Americans are furious with Southwest Airlines, and
understandably so. Severe weather always disrupts air travel, but Southwest was
the only major airline to suffer a near-complete collapse of service in the
wake of the recent megastorm, stranding thousands of passengers. As of
Thursday, as other carriers were more or less back to normal, Southwest was
still operating fewer than half its scheduled flights.
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How did this happen? To be honest, I would love to write a
scathing, muckraking column about the destructive effects of corporate greed.
But that does not seem to be the main story here.
To be clear, greed surely played some role in the disaster. Most
obviously, Southwest has not spent the money needed to upgrade a scheduling
system many people inside the airline knew was inadequate. Instead, before the
pandemic, it spent billions on stock buybacks.
Let me also add that nothing I say here should be taken as an
argument against demanding that Southwest compensate the travelers it failed,
not just as a matter of fairness but to create the right incentives. If we want
companies that serve the public to spend money to reduce the risks of
catastrophic failure, we need to ensure that they pay a high price when they
let their customers down.
Yet righteous anger should not stop us from trying to understand
why, exactly, things went so wrong.
The roots of Southwest’s unique meltdown go back all the way to
1978, when the airline industry was deregulated. Until then, interstate
carriers were basically forced to offer direct, “point-to-point” service
between cities. After deregulation, most major airlines shifted to
“hub-and-spoke” systems, which had many passengers changing planes at major
centers such as Chicago’s O’Hare or Atlanta.
Hub-and-spoke has some clear advantages over point-to-point. It
lets airlines service the same number of cities with fewer routes; connecting
10 cities point-to-point requires 45 routes, but sending everyone via a central
hub requires only nine. The system also creates some inherent flexibility
because planes and flight crews based at hubs can be reallocated to compensate
for, say, equipment breakdowns.
The roots of Southwest’s unique meltdown go back all the way to 1978, when the airline industry was deregulated. Until then, interstate carriers were basically forced to offer direct, “point-to-point” service between cities.
But a hub-and-spoke system has disadvantages, too. It can force
passengers to accept long layovers or, alternatively, miss tight connections if
anything goes wrong. (Dear American Airlines: No, I did not appreciate my
recent involuntary night in Miami.) Hub-and-spoke has also enhanced airlines’
monopoly power, with each big carrier dominating markets served by its hubs.
In response to these disadvantages, on the eve of the pandemic,
some airlines were moving partly back to point-to-point. Southwest, however,
had never left that system. Alone among major carriers, it mostly flew people
straight from origin to destination, without the need to change planes along
the way.
Partly as a result, Southwest had relatively low costs, some of
which were passed on in the form of cheaper fares. Patrons generally liked its
service: In 2022, Southwest’s economy class (it doesn’t offer business class)
led J.D. Power’s rankings for customer satisfaction.
But point-to-point turns out to be especially vulnerable to
extreme disruptions. Snow and bitter cold evidently left most of Southwest’s
planes and personnel stranded in scattered locations, unable to resume normal
service even when the weather let up. Again, as I write this, the airline is
still trying to put the pieces back together.
Antiquated technology that left Southwest unable even to find
many of its crew members, plus the absence of agreements that would have made
it possible to rebook passengers on other airlines, made it worse. But these
were only exacerbating factors. Basically, a system that has some real
advantages in normal times fell apart when it encountered, well, a perfect
storm.
Are there any broader lessons from this disaster?
Some analysts have suggested that Southwest’s debacle reflected
a widespread managerial culture that encourages “cheeseparing” — increasing
profits by slicing off costs until there is no margin for error. For example, a
relentless focus on holding down expenses was at the root of worker anger that
almost shut down America’s freight railways not long ago.
I am sympathetic to that view. We would probably all be better
off if corporations were less focused on their short-term bottom lines and more
willing to invest in resilience. And public policy should do what it can to
promote such investment.
Beyond that, what happened at Southwest is another reminder that,
for all the talk of an information age, we’re still living in a material world.
Notably, there is a clear family resemblance between the Southwest meltdown and
the supply chain crisis of 2021–22, when a constellation of unusual events left
many of the shipping containers central to modern commerce stranded in the
wrong places.
If you are an affluent American, it can sometimes seem as if you
are already living in the metaverse: Click on your mouse, and whatever you need
arrives at your door. But there is a lot of physical action and real-world
labor going on behind the scenes. And we forget that reality at our peril.
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