re: Southwest Airlines has cancelled 69% of its flights so far today.

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WN is going to have to do a hard reset just to recover normal operations.

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they haven't been in normal ops since Kelleher handed over the reins, throw in a little weather and they're completely fricked

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Obviously not on the backside of things and don’t know the intricacies, but why would it take longer than 2-3 days?

Shut it all down, you’re already cancelling 70% of flights, so pause everything… use next day/two to reposition crews and turn it back on Thursday with all existing reservations.

Then work on all the reimbursements/changes once you’ve stabilized things.

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Your flights going forward are already pretty full. You’ve got hundreds of thousands of cancelled seats yesterday and today and probably tomorrow at this rate that have to be rescheduled onto already full flights.

Even if many or most cancelled fliers made alternate plans, that leaves a backlog which will take a very long time to reschedule.

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You’ve got hundreds of thousands of cancelled seats yesterday and today and probably tomorrow at this rate that have to be rescheduled onto already full flights.

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It’s well over a million seats by now.

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They ran out of paper for the cockpit computer.

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they may have but that wasn't the reason for the cancellation

I have a flight at the end of January and I had two options: Spirit or Southwest.

I chose SW because I didn't trust Spirit

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I had two options:

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I chose SW because I didn't trust Spirit

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that's like choosing between the needle and the electric chair baw

Ended up making rental car reservations at hertz in Metairie, showed up and they cancelled it. Then booked refrained cars in Jackson and mobile but could not get a human on the phone to confirm they had a car. Finally got a person on the phone at enterprise in Gulfport; they had a van. Paid an arm and a leg for it (hoping to get some money back from southwest). Currently en route to NC….

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throw in a little weather and they're completely fricked

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That’s what got us in the specific incident in May. Wife scheduled us to fly to Boston out of NOLA to save a few bucks instead of Houston. Original flight was NOLA to switching planes in Nashville and then on to Boston.

A week or so before the flight, we get an email that the flight to Nashville had been cancelled. The flight then turned into from NOLA to Houston to Denver then to Boston.

Flight day weather hit us in NOLA and Houston and caused delays which missed out connection from Denver to Boston. Stayed overnight in Denver and flew from Denver to Baltimore and then on to Boston all the while our luggage got sent to Chicago. It was a rough 24 hours. We didn’t get our luggage until about 12 hours after we landed in Boston. That….THAT was a clusterfrick.

It looks like they are trying to operate flights that get planes and crews back to their “hubs” like DAL and BWI. Maybe that’s the first step to a hard reset.

SWA shite the bed here. They once were a great mid sized airport carrier. Once they started going into the bigger airports they signed their demise. People like me were willing to fly with less amenities to avoid being stuck in cluster fricks that occur at the big airports. Now they have all of that on top of tight schedules because the plane only makes money in the air not sitting on the ground. Once upon a time they were a good value for domestic travel. BTW, American customer service sucks too.