SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

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SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#1 Post by PHXPhlyer » Tue Dec 27, 2022 3:34 pm

Horror stories of endless lines at Pax Services, hours long hold times only to have calls dropped, piles of luggage covering the floor of baggage claim areas, and no hotels or rental cars. :-o #-o :(( [-X X(

Southwest cancels 70% of its flights as travelers try to get home
The airline acknowledged that it had been crippled by winter weather and said it plans to fly about one-third of its schedule in the coming days as it recovers.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/so ... -rcna63289

Thousands of Southwest Airline flights scheduled to depart on Tuesday and Wednesday have been canceled following the beleaguered airline's admission that it would fly just one-third of its schedule in the travel-heavy days after Christmas.

As of Tuesday morning, more than 2,500 Southwest flights, or 62% of its schedule, were canceled, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware. Roughly the same amount of the airline's flights have already been cancelled for Wednesday, FlightAware shows.

More than 4,500 total flights scheduled to depart Tuesday have been canceled, with Southwest cancellations making up about 56% of those. And more than 3,500 flights scheduled to leave Wednesday have already been canceled, with Southwest constituting about 70% of those cancellations, according to FlightAware.

On Monday, Southwest canceled more than 2,800 flights, or 70% of its schedule, frustrating passengers across the nation.

“Our heartfelt apologies for this are just beginning,” Southwest said in a statement Monday.

A Southwest representative did not immediately respond to an inquiry Tuesday morning about how many flights it had preemptively cancelled for the rest of the week or when it expects to resume a normal schedule.

Photos and video posted to social media showed bags piling up, and federal transportation officials called the cancellations unacceptable.

“I’m angry as hell, because I see mismanagement,” Ihore Konrad told NBC Chicago. He had been stranded at the airport for two days because of cancellations, according to the station.

Overall, around 3,900 flights were canceled within, into or out of the U.S. on Monday, according to the flight-tracking website FlightAware.

Southwest had 2,893 flights canceled at one point Monday, roughly 70% of its schedule, according to the site. Delta had around 300 and United around 130.

Southwest blamed “operational challenges” that followed days of severe winter weather across most of the country.

And the problems at Southwest are not over. The airline plans to fly one-third of its schedule — or around 1,500 flights — for the next “several days" so that it can reposition flight crews who are out of position, the company said.

"On the other side of this, we’ll work to make things right for those we’ve let down, including our employees," the company said in a statement.

Bags piled up at Denver International Airport and Chicago’s Midway Airport Monday, video showed. Southwest said it was inundated with calls and messages and asked for patience.

Southwest CEO Bob Jordan also told The Wall Street Journal that the company plans to operate just over one-third of its typical schedule Tuesday and Wednesday.

“We had a tough day today. In all likelihood we’ll have another tough day tomorrow as we work our way out of this,” Jordan told the newspaper.


Much of the continental U.S., at one point covering over 200 million people, was under winter weather warnings or alerts going into the holiday weekend, with bitterly cold temperatures and ice.

On Saturday, Sunday and Monday combined, over 8,200 flights into, out of or within the U.S. were canceled, according to FlightAware.

The issue with Southwest flights also caught the attention of the Transportation Department, which called the airline's performance unacceptable.

"USDOT is concerned by Southwest Airlines’ disproportionate and unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays as well as the failure to properly support customers experiencing a cancellation or delay," a department spokesperson said in a statement.

"As more information becomes available the Department will closely examine whether cancellations were controllable and whether Southwest is complying with its customer service plan as well as all other pertinent DOT rules," the statement said.

Southwest said that it was staffed in advance of the holiday but that the severe weather greatly affected its plans.

“These operational conditions forced daily changes to our flight schedule at a volume and magnitude that still has the tools our teams use to recover the airline operating at capacity,” the airline said.

The day after Christmas is typically one of busier travel days of the year — although the Transportation Security Administration said last week it expected Dec. 22 and Dec. 30 to be the busiest this year.

More than 2 million passengers passed through TSA checkpoints Friday, and on Sunday the number was 1.7 million, according to the TSA website. More than 2.2 million passengers passed through the checkpoints on Monday, marking the largest day of Dec. 26 travel since 2019, when 2.5 million passengers passed through TSA checkpoints.

At Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina, what was supposed to have been a flight instead turned to long trips by road — after Southwest flights were canceled, passengers were given the choice to travel by bus, NBC affiliate WRAL of Raleigh reported.

“There’s nothing else I can do except sit on this bus to get back home,” passenger Eric Ford told the station.


