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

What a damn shitshow.

I know several people whose direct flight never took off but somehow their bags are at the destination.

I can't explain that one but it's happening.

We just drove from Orlando to Nola and paid $254. 1 day rental with Budget.

Someone help me out. I can’t read 18 pages. WTF is going on? Is this a short term problem or long term? I fly SWA for business all the time and never have issues. Do I need to find a new carrier?

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I know several people whose direct flight never took off but somehow their bags are at the destination.

I can't explain that one but it's happening.

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I was on a SW flight coming back from California a few weeks ago. Our connecting flight from Austin to New Orleans originally looked like it was going to be cancelled (the original plane has maintenance issues). When we were rebooking a new flight we asked about our bags and the gate attendant said that our bags would get to NO before we did. We were both very confused when she told us that.

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8 hours down, 4 to go. Damn you southwest

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I’m 13 down and 7 more to go…. FML

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While I didn't catch the job title on their name tag, they were wearing SWA-logo emblazoned clothing, their response to "what's the cause for the system wide cancellations"? was:

" Federal regulations on hours worked. People timed out while waiting for flights that were delayed on the clock the whole time."

Obviously the weather played a part in delaying flights, but the fact that SWA personnel were not available to man and service the flights due to being prohibited from doing so because of FAA work hours regs is the truth as told by a real live SWA employee,not a Facebook post from a fake SWA pilot that is being reposted in various stages of relationships, like "my friend's husband is a SWA pilot.".....

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The timing out is a symptom, not the cause of the problems. The root cause is their point to point business model that is vulnerable to a localized "problem" of weather or labor or whatever cascading into a nation wide disruption of their entire flight schedule to an extent other carries aren't.

Next, their outdated personnel management system collapses spectacularly and SWA is scrambling to rebuild their entire board from scratch while being blind to a lot of necessary information like personnel location etc.


To characterize this as the FAA rules getting in the way of SWA operating is simply laughable. I don't care that that's what some gate agent claimed.

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Can anyone elaborate on this antiquated software platform / technology issue? As a tech guy and former network admin I’m a little curious. I mean shouldn’t all the airlines use the same shite?

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Just as an example, a few years ago flying back home from California my departure flight was delayed due to serious fog, enough to where I was definitely missing my connection. They rebooked me on an absurd route that had me traveling from one side of the country to the other and back again with a very long layover, 18+ hours. I went to the help desk and got them to rebook me on a much more sensible itinerary. The agent told me she couldn’t guarantee my bag would be on the new flights we had just done, and to check with an agent at the connecting airport on their status.

The connecting airport agent told me she had no way of knowing where my bag was, and to check with baggage agents at my destination. I just chalked it up to another lazy and/or incompetent airline employee.

At the destination I went to the agent desk in baggage claim. They also told me they had no way of knowing where the bag was, and to fill out a lost baggage claim form.

2 days later the bag showed up at my house with no notification of any kind. My assumption is it traveled on the original rebooked absurd itinerary, which isn’t surprising.

The fact that literally no one could tell me where my bag was while in transit either means that the baggage handlers are manually reading and moving each individual checked bag from one plane to another with no systemwide communication(which would seemingly require a literal army of baggage handlers at each airport given the number of flights and short turnarounds), or the bags get scanned but the scans are not entered into any kind of system wide database. Both of which seem astoundingly stupid given the capabilities of modern technology.

It was very apparent that day that southwest was not well prepared to handle any kind of deviation from their system plan. But the level of ineptitude displayed for the last week would still have been hard to imagine, even at that time.

The SWA subreddit is great reading right now.

They have pilots and crew stuck at airports too and aren't paying for their hotels/meals.


Pilots and crew with empty planes just sitting there. The crew is calling into SWA to try and get into service but having 10+ hr hold times.

It's fricking insane

There's a stranded passenger at MDW saying he's passing the time by digging through all of the luggage piled up everywhere and calling the #'s on the tags to let the owners know where their luggage is.

Really wish we had high speed rail in this country