Southwest Airlines pilots’ union blames the company’s mass cancellations on ongoing I.T. problems, which have plagued the airlines for years.
As of Monday, more than 2,000 Southwest flights had been canceled since Friday. This has left thousands of passengers stranded and unaware of when they will reach their destinations. Many have pointed to the airline’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate as the reason for the delays, considering that they began immediately after the pilot’s union attempted to block the order—however, Capt. Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said that the real issue is “operational difficulties” that they’ve warned the company about for years.
“It’s been going on for years, and of course, this Summer was a prime example, and then this weekend. Our issue is, there is a lot of internal processes at Southwest that are failing. It’s I.T. related as well, and what we’re not seeing really are solutions to what’s occurring,” Murray explained. He warned that Southwest would continue to face mass cancellations and outages if it refused to update its I.T. system soon.
Regarding the union’s move to block the airline COVID-19 mandate, Murray says they were only trying to get the company to “have some discussions around the vaccine,” as the long-term medical effects remain unknown to many pilots and other employees.
