This didn't come out of nowhere. Southwest's growth strategy has seen the airlines add more planes and routes without a comparable investment in back-end systems, including crew scheduling systems. SWA's unions have spent years warning the public that their employer's IT Infrastructure was one crisis away from total collapse.
While these firms were allowed to privatize their gains, Uncle Sucker paid for their losses. Trump handed the airlines $54 billion in Covid relief, which the airlines squandered on stock buybacks and executive bonuses, while gutting their own employee rosters with early retirement buyouts:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-04/airlines-got-the-sweetest-coronavirus-bailout-around
Incredibly, the airlines got even worse under the Biden administration. In the first six months of 2022, US airlines cancelled more flights than they had in all of 2021, while the airlines increased their profits by 45% – and kept it, rather than using it to pay back the $10b in unpaid refunds they owed to fliers:
https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/economic-liberties-releases-model-legislation-to-eliminate-airlines-liability-shield/
Dozens of state attorneys general – Republicans and Democrats – wrote to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, begging him to take action on the airlines. After months without action, they wrote again, just days before the Christmas meltdown:
https://www.levernews.com/state-officials-warned-buttigieg-about-airline-mess/
For his part, Secretary Buttigieg claimed he was doing all he could, trumpeting the order to refund fliers as evidence of his muscular regulatory approach (recall that these refunds have not been paid). He assured Americans that the situation "is going to get better by the holidays."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FlD6fHq8-g&t=145s
But the numbers tell the tale. Under Buttigieg, the DOT "issued fewer enforcement orders in 2021 than in any single year of the Trump and Obama administrations." (...)
Buttigieg's defenders trotted out a laundry list of excuses for the failure, ranging from the nonsensical to the implausible to the contradictory – Pete's Army continued to claim that the aviation meltdown was the weather's fault, even after Buttigieg himself went on national TV to say this wasn't the case:
https://twitter.com/GMA/status/1608075800254767105?s=20&t=wmaJq3OWU0r0e6TS9V-9sA
Buttigieg is the Secretary of a powerful administrative agency, and as such, he has broad powers. Neither he nor his predecessors have had the courage to wield that power, all of them evincing a kind of learned helplessness in the face of industry lobbying. But there is a difference between being powerless and acting powerless. (...)
The are a lot more recent examples of the DOT using this power than there are of the FTC using its Section 5 authority, like the Tarmac Delay Rule. But as Robert Kuttner writes, the airlines reneged on their end of the $54b bailout, slashing staffing levels and failing to invest in IT modernization – examples of the "unfair and deceptive" practices that the DOT could intervene to prevent:
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/ftc-noncompete-airline-flight-cancellation-buttigieg/
As Dayen writes, "The definition of 'deceptive' is 'likely to mislead a consumer, acting reasonably under the circumstances.' If the airline scheduled a flight, took money for the flight, and knew it would have to cancel it (or, if you prefer, knew it would have to cancel some flights, all of which it took money for), that seems plainly deceptive."
This is the same authority that Buttigieg used to fine 5 non-US airlines (and Frontier, the tiny US carrier that flies 2% of domestic routes) for cancelling their flights – his signature achievement to date. But as Dayen points out, this authority isn't limited to taking action after the fact.
The DOT can – and should – act before Americans' flights are canceled. It can use its authority under 41712(a) to "say that the cancellation itself is an unfair and deceptive practice and issue a fine for each canceled flight." It could "promulgate a rule saying that cancellations due to insufficient crews, or due to dysfunctional computer scheduling systems, are unfair and deceptive, with stiff fines for each violation."
by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic | Read more:
Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)
