(KERO) — Demands are growing for accountability for the Southwest Airlines meltdown. Experts say it could take another week before the airline gets back on schedule.
Passengers have been stranded for days in airports. Many of them have been separated from their luggage, which is piling up across the country. More than 2,300 Southwest flights are already canceled today, marking the fourth straight day the airline has canceled more than 50 percent of its scheduled flights.
In all, more than 13,000 Southwest flights in the past week have been canceled. As a result, United Airlines and American Airlines say they have put caps on fares in big cities where they compete with Southwest to help people get home.
Some passengers, like Brenden Chavez, are not waiting for a new flight. Instead, he is renting a car to drive his family 25 hours from Kansas City to California.
"We'll probably end up wringing each other's necks by the end of it, potentially," said Chavez. "We'll see how it goes, I guess."
Southwest's Chief Executive has apologized to customers. The airline says it will work on a case-by-case basis to refund passengers for "reasonable" travel expenses as the federal investigation now gains momentum.
So what is to blame for all this? A Southwest flight attendant says this all stems from an outdated IT system. The airline staffer, who wished to remain anonymous, is based in California and has worked for Southwest Airlines for more than 20 years.
The flight attendant says an outdated scheduling system went haywire over the holiday weekend. Staff use the system to log in and see their flights, hotels, and transportation to and from the airport. However, that was gone and it is part of a bigger issue.
"If there was a change if your flight was canceled, a lot of it was not updating," said the flight attendant. "It was not on your schedule. It was not keeping up with real-time."
The airline staffer says many flight attendants and pilots slept at the airport or paid for a hotel themselves, leaving some flights without flight attendants or even a pilot. It is an issue that could take time to fix.
Meanwhile, experts say the airline's point-to-point operating system makes it vulnerable to major disruptions compared to other carriers routing flights through key hubs.
