The Southwest Airlines Meltdown

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Air travel was a mess over the holidays — in the last 10 days of December, 30,000 flights were canceled. While every airline was affected, one stood out: Southwest, which over the past few decades has transformed how Americans fly, melted down. In the last 10 days of the year, it canceled as many flights as it had done in the previous 10 months. So what went wrong? Guest: Niraj Chokshi, a business reporter for The New York Times.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is a daily.
0:08.0	Over the past few decades, Southwest Airlines has transformed how Americans fly, and in the
0:18.2	process has become a revered corporate brand. Until that is, it melted down over the holidays.
0:27.0	Today, my colleague, Neurosh Chawkshi, on what went wrong?
0:33.0	It's Tuesday, January 10th.
0:38.0	Well, Neurosh, welcome back to the show. I want to start by asking you to relive something that I know a lot of people are trying to forget.
0:49.0	And that is evoke what it was like to travel by plane over the holidays.
0:57.0	Sure, it was a total mess.
0:59.0	A major winter storm is moving coast to coast just before Christmas, and as it moves throughout the country, it is also delivering what is being described as life threatening cold.
1:10.0	There's this huge storm that hits the middle of the country called the bombsite-lone, stropping heavy snow and rain, strong winds.
1:19.0	Within three feet of snow has buried Buffalo, New York.
1:22.0	Wind chills as low as 70 below zero, a forecast for the high planes in the Midwest expecting blizzard conditions.
1:30.0	There's bad weather everywhere, and the day is leading up to Christmas. The airlines are really doing everything they can to prepare, but there's only so much they can do.
1:39.0	Every major airport from Los Angeles to Denver, Dallas to Chicago to New York posting cancellations and delays on the boards.
1:46.0	In the last ten days of December, about 30,000 flights were canceled. People were stranded in a lot of cases for days.
1:52.0	After waiting in line for hours hoping to rebook, flyers at Houston's hobby airport tonight learned, if their flight had been canceled, there are no flights available until December 31st, as in five days from now.
2:06.0	Having gifts in their bags, not making it on time with them.
2:10.0	I have my keys, I love my keys in my suitcase with all my presents, but you can see it's my keys and all that are in DC.
2:18.0	It's just all over the place. Right.
2:22.0	It's not easy to get good numbers, but it's fair to say hundreds of thousands of people were affected if not millions.
2:28.0	And every airline is affected by this problem around Christmas, but one airline really stands out.
2:34.0	Flying Southwest Airlines is under fire after a stunning amount of passengers were left stranded.
	...

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