By DAVID KOENIG and ALI SWENSON
Southwest passengers wait to check in at Miami International Airport, Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021, in Miami. Southwest Airlines appears to be fixing problems that caused the cancellation of nearly 2,400 flights over the previous three days. By midday Tuesday, Southwest had canceled fewer than 100 flights, although more than 400 others were running late. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)
DALLAS (AP) — When Southwest Airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights over the weekend, citing bad weather and air traffic control issues, unsupported claims blaming vaccine mandates began taking off.
Conservative politicians and pundits, including Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, alleged the flight disruptions resulted from pilots and air traffic controllers walking off their jobs or calling in sick to protest federal vaccination requirements.
The airline, its pilots’ union and the Federal Aviation Administration denied that.
“The weekend challenges were not a result of Southwest employee demonstrations,” Southwest spokesman Chris Mainz said Monday.
Still, Twitter posts claiming airline employees were “standing up to medical tyranny” and participating in a “mass sickout” amassed thousands of shares. Vague and anonymous messages on social media speculated that Southwest was hiding the real reason for its disruptions. And anti-vaccine rallying cries such as #DoNotComply, #NoVaccineMandate and #HoldTheLine were among the 10 most popular hashtags tweeted in connection to Southwest over the weekend, according to a report from media intelligence firm Zignal Labs.
Even as flights appeared to be running closer to normal on Tuesday, the Texas-based airline remained at the center of the latest front in the vaccine mandate culture war, its challenges exploited by opponents of vaccine requirements.
Neither the company nor its pilots’ union has provided evidence to back up their explanations for why nearly 2,400 flights were canceled from Saturday through Monday. Southwest has only said that bad weather and air traffic control issues in Florida on Friday triggered cascading failures in which planes and pilots were trapped out of position for their next flight.
The crisis peaked on Sunday, when the airline canceled more than 1,100 flights, or 30% of its schedule. By Tuesday evening, it had canceled fewer than 100 flights, or 2% of its schedule, although more than 1,000 flights were delayed, according to tracking service FlightAware.
“When you get behind, it just takes several days to catch up,” CEO Gary Kelly said Tuesday on CNBC. “We were significantly set behind on Friday.”
Southwest struggled all summer with delays and cancellations. A senior executive admitted to employees Sunday that the airline is still understaffed and might need to reduce flights in November and December.
Despite repeated requests, the company and the union have declined to say how many employees missed work during the crisis. They have said that absentee rates were similar to those over a typical summer weekend, but they have not put out numbers to support that argument. It is also unclear how many Southwest pilots are unvaccinated.
“We don’t know, and the company doesn’t know,” said Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association.
Meanwhile, speculation from prominent Conservative politicians and pundits has flooded into the void. Many shared the unsubstantiated theory, but few provided details, facts or examples of employees walking off the job to protest the vaccine.
“Joe Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate at work!” Cruz tweeted Sunday. “Suddenly, we’re short on pilots & air traffic controllers. #ThanksJoe.”
The Republican senator wrote in another tweet Monday that he met last week with leaders of pilot unions who “expressed deep concern over the vaccine mandates.” A spokeswoman for Southwest pilots said no one at the union had talked to Cruz. A spokesperson for Cruz did not respond to emailed questions from The Associated Press about whether the Republican senator had any firsthand knowledge of pilots or air traffic controllers skipping work.
Republican U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin also posted the rumors on social media, without offering proof.
Vague, familiar-looking “friend of a friend” stories are a dangerous form of misinformation because they “feel like insider information being shared by individuals directly involved in the action,” according to Rachel Moran, a misinformation scholar at the University of Washington.
Similar unsupported claims circulated online in August, when social media users falsely claimed that flight delays and cancellations out of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport were the result of vaccine mandates. In September, false internet rumors swirled that 40% of employees at defense contractor General Dynamics had declined the vaccine and threatened to quit.
Some Twitter users connected Southwest’s flight problems to news that on Friday the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association had asked a federal judge in Dallas to block the airline’s vaccine mandate. The union said under federal labor law, Southwest must bargain with the union before making changes affecting working conditions. The judge has not ruled yet.
Asked on Tuesday to respond to claims that vaccine mandates have reduced the workforce and contributed to supply-chain disruptions, White House press secretary Jen Psaki took a jab at Cruz — sarcastically labeling him a “world-renowned business, travel and health expert” — before defending Biden’s policy.
