| From: Sam | 11/10/2021 8:04:14 AM | | | | | | | The Journey of One Southwest Plane Explains the Misery of Travel Now | |
Dow Jones Newswires November 10, 2021 06:00:00 AM ET
By Scott McCartney | Graphics by Emma Brown
To understand how routine airline disruptions have been mushrooming into travel meltdowns affecting a million passengers or more, consider the recent four-day odyssey of a single plane: a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-800 called N8661A.
Following that 175-seat jet shows how ill-prepared some airlines have been for the busy restart of travel this year. You can think of N8661A as one piece in a jigsaw puzzle where some of the pieces keep changing shape and size so fast that nothing fits together.
As fliers have found this summer and fall, and more are likely to discover over the holidays, short-staffed airlines are even tougher to get back on track. Cancellations continue for days. Takeoffs in California are delayed hours because of problems in Florida. It seems incomprehensible -- when it's your trip that's botched and you end up sleeping in a hotel far from your destination.
Take the holiday-weekend snafu in October at Southwest. A typical afternoon storm in Florida delayed some flights, then the air-traffic control center in Jacksonville, Fla., had a staffing shortage that grounded others. By the end of the day, 188 airplanes were in the wrong cities; flights at 66 airports were affected, Southwest says. About 30% of crews weren't where they were supposed to be.
What made it exponentially worse: Southwest was already running short on reserve crews and didn't have enough spare pilots and flight attendants to recover. It's the same problem that vexed American Airlines several times, including earlier this month, after high winds in Dallas twisted the airline into knots.
"An airline needs to keep moving. It counts on the aircraft moving, the crews moving, obviously our passengers moving, the bags moving. So all the pieces and parts need to keep moving," says Bob Jordan, Southwest's executive vice president and incoming chief executive officer.
Southwest's N8661A -- the registration number for the aircraft often called the tail number -- flew 16 trips over four days that October holiday weekend. (It often flies five or six a day.) It also had six cancellations over that period, mostly because Southwest didn't have a crew available to operate the trip.
Typical hiccups that normally would have delayed flights one day, maybe two, turned into a meltdown because of aggressive scheduling for the staff on duty and higher than usual sick calls, the airline says. It didn't help that on Friday, Oct. 8, the center of the flight groundings happened to be one of Southwest's biggest crew bases, Orlando, Fla.
"By the end of the day Friday, we've got aircraft out of position and crews out of position. We have crews [in Orlando] that couldn't come into the network. Obviously, we had a lot of customers that we've affected," Mr. Jordan says.
N8661A started its day that Friday in Norfolk, Va., and was supposed to fly to Baltimore; Tampa, Fla.; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Orlando; Dallas; and finally Little Rock, Ark., according to a log provided by Southwest.
It only reached Orlando. The Federal Aviation Administration slowed flights and kept some on the ground in Florida for a few hours because of severe weather, military training that limited routes for commercial flights and a shortage of air-traffic controllers at the Jacksonville regional air-traffic control center. Southwest says it canceled N8661A's flight to Dallas because air-traffic control had to thin out traffic. The airline used a different airplane for the Dallas-Little Rock flight.
Unlike hub-and-spoke airlines, Southwest airplanes hopscotch from city to city. Since N8661A was stuck in Orlando instead of Little Rock, it received completely new routes for Saturday: Dallas, then Miami, Austin, Texas, Chicago and Houston.
Good plan, except Southwest says several issues compounded into a four-hour delay leaving Orlando for Dallas. A different plane handled the next two legs and Southwest scrapped the final two.
After reaching Dallas 238 minutes late, N8661A switched to yet another routing plan and flew to Houston, Las Vegas and Phoenix. It was supposed to go on to Burbank, Calif., but that had to be canceled because that crew timed out. Federal safety rules restrict how long pilots and flight attendants can remain on duty.
The tally for Saturday was worse than Friday's, the day of the disruption: four flights flown and three flights canceled.
