U.S. Sues Southwest Airlines for ‘Chronic Flight Delays’
Skift Take
Key Points
- The U.S. Department of Transportation is suing Southwest Airlines for operating flights with chronic delays, impacting passengers.
- The DOT fined Frontier Airlines and has previously fined JetBlue as part of a broader initiative to enforce consumer protection in the airline industry.
- Southwest Airlines contests the lawsuit, arguing that the allegations are based on a limited number of incidents and do not reflect their overall performance.
Summary
The U.S. Department of Transportation has sued Southwest Airlines for operating chronically delayed flights, as part of a broader effort to enforce consumer protection regulations in the airline industry. The DOT also fined Frontier Airlines and previously fined JetBlue for similar issues. Southwest disputes the lawsuit, citing its overall performance and questioning the focus on isolated incidents.
The Department of Transportation announced Wednesday that it is suing Southwest Airlines for “illegally operating multiple chronically delayed flights and disrupting passengers’ travel.”
“As part of our commitment to supporting passenger rights and fairness in the market for airline travel, we are suing Southwest Airlines for disrupting passengers’ travel with unlawful chronic flight delays,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a statement.
The DOT also fined Frontier Airlines $650,000 for chronically delayed flights.
The lawsuit and fines are a part of the DOT’s latest approach to consumer regulations. Recently, the department fined JetBlue $2 million for persistent flight delays. Buttigieg told Skift that the department decided to increase its fines on consumer protection violations in order to change airlines’ behavior.
“We saw enforcement patterns where a billion-dollar abuse would be met with something on the order of a million-dollar fine, which is just not enough to change behavior,” Buttigieg said. “So we knew the enforcement practice needed to change, which is why we, in some cases, added a zero or two.”
The DOT found that Southwest operated two flights in August 2022 with persistent delays: one between Chicago Midway and Oakland, and another between Baltimore and Cleveland. Southwest was responsible for more than 90% of the disruptions on these two flights, the DOT said.
Southwest said it was “disappointed” by the lawsuit.
“Southwest is disappointed that DOT chose to file a lawsuit over two flights that occurred more than two years ago,” Southwest said in a statement. “Any claim that these two flights represent an unrealistic schedule is simply not credible when compared with our performance over the past 15 years. In 2024, Southwest led the industry by completing more than 99% of its flights without cancellation.”
It’s unclear if the Trump administration will move forward with the lawsuit or adopt the same approach to fines. At his confirmation hearing, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told the Senate Commerce Committee that he supported “the notion of rulemaking not to undermine safety or consumer priorities.”
Southwest also received a $140 million fine for its 2022 holiday meltdown, the largest fine an airline has received for mass disruptions.
Photo Credit: A Southwest Airlines aircraft on a snowy runway. Southwest Airlines Southwest Airlines / Southwest Airlines
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