Janine Jackson interviewed FlyersRights‘ Paul Hudson about the airline meltdown for the January 6, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

Janine Jackson: You will likely have seen the images, if you weren’t in them yourself: thousands of people stranded in airports, baggage lost, plans foiled. Is this how it has to be? And if not, well, what exactly is in the way?

Paul Hudson is president of FlyersRights, a nonprofit group organizing the consumer rights of airline passengers. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Paul Hudson.

Paul Hudson: Thank you for having me.

JJ: Reasonable folks understand acts of nature, unfair and brutal as they can be, but what were the non-weather-related conditions or circumstances that contributed importantly to the air travel breakdowns that we all saw in late December?

PH: Air travel has been deteriorating for a long time, really, in the last 20 years especially. So we were in a situation, especially coming out of the pandemic, where I would now analogize it to say, we’re in rough air.

We had terrible conditions over the summer with delays. We had awful situations during the pandemic, with flyers not being given refunds when their flights were canceled.

And now, in the most recent situation with Southwest, we have the equivalent of a crash landing. Their software system no doubt broke down, but it’s been in bad shape for many years, and their personnel were simply inadequate to handle the schedule that they have set up.

So there’s a lot of reforms that need to be done, some short-term and some longer-term, and hopefully this will be a wake-up call that allows the system to get back to where it should be, and where it really was in, say, the 1980s, or prior to that.

JJ: It’s not really a reduction, as maybe some folks have seen in media, it’s not a reduction to “finger-pointing,” or to “he said, she said,” to try to trace causes and to call for accountability.

There were systemic issues and problems that employees and their representatives were on the record, right, as pointing to, as being concerned about.

PH: Yes. And these things were ignored. I mean, this is not the first time an airline or Southwest has had computer breakdowns. Delta had some, a number of others had some. The systems are not nearly as robust as they need to be. They need to be failsafe.

If you look at other systems that, like the internet, like the phone system, even like your electrical grid system, if one part of it goes down, it doesn’t crash the system. You have backups, and you get what’s called graceful degradation.

But in the airline business, they have underinvested in a lot of these things. And as a result, we get these brownouts. And the cost of it, the inconvenience of it, is dumped on the public.

JJ: Associated Press offered an explainer, which, right there in the name, it’s supposed to tell folks, you’re not inside this system, you don’t understand the ins and outs of this system, but here’s what you need to know.

And in that explainer, AP said, “What happened?” And their answer was:

Airlines were prohibited from furloughing employees as a condition of receiving $54 billion in federal pandemic aid from taxpayers. But that didn’t stop them from encouraging tens of thousands of workers to quit or take long-term leaves of absence after the pandemic torpedoed travel in 2020.

I’m a little confused by that. I’m sort of getting “no one wants to work,” I’m sort of getting “airlines couldn’t keep people in jobs.” I just—as an explainer of what happened, I’m a little confused by that.

PH: Well, the intention of the PPP programs and some other bailouts of the airlines, which altogether involved about $90 billion, the intention was that you would keep the staff on the payroll so they would be ready when pandemic ended to restore traffic, and they wouldn’t have to go from a cold start.

But the airlines, unfortunately, are only incidentally in the transportation business. They’re primarily, especially their executives, in the business of making money. If that meant reducing their payroll through other means that got around the intention of the law—and there was no real oversight by the federal government on money—that’s what they did.

And they continued to pay, in some cases, dividends. They paid large bonuses to CEOs and top executives. Some of them also did stock buybacks to keep their stock price up while their profits, of course, were dwindling to nothing.

JJ: Let me just take you on maybe a side trip there, because when I looked at airline meltdown, everything, 100% of the stories, were about Southwest. And I wonder if you see any danger in making this conversation, and making conversations about how to come out of it, only about Southwest Airlines per se.

Is there a reason to expand the conversation beyond that, as though they were outliers or rogues?

PH: Definitely there is. The other airlines have all had lesser brownouts and crashes, not only their computer systems, but their lack of personnel coming out of the pandemic.