N8661A started Sunday flying from Phoenix to Houston. It never reached its next four destinations. Southwest says it had to scrap its scheduled trip from Houston to Tampa for crew reasons. A different plane picked up that route in Tampa. N8661A instead headed to Dallas, Tampa, Nashville, Tenn., and Panama City, Fla. It operated five flights for the day, with one cancellation, and now was in northwest Florida overnight.
That created another problem -- early flights out of Panama City were all canceled on Monday, three days after the disruption began, because of a lack of crew availability, Southwest says. N8661A sat on the ground in Panama City until 5:30 p.m. local time, when it picked up another route and flew to Nashville, St. Louis and Fort Myers, Fla. One flight related to N8661A was canceled and three others were flown with substitute aircraft while N8661A sat in Panama City.
By Tuesday, Southwest had reassembled its schedule -- for the most part.
Southwest says it typically has 12% to 15% of its crews on reserve duty ready to be called in to replace crews that run out of duty time, call in sick or end up out of position. Mr. Jordan says the airline was well below that level over the October holiday weekend.
"We just had less crew margin than typical and less crew margin than we needed," Mr. Jordan says. "We would absolutely still have had issues on Saturday and Sunday because of the widespread impact. But they could have been less if we had the right amount of margin that was typical."
Since summer, Southwest has had higher-than-normal sick leaves and other leaves -- a lot of that attributable to Covid-19, Mr. Jordan says. Crews have been picking up extra trips for extra pay, and unions have complained that workers are worn out.
"Even if they picked up trips at an extraordinary rate, you just don't have enough because there are so many trips to pick up," he says.
Lesson learned, the airline says. Southwest has trimmed its flight schedule for the holidays. That should leave more than 20% of its crews on reserve.
Write to Scott McCartney at middleseat@wsj.com |
| | Airline Discussion Board | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| From: Sam | 11/10/2021 9:40:31 AM | | | | | | Dow Jones Newswires November 10, 2021 09:31:00 AM ET
0931 ET - American continues to try and bolster pay to make sure it can staff a busy holiday schedule, but the airline's pilots present a wrinkle. The Allied Pilots Association, the union that represents American's pilots, said it rejected the airline's offer of incentive pay for peak periods around Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years. "The Board concluded that the need to achieve meaningful permanent improvements in a new collective bargaining agreement must remain APA's focus," the union said in a message to members. American's flight attendants will get triple pay if they have perfect attendance over the holidays, and the airline is offering $1,000 bonuses to several other work groups. ( alison.sider@wsj.com; @alyrose)
|
| | Airline Discussion Board | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| From: Sam | 11/16/2021 6:36:10 AM | | | | | | Southwest Airlines Price Target Cut to $59.00/Share From $63.00 by Goldman Sachs
Cut to Neutral from Buy.
Dow Jones Newswires November 16, 2021 06:29:00 AM ET
Previous close $48.42
|
| | Airline Discussion Board | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last ReadRead Replies (1) |
|
| From: OldAIMGuy | 11/26/2021 10:50:53 AM | | | | | | Re: MESA Air Group..............
Today's dip triggered a GTC Limit Order at $6.89 to buy an additional 12%
shares. That's about an 18% discount from my recent sale.
P/E = 7.3
Price/Book = 0.50
Price/Sales = 0.53
Beta = 2.89
Short Interest = 2.2%
JETS needs to drop below $19.50 to trigger further accumulation on my part.
Best wishes,
OAG Tom |
| | Airline Discussion Board | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| To: Sam who wrote (1670) | 11/26/2021 4:19:24 PM | | From: Moonray | | | | Robust post-thanksgiving air travel WAS supposed to have been a good thing:
__Symbol__Price__Chg __%|
UAL
| 42.26 | -4.47 | -9.57% | | | SKYW
| 41.06 | -3.17 | -7.17% | | | SAVE
| 20.60 | -1.78 | -7.95% | | | LUV
| 44.96 | -2.03 | -4.32% | | | JBLU
| 13.62 | -0.84 | -5.81% | | | HA
| 18.26 | -1.56 | -7.87% | | | DAL
| 36.38 | -3.31 | -8.34% | | | ALK
| 49.45 | -3.46 | -6.54% | | | AAL
| 17.75 | -1.71 | -8.79% | | | JETS
| 20.53 | -1.59 | -7.19%
|
o~~~ O
| Helpful Hints | | Spam-free Boards: Please do not post the same or similar message on more than TWO boards.