PP

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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#2 Post by PHXPhlyer » Tue Dec 27, 2022 3:47 pm

Why Southwest is melting down

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/27/business ... index.html

New York
CNN

A punishing winter storm that dumped multiple feet of snow across much of America led to widespread flight cancellations over the Christmas holiday. By Monday, air travel was more or less back to normal – unless you booked your holiday travel with Southwest Airlines.

More than 90% of Tuesday’s US flight cancellations are Southwest, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. Southwest canceled 2,500 flights. The next highest: Spirit Airlines with 75.

Southwest warned that it would continue canceling flights until it could get its operations back on track. The company’s CEO said this has been the biggest disruption he’s seen in his career. The Biden administration is investigating.

What gives?

Southwest had a combination of bad luck and bad planning.

The storm hit Chicago and Denver hard, where Southwest has two of its biggest hubs – Chicago Midway airport and Denver International airport.

More bad luck: The storm hit just as the so-called tripledemic surged across America, leaving people and their families sick with Covid, the flu and RSV. Although Southwest says it was fully staffed for the holiday weekend, illness makes adjusting to increased system stress difficult. Many airlines still lack sufficient staff to recover when events like bad weather cause delays or flight crews max out the hours they’re allowed to work under federal safety regulations.

Underinvestment
But Southwest (LUV) also hurt itself with an aggressive schedule and by underinvesting in its operations.

Southwest’s schedule includes shorter flights with tighter turnaround times, which are causing some of the problems, Kathleen Bangs, a FlightAware spokesperson, told CNN.

“Those turnaround times bog things down,” Bangs said.

Stranded customers have been unable to get through to Southwest’s customer service lines to rebook flights or find lost baggage.

Baggage waits to be claimed after canceled flights at the Southwest Airlines terminal at Los Angeles International Airport on Monday, December 26, 2022, in Los Angeles.
Southwest Airlines continues canceling flights as New Year holiday approaches
Employees also said they have not been able to communicate with the airline, the president of the union that represents Southwest’s Flight Attendants told CNN Monday.

“The phone system the company uses is just not working,” Lyn Montgomery, President of TWU Local 556, told CNN’s Pamela Brown. “They’re just not manned with enough manpower in order to give the scheduling changes to flight attendants, and that’s created a ripple effect that is creating chaos throughout the nation.”

The problems Southwest faces have been brewing for a long time, said Captain Casey Murray, the president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association.

“We’ve been having these issues for the past 20 months,” he told CNN. “We’ve seen these sorts of meltdowns occur on a much more regular basis and it really just has to do with outdated processes and outdated IT.”

He said the airline’s operations haven’t changed much since the 1990s.

“It’s phones, it’s computers, it’s processing power, it’s the programs used to connect us to airplanes – that’s where the problem lies, and it’s systemic throughout the whole airline,” he said.

Southwest CEO Bob Jordan, in a message to employees obtained by CNN, acknowledged many of Murray’s concerns, and promised the company will invest in better systems.

“Part of what we’re suffering is a lack of tools,” Jordan told employees. “We’ve talked an awful lot about modernizing the operation, and the need to do that.”

He said the airline is “committed to and invested in” improving its systems, but “we need to be able to produce solutions faster.”

The US Department of Transportation said it is investigating.

“USDOT is concerned by Southwest’s unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays & reports of lack of prompt customer service,” the agency tweeted. “The Department will examine whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan.”

To recover, Jordan told the Wall Street Journal the company plans to operate just over a third of its schedule in upcoming days to give itself the ability for crews to get into the right positions.

Not Southwest’s first rodeo
If this is all ringing a bell, that’s because this isn’t the first time Southwest’s service melted down in epic fashion. In October 2021, Southwest canceled more than 2,000 flights over a four-day period, costing the airline $75 million.

Southwest blamed that service meltdown on a combination of bad weather in Florida, a brief problem with air traffic control in the area and a lack of available staff to adjust to those problems. It has admitted it was having service problems caused by short staffing even before the thousands of canceled flights stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers.

Similar to this month’s service mayhem, Southwest fared far worse than its competitors last October. While Southwest canceled hundreds of flights in the days following the peak of October’s disruption, competitors quickly returned to normal service.

Later that month, on a call with Wall Street analysts, then-CEO Gary Kelly said the company had made adjustments to prevent a similar meltdown in the future.

“We have reined in our capacity plans to adjust to the current staffing environment, and our ontime performance has improved, accordingly,” said Kelly on October 21. “We are aggressively hiring to a goal of approximately 5,000 new employees by the end of this year, and we are currently more than halfway toward that goal.”

