From the Editorial Board: Southwest, the nation’s largest airline, has been allowed to operate without interline agreements and without any requirement to put stranded passengers on other carriers’ flights. It needs one. Now. On fear of re-regulation.
Travelers wait in line for Southwest Airlines luggage services to recover their luggage after major service interruptions at Midway International Airport on Dec. 27, 2022.
Sure, there was a very bad storm. But any frequent flyer knows that airlines love to trot out the liability-shielding word “weather” when a more honest reason for a delay is a chronic staff shortage, as was clearly the case in Denver for Southwest; no backup plans; or, in this instance, problems with an archaic, off-the-shelf phone and crew-scheduling system that buckled under pressure even as every other airline quickly got back to normal.
Not all of the reporting on this issue has been accurate. Southwest is not a low-cost airline anymore; its holiday week fares were eye-watering. Generally, it is just as costly to fly with Southwest as on the other majors, which clearly operate in a more efficiently zoned way, rather than hopscotching crews all over the map with breakneck turnarounds.
Our Grinchy friends at The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board used this week of human misery to warn the federal Department of Transportation against interfering, apparently trusting Southwest to fix itself. We beg to differ, given the strategic importance of transportation, the oligarchical nature of today’s airline industry and the level of public funds just expended. You just can’t do this to innocent people.
Is it safer to keep a sick older person from medication for days than allow a pilot another 60 minutes to reach one hub destination? In many cases, it’s not so much more regulation that is required asregulation, with the ability to adapt to weather and other emergencies. There also have to be financial incentives to not take people’s money and not deliver the goods in a timely way. The European Union put such regulations in place, and such stories in Europe are far less common.
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