Four charts illustrating the Southwest Airlines crisis

CNN
–

Severe winter weather last week caused thousands of Southwest Airlines flights to be canceled and turned into a Complete breakdown of its flight system. In the days since, the carrier’s scramble to recover has been slow, and some passengers argue largely unsuccessful. But experts say the Southwest mess is actually the culmination of issues that have accumulated over several years.

Since Dec. 22, the beleaguered airline has canceled more than half of its regular flight schedule, and as of late Wednesday, about 87% of all canceled flights in the US were from the Southwest alone, according to industry trackers FlightRadar24 and FlightAware.

The dire situation that angered the passengers and caught the eye It swelled from government regulators this week as other major airlines recovered from the bitter cold, ice and snow that gripped much of the United States over the weekend.

The airline apologized to its passengers and employees for the daily cancellations and cut capacity by about two-thirds Thursday, according to a CNN review of flight data.

This week’s crash is not the first time the company has found itself in this predicament. In October 2021, Southwest canceled more than 2,000 flights over a four-day period. While the airline blamed the crisis in part on bad weather in Florida, Southwest canceled its flights. Much longer than its competitors.

But much of the chaos in the Southwest may be the result of long-term problems unrelated to the weather.

Chief among them are internal processes and outdated information technology. Southwest Scheduling System It hasn’t changed much Since the 1990s, according to Captain Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association.

Southwest has canceled about two-thirds of its flights. See how travelers travel

Southwest has also acknowledged the company’s outdated infrastructure. “We’ve talked a lot about modernizing the process, and the need to do that,” CEO Bob Jordan told staff in a note obtained by CNN.

Over the years, the airline’s cancellation rate has increased, tripling from 2013 to September 2022, the most recent data available from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which tracks The performance of airlines, long before the last crisis.

The bureau only released data for 2022 through September. To ensure a fair comparison, CNN only analyzed carrier data from January to September in previous years.

Cancellation rates fluctuate among airlines from year to year, depending on weather and other factors, such as Covid-19, which led to significant industry-wide disruption in the early months of the pandemic in 2020.

But Southwest has consistently failed to perform as well as its competitors when it comes to cancellations, according to bureau data.

The data shows that in several years over the past decade, the airline has had higher cancellation rates compared to other major airlines.

It’s not just cancellations. Southwest has also seen its on-time percentage drop in recent years to the lowest point in a decade. Through September 2022, long before the carrier’s current struggles, only 7 out of 10 flights arrived on time.