And, just like the latest disruption, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association claimed the cancellations were due to “management’s poor planning.”

PP

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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#3 Post by PHXPhlyer » Tue Dec 27, 2022 8:31 pm

Photo from PHX T4 parking garage rooftop.
Southwest ramp area.
Sea of bags.


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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#4 Post by reddo » Tue Dec 27, 2022 8:43 pm

FB groups I am a member of say it's not the weather nor crew sickness, although, it hasn't helped. It's the lack of investment in robust systems that can cope with big demands.

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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#5 Post by PHXPhlyer » Tue Dec 27, 2022 9:03 pm

US Department of Transportation is getting involved.
Expect massive payout to pax.
Unfortunately the regs here are not as robust as they are in the EU for this sort of stuff.

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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#6 Post by barkingmad » Sat Dec 31, 2022 11:15 am

Of course it has nothing to do with this allegation founded from scurrilous rumours and innuendo.

For those who can't/won't watch videos, here's brief synopsis of the content;

:- - "Early on I made the prediction that Southwest Airlines could be the victim of a cyber attack. At first Southwest claimed it was just the weather for the massive number of flight cancellations, but now it claims their old and outdated systems melted down. I am skeptical that a massive meltdown of this scale can happen with out outside interference. But the question remains, how did Southwest get to the point of becoming so vulnerable? One look at its website gives us some clues.

It's filled with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs. Environmental pledges and promises to give back to global communities. Southwest's corporate site reads like a communist manifesto. The founder, Herb Kelleher would be mortified. CLearly Southwest focused more on Woke-ism than it did hiring qualified programmers and IT professionals. It focused less on operations and more on leftist pandering.

This episode we go though Southwest's woke corporate plan to show why it failed them and why it may have allowed cyber hackers to hack an admittedly outdated system."- - :

Go in at 1' 15" and later skip from 12' 45" to 14' 00" to avoid the PITA adverts;

https://rumble.com/v230xi8-the-truth-ab ... broke.html

One can only hope that some major British airlines who have thrown themselves enthusiastically down this road might learn from the SW experience.

But I tried holding my breath and just turned blue and almost fainted... [-X

Aaaah, I am reminded of the halcyon days of Bob Ayling and the tailfins project Utopia scandalous waste of >£60 million of shareholders' dosh. ~X(

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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#7 Post by barkingmad » Sat Dec 31, 2022 12:12 pm

After that depressing item, here's a little something to cheer us all up in these dark 'woke' days;

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/sexy-s ... s-history/

Spot the B&W pics of Southwest when they had more (dress) sense?

Happy New Year! :YMAPPLAUSE:

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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#8 Post by Boac » Sat Dec 31, 2022 1:05 pm

Good 'rumble' find, BM. I have a vague memory from TOP days that Mr Reddo may have been with SW, but it may have been another mod. If so it would be interesting to hear his views.

All one can say about the recent shambles is that they drastically cut their aviation emissions............ =))

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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#9 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Sat Dec 31, 2022 3:00 pm

PP's long post shows quite clearly that SW's C-suite have known for years what the problems were, that the system would fail under increasing load, and what the solutions were.
Their financials show they had ample profits to do it. A year ago they had $6 billion more liquidity than debt. That's more than the annual budget of half the countries in Africa.

In short, they're a bunch of greedy BSers who prioritized their annual bonuses over the business, the customers, and the Law.
Fire all the top management is the obvious answer.
Prosecution by the DoT would help.
Neither will happen, though.

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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#10 Post by PHXPhlyer » Sat Dec 31, 2022 7:30 pm

The way that I understand it, the initial cause was the delays caused by the bomb cyclone. The follow-on was caused by the failure of their crew scheduling software which was incapable of handling the massive number of cancelled and delayed flights.
Once they reached the tipping point with the software there was no way of catching up.
Their only recourse was to cancel down to a manageable number of flights (about one third of system capacity) and work to rebuild the whole schedule.
That seems to be why they were to come back with a full schedule yesterday, less than forty cancellations, with on ramp up.

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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#11 Post by PHXPhlyer » Tue Jan 03, 2023 11:43 pm

Southwest pilots union writes scathing letter to airline executives after holiday travel fiasco
The group decried the airline's leadership as a "cult" and a "good old boys and girls network."

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/busine ... -rcna64121

The Southwest Airlines Pilots Association has published a letter denouncing the airline's leadership as a "cult" that they say has spent the past 15 years destroying the company's legacy, culminating in the 2022 travel meltdown that left thousands of holiday travelers stranded.