“I know there was a little hubbub over the course of the last few days about Southwest Airlines,” Psaki said. “We now know that some of those claims were absolutely false and actually the issues were completely unrelated to vaccine mandates.”
Biden’s order, which is still being finalized, would require employers with 100 or more workers to get vaccinated or tested weekly for COVID-19. Airlines, however, are government contractors because they perform work such as emergency flights for the Defense Department that carried Afghanistan refugees to the U.S. in August. That makes airlines subject to a tougher standard under the Biden order: mandatory vaccinations with no opt-out for getting tested.
Following the lead of other airlines, Southwest told employees last week that it would require them to be vaccinated by Dec. 8.
While some staff at airlines and other large companies have spoken out against vaccine requirements, comments on social media have created an exaggerated sense of the dissent, according to Moran, the misinformation scholar at the University of Washington.
“In reality, it’s quite a small number of people who are protesting employment-based mandates for the vaccine,” Moran said. “People are more vulnerable to misinformation in times of crisis, and these labor shortages and supply-chain delays either create a real sense of crisis or are manipulated by misinformation spreaders to make it appear like we are heading towards crisis.”
___
Swenson reported from New York. Amanda Seitz in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report. David Koenig can be reached at www.twitter.airlinewriter
Conservatives go wild over imaginary anti-vax Southwest pilots
Igor Derysh, Salon
October 12, 2021
Ted Cruz at CPAC (Screen Grab)
Former President Trump and several right-wing Republican lawmakers claimed over the holiday weekend that hundreds of canceled and delayed Southwest Airlines flights resulted from pilots and other airline employees resisting vaccine mandates. But the airline, the pilots union and the FAA have all said that Southwest's vaccine requirements had nothing to do with this weekend's issues.
Southwest canceled more than 2,000 flights between Saturday and Monday and at least 1,400 other flights were delayed. The airline blamed severe weather, air traffic control staff shortages and a lack of hotel accommodations for employees for creating a cascading series of issues that led to inadequate staffing on more than one-fourth of Southwest's weekend flights. The union representing Southwest pilots blamed the airline's complicated technological system, which reassigns and reroutes pilots during disruptions, for causing a "domino effect" that forced the company to reassign more than 70% of its pilots over the weekend. Southwest saw a similar string of cancellations in June, which the airline later blamed on overly optimistic projections about how quickly it could scale up flights as passengers began to return over the summer.
This weekend's cancellations came just two days after the Southwest pilots' union asked a federal judge to block the company's vaccine mandate. Republican lawmakers, without evidence, quickly seized on an imaginary link, tying the travel chaos to the company's new policy and President Biden's call for a federal vaccine mandate.
"Joe Biden's illegal vaccine mandate at work. Suddenly, we're short on pilots & air traffic controllers," Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, declared on Twitter — while actually linking to a CNBC article that quoted an airline spokeswoman refuting his claim as an "unfounded rumor" and "inaccurate."
Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., claimed that Southwest employees were "standing up for their rights as Americans.
"You will NEVER be able to comply your way out of tyranny," she tweeted.
Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., said he stands with Southwest employees who are "fighting against these mandates."
"This isn't about a vaccine, this is about freedom," he wrote.
"Shut them down," wrote Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas.
Donald Trump also sought to link the issues to vaccine mandates, as well as his endlessly repeated false claims about the 2020 election.
"I think it has a lot to do with a lot of things. I think it has something to do with the election that was rigged," he said in a radio interview this weekend. "I think these are big fans of your favorite president, I think that this has something to do with that. I think it has something to do with the ... I think it has a lot to do with mandates."
Donald Trump Jr., also amplified the baseless claim on Twitter, claiming that employees had gone on "strike" over the mandates.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson amplified these unfounded claims to his primetime audience, saying that the flight cancellations were the "direct consequence" of Biden's vaccine mandate.
But there's no evidence of a strike or sick-out by airline employees. The pilots' union has said that pilots called in sick at a normal rate over the weekend.
Asked how much the company's vaccine mandate contributed to the cancellations, Southwest CEO Gary Kelly told CNBC, "Zero."
Kelly said that the rate of employee absences over the weekend was "very normal."
"Understand how airlines work," he said. "When you get behind, it just takes several days to catch up."
The Southwest Airlines Pilots Association said on Saturday that "our pilots are not participating in any official or unofficial action."
"There are false claims of job actions by Southwest Pilots currently gaining traction on social media and making their way into mainstream news. I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise," union president Casey Murray said in a statement on Sunday, pointing instead to severe weather in the southeast United States, staffing shortages and the company's operating system, which he said has become "subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure."
