Letters to the Editor: I survived the Southwest Airlines meltdown, with the help of great employees
To the editor: I too was caught up in the Southwest Airlines meltdown, but I was one of the lucky ones. Only traveling from LAX to Las Vegas to be with my daughter for Christmas, I was on flights that were delayed, not canceled.
What has not been widely discussed are the effects on Southwest flight crews. On my flight back to LAX, two pilots on their way home were sitting in front of me. As we were exiting the plane, I heard one of them say, “It is so good to be home. I can’t tell you how many days I have been wearing this same undershirt.”
They had a lighthearted tone in their voice — that impressed me the most. Grace under pressure.
I hope this Southwest debacle does not cause the airline to lose great staff.
Deborah Suyehara, Los Angeles
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To the editor: A thought about Southwest’s complete failure to their thousands of customers over Christmas, from the book “Becoming Trader Joe,” by Joe Coulombe:
“A deeply troubled company is always the fault of the CEO, the board of directors, and the controlling stockholders who appoint those worthies. It is never the fault of frontline troops.”
Mike Urane, Long Beach
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To the editor: All the misery caused by the Southwest meltdown reminded me of something I have long known — the worst thing that you can do to Americans is inconvenience them.
While we all wish it didn’t happen and it was a mess for tons of families (ours included), maybe we should all take a second and compare our inconvenience to that of the Ukrainians. As bad as being stranded somewhere is, no one was dropping bombs on us.
Our reunions are merely delayed, not canceled forever. Southwest blew it. Vote with your wallet, and be grateful it wasn’t worse.
Jeff Heister, Chatsworth
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To the editor: Certainly Southwest’s point-to-point, low-cost business model was not resilient enough to withstand the severe jolt to its system caused by the winter storms.
However, like JetBlue’s 2007 Valentine’s Day meltdown, also caused by terrible weather in the Midwest and eastern parts of the country, Southwest will recover, building off a little-known hypothesis called “satisfaction as resignation”: Airline customers are happy when the system works, as they do not expect the system to work most of the time.
Southwest’s low-cost business model will work again, and we’ll all tell stories of everything that went wrong over the Christmas holiday, remember one thing that went right, and book the next reservation resigned to be satisfied if even one thing works.
Leonard D. Lane, Irvine
The writer is a senior lecturer at UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business.
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To the editor: Yes, Southwest deserves all the bad press for its antiquated internal tracking system, but that does not excuse the travelers who blindly packed their bags for the holidays knowing full well that one of the biggest storms in decades was going to impact much of the country.
What were they thinking marching into the airport while people in places like Buffalo were dying? Travelers need to do their own evaluations of conditions and preemptively cancel plans if such weather conditions exist in the future.
Mike Post, Winnetka