The union, which remains locked in heated contract negotiations with Southwest Airlines, published the letter Dec. 31. It was signed by Capt. Tom Nekouei, a union vice president.

Nekouei says systemwide meltdowns at Southwest Airlines have increased in frequency and magnitude over the past 15 years, citing not just the December failures that left Southwest passengers stranded nationwide, but also incidents from years past. Those include a series of “meltdowns” at Chicago Midway International Airport in January 2014, leading to 130 flights there being canceled; a router brownout issue in July 2016 that caused 2,300 flights to be canceled; and an October 2021 air traffic control problem in Jacksonville that led to 29% of Southwest’s flights being delayed or canceled.

Nekouei laid the blame on Southwest chairman and former CEO Gary Kelly. Kelly served as Southwest CEO from 2004 until last February, and replaced Southwest co-founder Herb Kelleher as chairman in 2008.

"Gary Kelly still reigns supreme on the board of this Company despite having overseen the decisions and setting the conditions that made this most recent fiasco possible," Nekouei wrote, adding that the airline's struggles are "not a Southwest Airlines problem. This is not an employees of Southwest Airlines problem. This is not an unprecedented weather problem. This is a Gary Kelly problem."

Nekouei accused Kelly of staffing the company's senior leadership with individuals of similar backgrounds, namely holders of bachelor’s degrees in accounting from the University of Texas.

"A recipe for operational ignorance and collective groupthink," Nekouei wrote. "A monetization of the once vaunted Southwest culture and instead turning it into a headquarters-centric cult. A good old boys and girls network indeed," he wrote.

"While this would temporarily bode well for our shareholders for the last decade, it slowly eroded our Company from within to set the stage for our current and complete meltdown," Nekouei said.

Staffing issues, Southwest's unique plane-routing regime, and outdated technology have all been put forward as reasons why Southwest was forced to cancel two-thirds of its flights over the holiday travel period that included the final days of Hanukkah leading into Christmas Day, and stranding nearly half a million passengers. Nekouei argued that each explanation the airline gave for its problems shared the similar theme of underinvestment and refusal to update its operational resources.

The union, Nekouei wrote, "has been beating this drum to management for nearly a decade pleading with them to spend the necessary capital to prevent the ultimate consequence someday."

"As CEO, Gary Kelly made a conscious decision to make the less than necessary investments in tech upgrades in favor of maximizing shareholder return because, well, 'our tech’s been working OK for 20 years,'" he wrote. "While Gary’s financial acumen cannot be debated, his poor operational leadership and judgment have been demonstrated repeatedly with each meltdown and finally laid bare with the current situation we find ourselves in."

In an emailed statement responding to the union's letter, Southwest said that "it has a more than 51-year history of allowing — and encouraging — its Employees to express their opinions in a respectful manner."

Read the full letter here: https://www.swapa.org/news/2022/two-legacies/.

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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#12 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Wed Jan 04, 2023 12:31 am

None of it matters a whit.
Same with the GFC, Afghanistan, rail and air disasters, anything.
Until management/politicians start going to jail, nothing will change.
And the politicians decide who goes to trial, and the management fund the politicians' campaigns.
And this has been true throughout history.

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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#13 Post by llondel » Wed Jan 04, 2023 2:27 am

Even if he resigned or got fired, he'd just have six months off and get hired as CEO at some other big company. Sort of musical chairs, someone gets fired, they poach from elsewhere to fill the vacancy, someone else moves sideways into that role, and eventually the original perp gets hired and the whole thing stops until the next scandal.

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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#14 Post by PHXPhlyer » Thu Jan 26, 2023 1:26 am

Transportation Department probe will look at whether Southwest overscheduled flights
The meltdown at Southwest Airlines in December led to thousands of canceled flights, stranded passengers, and lost luggage.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tr ... -rcna67556

The U.S. Department of Transportation is in the initial phases of an investigation into Southwest Airlines' travel meltdown, and the agency will look at whether executives overscheduled flights, a spokesperson said.

Southwest canceled thousands of flights, slashing around two-thirds of its daily schedule, for days as it struggled to recover from winter weather even as other airlines did. Passengers were left stranded and scrambling to find other ways to get home.

The Department of Transportation is “probing whether Southwest executives engaged in unrealistic scheduling of flights which under federal law is considered an unfair and deceptive practice,” the agency spokesperson said.

Southwest Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening.

The DOT said it was also ensuring Southwest was providing refunds and reimbursements to passengers.

