SEATTLE — When Bellevue resident Alex Kain landed in Denver for a stopover on his way home last week, he found an airport crowded with people crying and waiting in long, stagnant lines.
Kain was booked on a Southwest flight scheduled to depart at 10:55 p.m. Friday night. It kept getting delayed until 2 a.m., when he got the notification that it had been canceled.
Kain’s flight was just one of thousands Southwest flights canceled as a winter storm and staffing shortages upended the airline, which is often one of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport’s busiest carriers.
While ice in Seattle and a “bomb cyclone” in much of the rest of the U.S. snarled travel over the weekend, the damage to Southwest’s schedule proved lasting. The airline scrubbed more than 2,600 flights Tuesday, accounting for 80% of all U.S. cancellations, and expected to cancel another 2,500 on Wednesday.
The cancellation spree drew the attention of the U.S. Department of Transportation and Congress. Noting that Southwest was prepared to pay $428 million in shareholder dividends next month, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said in a statement that Southwest’s problems go beyond weather.
“Many airlines fail to adequately communicate with consumers during flight cancellations,” Cantwell said, adding that consumers deserve updated protections when cancellations occur.
As Kain described it, he couldn’t even contact Southwest after his flight was cancelled. Kain and his girlfriend entered a customer service line to find another flight but gave up soon after because it was long, and it wasn’t moving.
They booked a hotel room for what was left of the night, and a car at a nearby Enterprise. They ultimately drove 1,136 miles from Denver to Redmond, Oregon, and flew to Seattle on an Alaska Airlines flight. They spent Christmas on the road escaping the Denver airport — and possibly a days-long wait.
After more than 17 hours driving and $3,000 in hotel, transportation and food costs, Kain and his girlfriend landed in Seattle on Monday, three days after his original flight was scheduled.
“It was the first Christmas I ever spent at a Best Western,” Kain said Tuesday.
While Kain was able to escape by car, thousands of travelers remained stranded or stuck at airports, including Sea-Tac, due to a spate of flight cancellations.
Sea-Tac’s run of delays and cancellations continued Tuesday, with 85 departing and arriving flights canceled and 175 delayed, according to tracking website FlightAware.
Out of all cancellations Tuesday, 35 were Southwest flights. Alaska Airlines, the airport’s most popular airline, topped the number of cancellations, scrubbing 42 flights.
Southwest is expected to continue canceling flights though at least Thursday. The U.S. Department of Transportation said it will investigate “whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan.”
Southwest canceled 95 flights set to depart from and arrive at Sea-Tac between Monday and Thursday, according to FlightAware.
Denver and Chicago had the most flights canceled Tuesday, according to FlightAware, as the two cities struggle with snow and icy conditions caused by the massive winter storm that hit much of the country.
In a memo to employees sent Monday, Southwest Chief Executive Bob Jordan said the extreme weather made the company limit the number of ground crews available.
“We started to see equipment freeze, jet bridges freeze, fuel congeal, and as a result, we had to modify our network, sometimes shutting down Crew bases operations for a while,” Jordan said.
The problems began over the weekend and snowballed Monday, when Southwest called off more than 70% of its flights.
That was after the worst of the storm had passed. The airline said many pilots and flight attendants were out of position to work their flights. Leaders of unions representing Southwest pilots and flight attendants blamed antiquated crew-scheduling software and criticized company management.
Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said the airline failed to fix problems that caused a similar meltdown in October 2021.
“There is a lot of frustration because this is so preventable,” Murray said. “The airline cannot connect crews to airplanes. The airline didn’t even know where pilots were at.”
Murray said managers resorted this week to asking pilots at some airports to report to a central location, where they wrote down the names of pilots who were present and forwarded the lists to headquarters.
Sea-Tac had a surge in flight cancellations when an ice storm hit the region Friday, with 699 arriving and departing flights canceled and 266 delayed. All three runways closed as freezing rain turned roads into sheets of ice, and passengers were stranded at the airport for most of the day. As temperatures went up, airport operations returned to normal around 4 p.m.
On Tuesday, Sea-Tac advised travelers to contact airlines directly for flight information, baggage questions and other services.
Even though he will seek reimbursement from the airline for his travel costs, Kain said he never wants fly Southwest again.
“It was a systematic failure on all counts, and at no time did anyone from Southwest come out and say, ‘From us to you, we’re sorry this is a huge failure,’” Kain said. “There’s no price that can pay this experience, to remedy it.”
