Exhausted Southwest Airlines Pilots are the ‘Number-One Safety Threat,’ Union Warns CEO

Southwest Airlines pilots are feeling increasingly exhausted and the issue has become the company’s “number-one safety threat,” union officials are warning the airline’s CEO.

This is a result of company “mismanagement” and “scheduling failures” and needs immediate addressing, the board of directors for the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) wrote in an April 12 letter to top company executives.

In 2021, there was a “dramatic” spike in pilots reporting fatigue over the summer, when air travel returned to normal levels in June amid the pandemic, and these safety reports have only continued to rise since then, the letter said.

The rates of tired pilots rose by 330% in March, it added.

“April is already setting fatigue records. Fatigue, both acute and cumulative, has become Southwest Airlines’ number-one safety threat.”

The harmful effects of pilot fatigue include “impaired judgment, lack of concentration, reduced in-flight attention, and heightened emotional activity leading to poor cognitive processing, along with decreased reaction time and slower hand-eye coordination, to name a few,” union officials warned.

The letter emphasized how safety is the top priority for Southwest pilots. However, a pilot’s ability to avoid making errors is “compromised” due to fatigue.

Additionally, the union pointed out several pilots are overworked from scheduling issues such as reassignments, which is contributing to their exhaustion.

“Our Pilots have been unable to obtain hotel rooms for proper rest following excessive reassignments and the resultant delays,” the letter said.

Over the past year, there were more than 100 documented cases that revealed pilots “were not provided with the federally mandated minimum rest opportunity.”

A pilot is supposed to get at least 10 hours of rest before work, according to Cornell Law School.

The letter said that Southwest CEO Bob Jordan and President Mike Van de Ven “have both gone on record saying that our Pilots should be able to fly what they signed up for, yet reassignment rates have remained at record highs for months on end,” including in early April.

In 2021, reassignment rates increased by 85% and have jumped between 30% and 50% in 2022, according to SWAPA.

“Since last summer, our Pilots have lost more than 18,000 days off when the Company forced them to work on a day when they weren’t previously scheduled.”

SWAPA said the number of flights that the company is responsible for isn’t the issue. Instead it’s “the mismanagement of connecting crews to airplanes.”

“This constant failure leads to delays, resulting in more reassignments.”

On Saturday, April 2, a total of 520 flights were canceled by Southwest Airlines and there were 1,512 delayed flights amid bad weather in Florida, CNBC reported.

“With widespread cancellations in the midst of a busy travel season, hotel rooms were unavailable in a few cities, and late day Crew timeouts in those cities meant that some Crew Members were left without rooms,” the company acknowledged in a statement, according to the outlet.

SWAPA urged that “our airline must stop using our Pilots inefficiently” and called on company executives to take “immediate action” on the safety concerns mentioned in the letter.

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