“DOT will leverage the full extent of its investigative and enforcement power to ensure consumers are protected and this process will continue to evolve as the Department learns more,” the department spokesperson said Wednesday.

The cancellations, which came after the Christmas holiday, infuriated passengers. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called the cancellations unacceptable and said his department would look at its scheduling system.

Southwest canceled an estimated 11,000 flights in the week after Christmas, and the airline has pinned the cost of the fiasco at upward of $800 million.

Southwest has called its own performance unacceptable and apologized. CEO Bob Jordan said earlier this month that the company is budgeted to spend $1 billion on "investments, upgrades, and maintenance of our IT systems."

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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#15 Post by llondel » Sun Jan 29, 2023 5:16 am


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Re: SouthWest Airlines' Holiday Meltdown

#16 Post by PHXPhlyer » Wed Feb 08, 2023 10:15 pm

‘It’s a mess down here.’ Southwest pilots detail the Christmas meltdown chaos

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/08/business ... index.html

Congress is set to receive new evidence Thursday of internal chaos at Southwest Airlines over the Christmas holiday meltdown.

The pilots’ union is prepared to characterize the operation as held together by “duct tape,” while Southwest’s chief operating officer is expected to apologize and say the airline “is intensely focused on reducing the risk of repeating the operational disruption.”

Southwest meltdown may cost the airline up to $825 million
Among the union’s evidence is a message sent during the meltdown to a cockpit computer from the airline’s dispatchers asking what crew is onboard the plane.

“Sched is asking to confirm who is operating this flight,” the message read. “Pls send emp numbers to confirm. It’s a mess down here.”

A photograph of the message, which shows the extent of the airline’s breakdown, is included in testimony the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association union, SWAPA, plans to present at a Senate Commerce committee hearing. (The message and others are seen in all capital letters, standard for this type of cockpit display.)

As planes stood still at the height of the debacle, crewmembers sat stranded, unable to communicate with their dispatchers and schedulers.

“No updates here,” another cockpit computer message to pilots read. “Scheduling is so far behind we were told we aren’t allowed to walk over and talk to them.”

Lawmakers are set to question Southwest executive Andrew Watterson, alongside Southwest pilot union president Casey Murray, Sharon Pinkerton of the Airlines for America trade group, Paul Hudson of Flyers’ Rights, and economist Clifford Winston of The Brookings Institution.

Insiders at Southwest reveal how the airline's service imploded
The massive meltdown began in the wake of a large winter storm at Christmastime, one of the busiest travel windows of the year. But while other airlines managed to recover their schedules, Southwest’s legacy technology and manual scheduling processes could not keep up with the rate of changes.

More than 16,700 flights were canceled and 2 million passengers stranded, scuttling holiday plans and leaving mountains of unclaimed baggage nationwide. Southwest CEO Bob Jordan apologized and the airline offered reimbursements for passengers’ costs, along with bonus points. The Department of Transportation is investigating, including whether the airline scheduled more flights than it could handle.

The pilots’ union is prepared to testify that Watterson and Jordan, who took office just over a year ago, “inherited a massive, complex operation held together by duct tape and baling wire.” Technology failures were predictable and avoidable because the system has failed multiple times “with increasing frequency and magnitude.”

“Since 2011, SWA has averaged one major operational failure every 18 months,” the testimony says. “Warning signs were ignored. Poor performance was condoned. Excuses were made. Processes atrophied. Core values were forgotten.”

The testimony also provides new details about what was happening behind the scenes while the airline’s schedule fell apart.

The union says the airline operated more than 500 empty flights to reposition planes – and it contends the aircraft could have carried passengers. More than 10,000 pilots rode in passenger seats, headed to another assignment in a choreography the union called “inefficient.”

Southwest declined to comment on the union’s allegations ahead of the hearing.

A copy of Watterson’s testimony, obtained by CNN, includes an apology to travelers and employees for the disruption. It shows he is prepared to say the difficulty of recovering from the storm “created an unprecedented amount and frequency of required changes to Crew schedules that overwhelmed our Crew Scheduling processes and technology.”

Southwest says it has been testing a scheduling software update, launched a new team in its command center, improved telephone systems, and is investing in better preparedness for cold weather.

Watterson is set to say the airline “had an opportunity to test some of these newly-implemented mitigation efforts” when the FAA grounded all departures nationwide last month due to its own computer failure.

The union criticized the airline for giving executives stock options in the wake of the meltdown while employees lost profit sharing pay because of the airline’s financial hit due to the meltdown. The airline did agree to give some employee groups hardship pay.

PP

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