The reforms that we’ve been promoting pretty much have been ignored by DoT, which is the only regulator of the airline industry. And as a result, things have gotten worse and worse.

For example, you would think there would be some requirement to have a certain level of backup or reserve capacity, for personnel as well as equipment. But there is none. There is no requirement, and some airlines actually have negative reserves. So even on their best day, they cancel 1 or 2 percent of their fights. It’s profitable to do that.

Another example is that there is no requirement that they maintain any level of customer service. Each airline sets their own goals about that, but there’s no enforcement. And they just say, “Well, I’m sorry.” They don’t answer your phones. They don’t have the personnel to do it.

And the area that’s most crucial, which is pilots; we have a shortage of pilots. Pretty much everyone agrees with that, except perhaps the pilot union that wants to leverage the situation says there is no shortage. But the airlines are simply not recruiting the pilots they need, and haven’t done so for years, especially for regional airlines. They don’t pay them nearly enough.

And the proposals that FlyersRights made, going back to June of this year, about 17 of them, have pretty much been ignored by DoT, at least until recently.

JJ: Let me ask you to talk about journalism. When we see structural or infrastructural problems that you’re pointing to of this order, news media coverage can be unfortunately predictable, really, in terms of, just to put it crudely: There’s going to be a wave of disaster, human-interest, “what the heck is happening” stories, and then a smaller wave of, “well, who’s to blame for this” stories. And then later, maybe a ripple of “serious people” analysis. And that often says, “Golly, everybody’s upset, but there’s really nothing to blame here. There’s nothing to point to.”

And then we rinse and repeat, and we act surprised the next time there’s a crisis. I wonder, what did you make—good, bad or indifferent—of media’s reporting on the airline meltdown?

PH: Well, it was somewhat predictable. I think, though, that the fact that air travel affects such a wide proportion of the population, and the media are, frankly, doing a lot of air travel in many cases—personally, it has affected them. So there was a wider coverage than I would have expected.

I was interviewed on CNBC for six-and-a-half minutes. And, as you know, in national television….

JJ: That’s a lot.

PH: You’re lucky to get one or two minutes. That’s huge.

JJ: So that’s very helpful.

We’re coming out of an era where the White House was issuing sort of comic book rules like, well, for every new regulation, you have to eliminate two. And regulation is evil, and that’s the way we’re meant to understand it. The bar is pretty low.

But I don’t know, listeners may remember, this country had moments when we could talk about consumer rights, not maybe as robust and expansive as some of us would want. But it wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t a “snowflake issue” to want companies to make products that were safe and nontoxic, and that had consumers—human beings—in mind.

What do you say about the moment to reinvigorate that consumer perspective?

PH: I hope it’s going to come back to some degree. We issued a Bill of Rights for airline passengers back in 2014 and ’13. And we visited 150 congressional offices over the next two or three years. Now, there’s 535 members of Congress; we could not find one member who would introduce any substantial legislation, even drop a bill in.

And so we’re in a total desert situation now. And if you don’t have a member of Congress that wants to make, not just this, but other consumer issues important, and will not introduce legislation, you’re just not going to get anywhere.

The agencies that are the regulators, they are political at the top. And whether and however they’re controlled by the Democrat or Republican administration, our experience has been, over the last 30 years, that they’re actually controlled by the industry. And the industry pretty much has veto power over any consumer regulation.

JJ: It’s what we call being captured.

Do you have any final thoughts for journalists, many of whom might be starting out new, and think they can cover what they want to cover and let the chips fall where they may? What would you encourage journalists to look at or to ignore or to think about, or any thoughts for media?

PH: I would say if I was a journalist starting out, or even not starting out, experienced, in an issue like air transportation, you have to look at all the different sides, not just go with the propaganda or the sound bites from any interest groups, because every group you speak to comes with their own agenda.

But even so, there are many facts that can be distilled from these things. And it’s not impossible to come up with reasonable policies and come up with a reasonably accurate story in many situations.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Paul Hudson. He’s president of FlyersRights. They’re online at FlyersRights.org. Paul Hudson, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PH: Thank you so much.

 

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