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Whereas the US president blamed Southwest Airways for the disruptions, critics say his insurance policies induced a pilot scarcity
US President Joe Biden has threatened to carry airways “accountable” over a spate of delayed and canceled flights, with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg singling out Southwest Airways specifically. Nonetheless, the Biden administration has been accused of contributing to the issue.
With greater than half of the continental US affected by a bitter winter cyclone, a minimum of 3,100 flights have been canceled all through the nation on Sunday, with an additional 6,800 delayed. Delays and cancellations nonetheless numbered into the hundreds on Monday, however by Wednesday, one airline specifically was nonetheless struggling to renew regular service: Southwest, a low-cost service.
In accordance with FlightAware, a flight monitoring web site, some 2,509 Southwest flights, or 62% of the airline’s deliberate service, have been canceled by Wednesday afternoon. The airline has canceled greater than 14,500 flights since Friday.
“We’re previous the purpose the place they might say this can be a weather-driven concern,” Buttigieg advised ABC Information. “So what this means is a system failure, and they should make it possible for these stranded passengers get to the place they should go and that they’re offered satisfactory compensation,” he continued, including that doing so “is the airways’ accountability.”
The Division of Transport introduced on Tuesday that it could look at whether or not the rash of cancellations constituted a breach of Southwest’s customer support plan, whereas President Joe Biden said his administration “is working to make sure airways are held accountable.”
Nonetheless, Southwest has been grappling with a scarcity of pilots for greater than a 12 months, with some employees refusing to work resulting from a Covid-19 vaccine mandate imposed in September 2021. The mandate was introduced in by Southwest itself, citing a controversial directive from the Biden administration. Southwest’s pilots’ union bitterly opposed the mandate, and opposed current efforts by the airline to rent overseas pilots to deal with the shortfall.
Throughout the business, pilots’ unions warned the Biden administration that vaccine mandates would result in “mass terminations of unvaccinated pilots.” Whereas it’s unclear what number of pilots stop or took early retirement earlier than Biden’s vaccine directive was halted by the Supreme Court docket earlier this 12 months, one examine in August discovered that the US airline business confronted a shortfall of 8,000 pilots in 2022, partly resulting from early retirements.
In the meantime, Buttigieg has resisted strain to lift the retirement age for pilots to 67, saying in July that the US can’t “maintain the Child Boomer technology within the cockpit indefinitely.”
In a video message launched on Tuesday, Southwest CEO Bob Jordan stated that he’s “optimistic” that common service will resume by subsequent week.
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