LegalTender

Officially a party.

SWAPA says it was "not aware of any work stoppage" and wouldn’t condone it anyway.

Bear96

Wow, 27% of the schedule!

spongenotbob

Pilot “sick-out” complaining about the Vax mandate. Pathetic.

jiburi

I had two roundtrips cancelled due to staffing. Flight to san jose saturday and flight to sacramento…. Sunday Grr

Jiburi

screeton

If SWA crews are truly slowing things down, they are killing the goose that laid the golden egg. If they lack sufficient intelligence to comply with a simple vaccine mandate (when they had obviously complied with many other vaccine mandates in public schools, the military and elsewhere) then I am not sure I want them flying the plane I am on anyway. I really have a hard time blaming SWA employees like that, because the ones I know are professionals who are far above that level of foolishness, but the company does need to come clean immediately with what is going on. All the other carriers are functioning basically normal this weekend, systemwide, so weather or ATC is not going to cut it as an excuse.

synergistic

I can't quite convince myself yet that somehow WN employees - who, by and large, have seemed to be higher caliber than the average on other major airlines - are really staging a widescale sickout over the vaccine mandate. How radically different is the employee pool from United??

I wish they'd release some actual information. Blaming weather on Friday was appropriate, blaming ATC is rude af but it's one of the easiest boogeymen so I'm used to it, but we're two days out now and it's bad everywhere. It's glaringly obvious that they're melting down internally. Time to tell us why!

expert7700

ATC/NATCA are quite unhappy that some Southwest responses have been trying to push the blame off on to them. Yet the #s speak for themselves, no other US airlines affected today it is not ATC.

Southwest cancelled my family's (all A-List) 5pm flight with 10 hours notice today. This is one of the 2 flights we needed for promotional companion pass and we're not willing to take the crazy alternate they booked.

For all we know that alternate will be cancelled too. Staffing/irrops will likely only get worse not better as the day goes on until the system can "reset" in a couple days.

Tanic

I did not expect that WN PR would become the Ministry of Misinformation. Herb must be spinning.

wakesetter93

As another data point, I was speaking with the station supervisor at PNS during our delay yesterday. They had flown a 738 in from MSY the night before to operate te PNS-DAL leg of WN 2234 as the 737 on the ATL-PNS leg wouldn't accommodate all of the passengers (Flight was origionally scheduled on a 738 all the way through). Delay in Atlanta as they had their FO pulled and then were unable to find another for 2+ hours while ATL-PNS pax sat on the plane. On arrival in PNS (where WN has one gate), the inbound 737 from ATL-PNS had to sit on the tarmac for 20-30 minutes while they got a St. Louis flight out from the NK gate next door. Our 738 for PNS-DAL had been parked at WN's only gate all morning. Finally after getting the ATL-PNS leg to the gate they had to move 57 through passengers and crew through the terminal from the old plane to the new one before boarding could start.

Landing at Dallas wa even a bigger nightmare (for a connecting pax) as we waited 15 minutes for an Ops agent that could drive the jetbridge and the plane next to us had the same issues. In the terminal, WN employees were fighting a losing battle as they tried to help thousands of stranded pax. We were just happy to get our bags and hop in our Uber to the house.

Will be interesting to see what the official story is on this in the coming days.

jmw

At this point, I'd welcome new regulations that require all employees (pilots/ATC/food service/maintenance) to have one dose of the vax to enter the premises of any airport in the country with immediate effect just like everybody has to wear a mask to be in the airport for the safety of the passengers. For now, I have a bunch of Southwest flights lined up and can't afford to be stranded by a sickout.

bgasser

I had a flight 442 from ISP to MCO on Oct. 8 Depart at 3:25PM arrive at 6:10PM. After I got to the airport at 2:10 PM, the flight was cancelled with no notice. Was rebook to fly Oct. 8 ISP to BNA Flight 953 scheduled to depart 6:15PM arrive 7:40PM then BNA to MCO Flight 1860 depart 8:20PM arrive 11:10PM. Upon my arrival to BNA, I was told that the MCO connection was canceled. Was very frustrating to put on a flight where there was no notice that my connection was going to be canceled. I also spent $40 for a A1-15 upgrade seat fare, for the first leg (ISP to BNA) of a flight that could not get me to my destination. No hotel, food, or flight credit was offered, even though SWA could not transport me to my final destination for the day and I suffered two cancellations with no notice.

I gave up on getting to MCO and decided to head home (ISP) since the next available flight was too late for me and I had no accommodations in Nashville. All Nashville hotels were full (Friday night) and could not get a car rental since they were all sold out. I flew Oct. 8 BNA to BWI Flight 1058, slept in the terminal overnight since all the BWI hotels were full (arrrived at BWI at midnight) and no rental cars were available to due to being sold out.

On Oct. 9 flew BWI to ISP Flight 2089 that left 1 hour, 48 minutes late due to a plane swap and then the new plane having too much fuel on board and needed to unload some of it. What makes this so frustrating is Frontier Airlines had a flight 1085 ISP to MCO non stop on Oct. 8 Depart 6:26 PM Arrive 9:22 PM (same as my original flight), that was delayed, but was able to complete that flight and get passengers to their destination.

I am a loyal Southwest customer and appreciate the airline serving ISP. The product that was delivered to me though was the worst Southwest experience I have had. It is not helpful that Southwest is now in the business of cancelling flights with little to no notice. I wish they would slow down adding stations and bulk up on staffing their current airports to be able to handle problems when they occur.

wrp96

Friends are stuck in Vegas until at least Tuesday. They’ve been told different reasons but each boils down to lack of crew.

bgasser

The problems at WN has to do with staffing, not vaccination or Covid infection. WN went through the same meltdown as Spirit did a few months ago. Neither airline had enough staffing to handle the hiccups of bad weather and planes/crew out of position. Southwest suffered lots of delayed flights over the summer and has not been able to build in enough contingency into their schedules.

While being stuck overnighting it at BWI, I talked with a nice WN gate agent who was waiting for a delayed flight to arrive at 2:30AM. She explained that WN is hiring, but it takes time to train and get security clearances done. She could not understand why LUV corporate was adding new stations when their current staff is stretched thin after all the retirements from the 2020 incentive and lack staffing at current bases.

dcstudent

SWA Twitter is still reporting that this is all due to weather and ATC. Yet somehow WN is the only airline having issues. Weird how weather and ATC are just targeting Southwest.

spongenotbob

“There can be no doubt, this is evil weather and ATC specifically disparaging small but noble Southwestern Airliners.”