m-e-s-s mess, that washington is getting involved. transportation secretary pete buttigieg told my colleagues at nbc nightly news yesterday that he s going to hold southwest accountable. and give to customer us. and looking into the southwest debacle. what exactly is causing this issue at southwest where other airlines were fine. how do you fix this? joining us justin george, transportation reporter for the washington post. justin, thank you so much for being with us. explain to us why is southwest such a mess right now? what happened? yeah, it s pretty staggering. it s basically a perfect storm of what happened here. you had antiquated sort of older scheduling systems. you have so many things, so many variables, you re working with when you talk about flights. you re talking about positioning airplanes and cries and pilots and runways and gates. and all of those things sort of
do you fix it? joining us now, justin george, transportation reporter for the washington post. justin, thank you so much for being with us. explain to us how southwest is such a mess right now. what happened? it s pretty staggering, it s basically a perfect storm of what happened here. you have antiquated older scheduling systems, you have so many things, so many variables that you re working with in flights. positioning airplanes, crews, pilots, and runways. all of those things have to work together. according to employees, according to the union, including to analysts, southwest has long been working with out of date equipment. they have been urging the airline to make an upgrade, like many airlines have. they haven t yet. they ve been slow to do so for whatever reason. they ve gotten by in the past, because they ve been very centralized, centralized
flights canceled. how can travelers have faith in the airline? and to be frank, have faith in your department as a watchdog if these problems keep happening? well, what we did, especially over the course of the problems we saw this year was press the airlines to increase their customer service commitments. they did that. they did that in writing. and now that we have that in hand, we are able to hold them accountable to a higher standard than what was possible last year. now again, what we have going on right now is different for southwest, this one airline, than what we re seeing across the rest of the system. as a watchdog, we are going to hold them accountable. and we re going to have to take a deeper look at what s going on with their scheduling systems. we all understand you can t control the weather. this is clearly crossed the line from what an uncontrollable weather situation to something that is the airline s direct responsibility. secretary buttigieg, we appreciate your t
another day of travel chaos with thousands more flight delays and cancellations. southwest struggles to recover from holiday storms and system-wide operational problems. the u.s. department of transportation says it is launching an investigation. as a wash dog we ll hold them accountable and have to take a deeper look what s going on with their scheduling systems. we all understand you can t control the weather but this is clearly crossing the line from what s on uncontrollable weather situation to something that s the airline s responsibility. julie: president biden dodging the travel chaos and winter weather as he jets off to a tropical vacation. peter doocy is live at the white house. we have a heater right here. it s pretty warm. not that bad. it s not that bad. as we look at some of these images from airports, julie, people who are stranded and
hubs but this is not just about mother nature. i mean, one of the most stunning things we ve learned this week is that southwest relies on technology and software and scheduling systems that haven t really changed since the 1990s. that s according to the head of the southwest pilots trade union. that s pretty amazing, i mean, think about how much has changed since the 1990s, think about how hold the 1990s look if you watch and early episode of seinfeld. it s alarming a major airline hasn t upgraded its system since then. now, the fact that other airlines have bounced back pretty quickly is also another reminder of how southwest using a point-to-point system to get its planes around the country. a lot of other airlines, they use a different system and this system that southwest uses, it seems to work pretty well when the weather is cooperating but when something goes wrong, it really goes wrong, abby. yeah, i think a lot of people are used to getting funneled