Basically, Southwest Airlines Sucks?

Southwest Airlines has collapsed in the wake of a severe snowstorm, while other airlines were barely affected by it.

The U.S. Department of Transportation says it will look into flight cancellations by Southwest Airlines that have left travelers stranded at airports across the country amid an intense winter storm that has killed dozens of people. Many airlines were forced to cancel flights due to the weather, but Southwest was by far the most affected.

The Denver International Airport bore the brunt of the dysfunction, with 334 flights canceled and 275 delayed Tuesday after days of snarled air traffic, according to the tracking website FlightAware.

Of the 2,890 flight cancellations in the U.S. early Tuesday, 2,522 were called off by Southwest, FlightAware shows. . . . Southwest Airlines . . . cancelled more than 70% of its flights Monday, more than 60% on Tuesday, and warned that it would operate just over a third of its usual schedule in the days ahead to allow crews to get back to where they needed to be. American, United, Delta and JetBlue, suffered cancellations rates of between none and 2% by Tuesday. . . .

The president of the union representing Southwest pilots blamed the lack of crews to fly planes on scheduling software written in the 1990s and on management that he said failed to fix things after previous meltdowns, including a major disruption in October 2021.

From the Colorado Sun.

Fun Fact: A typical airline spends roughly the same amounts on fuel and on operations research to schedule its flights and crews, etc.

Incidentally, about half of the deaths were in greater Buffalo, New York, which got more than 50 inches of snow in blizzard conditions.