Southwest Airlines pilots and unions have been warning the company for years that there would be a major issue with its computer scheduling systems that are at least two decades old, and "everything kind of came to a head" with the Christmas holiday traveling season coming at the same time as a massive nationwide storm, Joshua Yoder, the president of U.S. Freedom Flyers said on Newsmax on Thursday.
"What happened is that bitter cold did descend on Denver, and that's where the Southwest Airlines meltdown started," said Yoder, a pilot for a separate U.S. airline, on Newsmax's "National Report" while responding to comments from Southwest CEO Bob Jordan, who said the airline was forced to cancel thousands of flights since last week because of the cold temperatures nationwide.
But while other airlines canceled flights, only Southwest's schedule remains at a standstill, and Yoder pointed out that Jordan didn't address the company's "antiquated scheduling systems" during his statement.
"Ultimately Southwest found themselves trying to communicate with all of their 20,000 front-line employees that were in place and ready to go via phone and essentially, the operation fell apart," said Yoder. "They didn't know where aircraft or where their crews were, and I know of a number of Southwest crews that spent over 48 hours sleeping in the airport because even on their own, they were unable to find hotels."
Meanwhile, the continued cancellations can't be blamed on the weather, because other airlines "were able to operate fairly normal schedules," said Yoder.
"Southwest has been warned for years — they've known for years about these antiquated computer systems that they had," said Yoder, noting that Southwest obtained $7.2 billion since 2020 in money from the federal government but didn't use it to update their systems and now Jordan, as the new CEO, is "left holding the bag."
The delays and cancellations could have been prevented had Southwest's management heeded the warnings from the pilot's union and others, Yoder insisted, but "you have to understand to do that, it costs the company millions of dollars and they were reluctant to spend the money … it would have been far cheaper to upgrade those systems a few years back."
And now, Southwest must take "extensive measures" to make amends to its customers, or it will lose people who have been loyal over the years, said Yoder.
"This isn't the first time this has happened at Southwest," he continued. "This has become a semi-regular thing over the past two to three years. They've had some major hiccups, so I think management needs to do some soul-searching. I think they need to reconsider the investments they're making in their airline, also their employees and also the way that employees are treated.
"I hear frequently from pilots and flight attendants at Southwest who are very unhappy at what Southwest has become."
Yoder's organization is made of up pilots and other airline employees who have pushed back against COVID-19 vaccination and other mandates, and he said Thursday that "we're starting to see the fallout" in the form of long-term disability claims and "major training backlogs, at least at a few of the major airlines."
"It's not uncommon to wait for ... two to three months for a training slot," said Yoder. "If you couple that with the pilot shortage that we already knew we were going to have between 2020 and 2030."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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