cancelled. reporter: making up 90% of cancellations, southwest 2500 flights on top of 11,000 already cancelled in the last week. i really hope they figure out whatever the problems are and get back on track. reporter: so what s keeping one of the country s largest carriers from bouncing back? industry experts blame a trifecta of bad weather, the airlines outdated scheduling system. and lower cost point-to-point flight design which sends planes from one destination to the next. and so on, instead of the popular hub and spoke system connecting passengers and crews through a central point. in a point-to-point system like southwest, you can see a domino effect of kansal las vegas cancellations if one flight gets cancelled it puts that crew and plane at risk. reporter: and the pilots association. we ve been warning about this over the last five years, the last two years we ve seen more meltdowns, they ve been more
so this says a lot about the fact the biden administration hired a bunch of people for cabinet positions who just fill the seat. they have no experience and affect the record on things like this are terrible. pete buttigieg during the primary got a lot of flak without filling potholes and ultimately on the question of congress, do you think they can make it better because i m not sure government makes these things improve and they pass laws for regulation and make it harder to manage these positions. kennedy: i think they make it worse and they compound the problem. when you have people flapping their gums like secretary of transportation, no, everything is fine and it will be better because then they don t have to do any real work. the real work is hard. it is time consuming. it is not rewarding. but if there so incredibly necessary, southwest has had a scheduling system they put in place when i was wearing questionable pajamas on mtv and 90s. [laughter] that is how long and they
of leadership, myself included, has gone into flight ops leadership and talked to them about what s happened and kind of do an after-action report. and we ve always pointed to deficiencies in the scheduling system and the i.t. behind it, along with the schedule processes that they use to actually create our schedules and move us around the system. it s been countless times we ve gone over there and made those warnings to them. they just never listened to us. you just heard one of the southwest customers vowing to tell everyone never to fly southwest again. a man in chicago says he s been a loyal southwest customer and called this the worst fiasco he s ever seen in the decades he s been flying with southwest. do you think southwest can recover from this? or is this something that s really going to hurt the airline going forward? so, i ve been a southwest pilot for 16 years, and it s, in my opinion, the best airline out
we are over 15,000 canceled flights. so the tools that we identified in 2016, and brought it to the attention of the ceo, this is basically what is happening now. that is the lack of infrastructure, the scheduling system, and software that has the flight attendants to get them to the airplane. to get pilots and flight attendants to the airplane to offer something like it whether a vent. if the company had listened to you and your colleagues back in 2016, and i ve upgraded the systems then, with this dramatic disruption still be happening, what do you think? we believe so. we believe it would not be happening. not to this severity. we have communication and documents that we sent to the company back in 2016 because we were a very analytical
upgrade systems, that scheduling system we ve heard a lot about over the last week or so and then you also have to think about the more immediate financial impacts in terms of reimbursing all of these travelers, scott keyes who runs scott s cheap flights put it this way, i think there will be a nontrivial financial cost to the airline for this meltdown, both in terms of the compensation that they re almost certainly going to pay to travelers impacted but, amara, also the crew, think about all of these people who are working the phones, working reservations trying to provide some assistance relief in customer service to all these passengers around the country. so you combine sort of all of those factors and can start to understand the potential financial impact for southwest airlines and why the shares are lower today. didn t even think about the overtime. yeah, so many people being on hold for hours and hours which means you ve got a lot of staff and crew members, exactly, overtime.