought on new lobbying firepower for the first time in almost half a decade, as the airline weathers new scrutiny in Washington over the scheduling meltdown last month.
The carrier hired former Rep. Jerry Costello (D-Ill.) earlier this month to lobby on the upcoming Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization, according to disclosures filed over the weekend. The Illinois Democrat, who left Congress in 2013 after 25 years in the House, previously served as chair of the aviation subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure panel.
The airline spent $1.1 million on federal lobbying last year — the same as in the previous year. But Costello’s firm is the first new addition to Southwest’s roster of outside lobbyists — which already includes fellow former lawmakers Kit Bond and Kenny Hulshof — since 2018, when lawmakers were crafting the last FAA reauthorization.
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#Southwest #hires #lobbyist #years #multiprong #controversies
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 30, 2023