Southwest Airlines has only been running smoothly again for a few days. Over the Christmas period, the winter chaos in the USA caused massive problems for the airline – as well as for the competition.
But because outdated systems did not allow the aircraft to be crewed quickly, the low-cost airline needed until just before New Year’s Eve to recover. Southwest had to cancel thousands of flights.
Less than a week later, the next problem arose. Because the system that supplies the crews with weather data during flight planning failed, the airline had to temporarily impose a so-called ground stop.
This means that flights were not allowed to take off because the weather data is essential for flight preparation. Flight Aware data shows Southwest had more than 1,500 delayed flights and nearly 140 canceled flights as of Tuesday.
That’s a lot, but actually not catastrophic. But even after the Christmas disaster, there was much criticism of Southwest’s IT infrastructure.
Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg said he had made it clear to management that the airline would be held accountable for the problems, as travelers and employees experienced “unacceptable disruption”.
This article was written by Laura Frommberg
The original of this article “After heavy Christmas chaos, US airline experiences next breakdown” comes from aeroTelegraph.