The union said last week that it does not oppose vaccines but filed a lawsuit to block the mandate because Southwest had not consulted employees before making the decision.
Murray told the Dallas Morning News that pilot sick rates over the weekend "were exactly in line with where they were all summer with the same kind of operational disasters."
Incoming Southwest CEO Bob Jordan last month blamed the company's months-long issues predating the vaccine mandates on staffing shortages stemming from the pandemic, when thousands of employees accepted buyouts, early retirements or long-term leave.
Southwest COO Mike Van de Ven said in a video to employees that despite "a very aggressive hiring plan ... we are still not where we want to be with staffing," especially pilots.
Industry experts blamed the company's "point-to-point route network" for making the airline more susceptible to widespread issues than other airlines. Delays cause cascading issues at each flight's additional stops and the airline had scheduled more flights than it could handle, Henry Harteveldt, president of the Atmosphere Research Group, told NBC News.
"You screw up Florida, you screw up their whole network a whole lot more because it's connected to the rest of their system. Once it gets screwed up, airplanes are out of place, crews are out of place," added Mike Boyd, an aviation consultant at Boyd Group International. "The crew gets stuck in Omaha and ran out of time, they should be in Orlando. Getting that squared away takes time."
Cruz ignored all of the contradictory evidence and statements from the airline, the pilots and the FAA — which also said there is no evidence that "this weekend's cancellations were related to vaccine mandates" — to accuse the media of Democratic propaganda when his baseless claim was widely fact-checked. He then claimed he had not meant Southwest employees but was referring to air traffic controllers in Jacksonville, where local aviation authorities reported staffing issues over the weekend.
But the statement he posted explicitly refuted the "rumor" that it was impacted by an "organized walkout late Friday by controllers in response to the FAA's mandate that all employees get vaccinated." Instead, it blamed staffing issues on "normal approved leave" and controllers who are required to stay at home for 48 hours after getting vaccinated.
"If you believe the pilots unions, MANY MORE FLIGHT CANCELLATIONS ARE COMING (and not just SWA) because of Biden's illegal vaccine mandate," Cruz wrote.
Nearly all major airlines have now required employees to be vaccinated without encountering the same problems as Southwest, where the issues have persisted for more than four years, according to the pilots' union. While Republicans continue to attack Biden for urging vaccine requirements, most voters support such mandates and data shows that compliance rates have been exceptionally high.
United Airlines, the first airline to require vaccines for employees at a time when its overall vaccination rate was below 70% in August, says that all but about 300 of the company's 67,000 employees have been vaccinated or granted exemptions, a rate of more than 99.5%.
"I did not appreciate the intensity of support for a vaccine mandate that existed, because you hear that loud anti-vax voice a lot more than you hear the people that want it," United CEO Scott Kirby told The New York Times. "But there are more of them. And they're just as intense."
Igor Derysh, Salon
October 12, 2021
Ted Cruz at CPAC (Screen Grab)
Former President Trump and several right-wing Republican lawmakers claimed over the holiday weekend that hundreds of canceled and delayed Southwest Airlines flights resulted from pilots and other airline employees resisting vaccine mandates. But the airline, the pilots union and the FAA have all said that Southwest's vaccine requirements had nothing to do with this weekend's issues.
Southwest canceled more than 2,000 flights between Saturday and Monday and at least 1,400 other flights were delayed. The airline blamed severe weather, air traffic control staff shortages and a lack of hotel accommodations for employees for creating a cascading series of issues that led to inadequate staffing on more than one-fourth of Southwest's weekend flights. The union representing Southwest pilots blamed the airline's complicated technological system, which reassigns and reroutes pilots during disruptions, for causing a "domino effect" that forced the company to reassign more than 70% of its pilots over the weekend. Southwest saw a similar string of cancellations in June, which the airline later blamed on overly optimistic projections about how quickly it could scale up flights as passengers began to return over the summer.
This weekend's cancellations came just two days after the Southwest pilots' union asked a federal judge to block the company's vaccine mandate. Republican lawmakers, without evidence, quickly seized on an imaginary link, tying the travel chaos to the company's new policy and President Biden's call for a federal vaccine mandate.
"Joe Biden's illegal vaccine mandate at work. Suddenly, we're short on pilots & air traffic controllers," Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, declared on Twitter — while actually linking to a CNBC article that quoted an airline spokeswoman refuting his claim as an "unfounded rumor" and "inaccurate."
Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., claimed that Southwest employees were "standing up for their rights as Americans.
"You will NEVER be able to comply your way out of tyranny," she tweeted.
Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., said he stands with Southwest employees who are "fighting against these mandates."
"This isn't about a vaccine, this is about freedom," he wrote.
"Shut them down," wrote Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas.
Donald Trump also sought to link the issues to vaccine mandates, as well as his endlessly repeated false claims about the 2020 election.
"I think it has a lot to do with a lot of things. I think it has something to do with the election that was rigged," he said in a radio interview this weekend. "I think these are big fans of your favorite president, I think that this has something to do with that. I think it has something to do with the ... I think it has a lot to do with mandates."
Donald Trump Jr., also amplified the baseless claim on Twitter, claiming that employees had gone on "strike" over the mandates.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson amplified these unfounded claims to his primetime audience, saying that the flight cancellations were the "direct consequence" of Biden's vaccine mandate.
But there's no evidence of a strike or sick-out by airline employees. The pilots' union has said that pilots called in sick at a normal rate over the weekend.
Asked how much the company's vaccine mandate contributed to the cancellations, Southwest CEO Gary Kelly told CNBC, "Zero."
Kelly said that the rate of employee absences over the weekend was "very normal."
"Understand how airlines work," he said. "When you get behind, it just takes several days to catch up."
The Southwest Airlines Pilots Association said on Saturday that "our pilots are not participating in any official or unofficial action."
"There are false claims of job actions by Southwest Pilots currently gaining traction on social media and making their way into mainstream news. I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise," union president Casey Murray said in a statement on Sunday, pointing instead to severe weather in the southeast United States, staffing shortages and the company's operating system, which he said has become "subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure."
The union said last week that it does not oppose vaccines but filed a lawsuit to block the mandate because Southwest had not consulted employees before making the decision.
Murray told the Dallas Morning News that pilot sick rates over the weekend "were exactly in line with where they were all summer with the same kind of operational disasters."
Incoming Southwest CEO Bob Jordan last month blamed the company's months-long issues predating the vaccine mandates on staffing shortages stemming from the pandemic, when thousands of employees accepted buyouts, early retirements or long-term leave.
Southwest COO Mike Van de Ven said in a video to employees that despite "a very aggressive hiring plan ... we are still not where we want to be with staffing," especially pilots.
Industry experts blamed the company's "point-to-point route network" for making the airline more susceptible to widespread issues than other airlines. Delays cause cascading issues at each flight's additional stops and the airline had scheduled more flights than it could handle, Henry Harteveldt, president of the Atmosphere Research Group, told NBC News.
"You screw up Florida, you screw up their whole network a whole lot more because it's connected to the rest of their system. Once it gets screwed up, airplanes are out of place, crews are out of place," added Mike Boyd, an aviation consultant at Boyd Group International. "The crew gets stuck in Omaha and ran out of time, they should be in Orlando. Getting that squared away takes time."
Cruz ignored all of the contradictory evidence and statements from the airline, the pilots and the FAA — which also said there is no evidence that "this weekend's cancellations were related to vaccine mandates" — to accuse the media of Democratic propaganda when his baseless claim was widely fact-checked. He then claimed he had not meant Southwest employees but was referring to air traffic controllers in Jacksonville, where local aviation authorities reported staffing issues over the weekend.
But the statement he posted explicitly refuted the "rumor" that it was impacted by an "organized walkout late Friday by controllers in response to the FAA's mandate that all employees get vaccinated." Instead, it blamed staffing issues on "normal approved leave" and controllers who are required to stay at home for 48 hours after getting vaccinated.
"If you believe the pilots unions, MANY MORE FLIGHT CANCELLATIONS ARE COMING (and not just SWA) because of Biden's illegal vaccine mandate," Cruz wrote.
Nearly all major airlines have now required employees to be vaccinated without encountering the same problems as Southwest, where the issues have persisted for more than four years, according to the pilots' union. While Republicans continue to attack Biden for urging vaccine requirements, most voters support such mandates and data shows that compliance rates have been exceptionally high.
United Airlines, the first airline to require vaccines for employees at a time when its overall vaccination rate was below 70% in August, says that all but about 300 of the company's 67,000 employees have been vaccinated or granted exemptions, a rate of more than 99.5%.
"I did not appreciate the intensity of support for a vaccine mandate that existed, because you hear that loud anti-vax voice a lot more than you hear the people that want it," United CEO Scott Kirby told The New York Times. "But there are more of them. And they're just as intense."
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