Dec. 28—The ongoing debacle at Southwest Airlines left company employees in the same position as many of its passengers: far from home, exhausted and deeply frustrated.
The Dallas-headquartered airline on Monday canceled about 70 percent of the day's flights, including 220 of the roughly 300 scheduled to arrive and depart from William P. Hobby Airport, causing the smaller of the region's two international airports to enter emergency operations mode. A similar share of Southwest flights were canceled Tuesday, and airline leaders warned the cancellations could extend to the coming days as they try to reset their operations.
In addition to throwing the plans of tens of thousands of travelers into disarray, the cancelations added another layer to the discontent felt by its flight attendants, who generally do not earn their flight pay until a plane pushes back from the gate.
Michael Massoni, a 29-year flight attendant and first vice president of Transport Workers Union Local 556, which represents Southwest's 18,000 flight attendants, said in an interview Tuesday that Southwest's pilots and flight attendants faced questions about whether they would be able to document the hours they've logged this week and be compensated fairly.
"This is not a people issue," Massoni said. "We had plenty of people in place at the beginning of the Christmas holiday, but everybody got displaced because of the storm, and then Southwest Airlines' systemic issues kicked in and finished the job.
"Missing time with your family over Christmas, that can't be replaced," he said. "But I think that at this juncture Southwest just needs to pony up. If somebody says 'I was on duty for 20 hours,' they should just take it at face value and pay that time. That's the least they can do for the pain they have caused their employees and, of course, our poor passengers."
In an email, a spokesperson for Southwest responded: "Crewmembers are pay protected for trips according to their collective bargaining agreements."
At a press conference in Houston Tuesday morning, Jay McVay, a Southwest spokesperson, said last week's Winter Storm Elliott led to this week's cancellations.
The massive storm, which brought an arctic cold front to Houston and blanketed a region from Chicago to Buffalo, N.Y. with heavy snowfall, caused major domestic air carriers including Southwest to cancel thousands of flights during a busy holiday travel week. But as the week started, Southwest was the hardest hit.
Most carriers had largely returned to normal operations over Christmas weekend, with cancellation rates of less than 2 percent, according to data from the flight-tracking service FlightAware. No other carrier cancelled flights out of Hobby on Monday or Tuesday, according to FlightAware.
"The cancellations just compiled, one after another, to 100, to 150 to 1,000," McVay said. "With those cancellations we end up with flight crews and airplanes that are out of place and not in the cities they need to be in to continue to run our operations."
Southwest employees said a critical difference between the airline and other major carriers is the technology the company uses to coordinate crew members for various flights. The system can prove inefficient, they said, especially in conjunction with Southwest's point-to-point network, a contrast to the hub-and-spoke system other major carriers embrace.
"The situation by which we communicate with our scheduling department goes back 50 years," Massoni, the union representative, said. "It's a phone call.
"We had the weather event that caused airplanes to not be where they were supposed to be, and crew members to not be where they were supposed to be," he continued. "At that point, [the airline] is trying to match up equipment with crew members. They're having to literally do it manually, right now."
Southwest's technology has been a point of contention in its contract negotiations with flight attendants, which went to federal mediation this fall after dragging on for four years without progress.
"One of the biggest challenges we have is the company continually has technology failures that affect our flight crews," said Denny Sebesta, a Southwest flight attendant for more than 30 years who is serving as a member of the Local 556 negotiating committee, said in September, as off-duty flight attendants prepared for informational pickets in Houston and other cities.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Southwest leaders were still occupied with the immediate crisis.
"Our focus right now remains on getting our crews and customers to their destinations," a spokesperson said in an email.
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