Southwest says it will return to normal operations Friday after canceling more than 10,000 flights over the past four days.
After meeting with Southwest's leadership, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told that"they indicated a number of issues that they're having with systems, legacy systems for managing their schedule and where their crews are."
"Due to the magnitude and scale of the disruptions, our technology could not align our resources," Southwest Airlines told USA TODAY."As a result, our crew schedulers are tackling the issue manually and that is a tedious, long process that takes time and trained resources to accomplish." Jordan noted that the airline's tools work 99% of the time,"but clearly, we need to double down on our already existing plans to upgrade systems for these extreme circumstances so that we never again face what's happening right now.", which represents Southwest ground crews, cast additional blame."If airline managers had planned better, the meltdown we’ve witnessed in recent days could have been lessened or averted," Barnes said in a statement.
"We always take care of our customers," Southwest's CEO said."And we will lean in and go above and beyond as they would expect us to. Teams are working on all of that: processing refunds, proactively reaching out and taking care of customers who are dealing with costly detours and reroutes, as just a few examples."
Some lawmakers want more. In a joint statement, Sens. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., called for "not only rebooked tickets, ticket refunds, and hotel, meal, and transportation reimbursement, but significant monetary compensation for the disruption to their holiday plans.”
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