New Users: To discourage spamming from throwaway accounts, embedded hyperlinks in posts from new accounts are disabled for a brief observation period.
No lewd content: The posting of images that are sexually offensive is |
|
|
| | Airline Discussion Board | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| From: Sam | 11/30/2021 7:44:26 AM | | | | | | BUZZ-Moderna CEO warns COVID-19 vaccines may be less effective against new variant
** Alaska Air Group Inc: down 2.6% premarket
** American Airlines Group Inc: down 2.5% premarket
** Southwest Airlines Co: down 2.3% premarket
** Delta Air Lines Inc: down 2.7% premarket
** United Airlines Holdings Inc: down 2.9% premarket
** Spirit Airlines Inc: down 3.1% premarket
** JetBlue Airways Corporation: down 2.7% premarket
** The Boeing Company: down 2.3% premarket
** Company's Name: down 2.6% premarket
** Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd: down 2.5% premarket
** Carnival Corporation: down 3.2% premarket
** TripAdvisor Inc: down 3.0% premarket
** Expedia Group Inc: down 3.2% premarket
** Booking Holdings Inc: down 1.6% premarket
** Marriott International Inc: down 2.5% premarket
** Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc: down 2.3% premarket
** Hyatt Hotels Corporation: down 1.8% premarket
** Melco Resorts & Entertainment Limited: down 1.2% premarket
** Wynn Resorts Limited: down 2.1% premarket
** MGM Resorts International: down 2.7% premarket
** Las Vegas Sands Corp: down 2.4% premarket
BUZZ-Travel stocks tumble again as COVID-19 fears resurface
|
| | Airline Discussion Board | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| From: Sam | 12/3/2021 6:18:03 PM | | | | | | Scrutiny of U.S. airline assistance grows in Congress
Reuters December 03, 2021 05:31:00 PM ET
WASHINGTON, Dec 3 (Reuters) - The leaders of the U.S. House Transportation Committee have asked a major airline industry trade group to answer questions about $54 billion in government payroll aid carriers got.
Committee chair Peter DeFazio, a Democrat, and the panel's top Republican Sam Graves, asked Airlines for America (A4A) to answer questions about staffing reductions despite the taxpayer assistance.
The lawmakers in a letter late Thursday noted questions have been raised about disruptions at two major U.S. carriers in recent months. They asked in the letter if that is the result of "a shortage of workers in key operational areas, despite the approximately $50 billion in aid" from Congress.
"We expect airlines to take whatever measures are available to ameliorate any short-staffing issues and begin to address longer-term workforce shortages."
The letter comes as the Senate Commerce Committee has invited the chief executives of seven major U.S. airlines to testify at an oversight hearing now expected to take place Dec. 15.
Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat who chairs the panel, is inviting the CEOs of American Airlines, Delta Air Lines , Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Alaska Airlines and Spirit Airlines to testify, Reuters reported earlier this week.
Many of those CEOs are expected to be in Washington on Dec. 15 to take part in an A4A meeting, officials said.
Cantwell said the CEOs should testify.
"I would encourage them to show up," Cantwell told Reuters on Wednesday. "I think it is bad faith not to show up ... The public deserves to know some answers."
She added "we're going to do our oversight role because this was a lot of money."
The airlines declined comment or did not immediately comment.
Starting in March 2020, Congress approved three separate rounds of taxpayer bailouts totaling $54 billion to cover much of U.S. airlines' payroll costs through Sept. 30 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Airlines that received government assistance were not allowed to issue involuntary layoffs or cut worker pay. They also had to limit executive compensation and halt share buybacks and dividend payments.
|
| | Airline Discussion Board | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| |
