DOJ JOINS INVESTIGATION INTO SOUTHWEST’S DECEMBER 2022 MELTDOWN
May 4, 2023
On Friday, April 21, 2023, DOT announced that the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) has joined its investigation into Southwest’s scheduling practices following the carrier’s December 2022 “meltdown” resulting in over 16,000 cancelled flights. Severe winter weather largely affected the operations of many airlines at several U.S. airports between December 21st and 26th, 2022, but as DOT noted, all the other airlines affected were able to recover from the weather-related issues fairly quickly while Southwest struggled to recover due to its use of an outdated internal scheduling system that only added to the weather-related problems it faced.
DOT, DOJ, and the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”) are now working together to investigate whether Southwest engaged in unrealistic flight scheduling by scheduling flights that it knew it would not be able to properly staff, which DOT considers an unfair and deceptive practice. Since it announced its investigation into Southwest’s scheduling practices in January, DOT has conducted several on-site audits of Southwest’s refund records, worked with Southwest to determine how many passengers would be entitled to a refund under federal law, met with and interviewed Southwest officials, and examined thousands of pages of documents related to the incident. Southwest also asserted that it has completed an internal investigation and pledged to upgrade its scheduling system and winter infrastructure to prevent similar issues in the future. Nevertheless, Southwest recently suffered another “technical glitch” prompting it to ask the FAA to pause all its flights for about 40 minutes on April 18th, resulting in nearly 2,000 flight delays. Though cancellations in this instance were minimal, some U.S. Congress members and DOT have noted that the pause further shows the need for Southwest to upgrade its systems and for continued DOT observation to ensure all affected passengers are taken care of.
If you have any questions, please contact Evelyn Sahr (esahr@eckertseamans.com 202-659-6622) or Drew Derco (dderco@eckertseamans.com 202-659-6665).
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