Courts

Grab Your Popcorn, The Class Action Suits Against Southwest Have Begun

Southwest's bottom line is about to get a mile-high clubbing.

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465547I used to think that the worst part of flying was waiting around at that luggage carousel after you land. No one is there is there because they want to be, it’s because they have to be. You either take pride in having the foresight to differentiate your luggage from everyone else’s or kick yourself in the shins for not making your blue-jeans ass suitcase any different from everyone else’s standard issue. But after learning that Southwest’s fuck-up made thousands of people miss holiday time with their family, I now know that there are worse flight outcomes than waiting for luggage. We will surely hear a bunch of them after these class action suits get underway. Told you they were coming. From Corporate Counsel:

Southwest Airlines is facing the first of what likely will become a deluge of class action lawsuits stemming from operational problems that forced it to cancel more than 15,000 flights late last month.

After winter storms grounded many Southwest planes in places such as Chicago and Denver, the airline’s outdated scheduling software struggled to match crews with planes, leaving thousands of passengers traveling around Christmas without a plane to board.

It is easy to read this and think, “Oh no, if only they had the resources or opportunity to fix those outdated scheduling mechanisms.” Quick and friendly reminder — they did. They were given billions of dollars from the government to maintain and fix their infrastructure prior to this happening.

The first case was field by Eric Capdeville, of Marrero, Louisiana, who in October bought tickets for himself and daughter to travel to Portland, Oregon, on Dec. 27. After canceling the flight, Southwest offered him a credit on a future flight. In the lawsuit, filed Dec. 30 in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, Capdeville alleges the airline’s contract of carriage doesn’t proscribe credits but rather a seat on the next available flight or a full refund.

I get the feeling that Capdeville’s argument will be pretty persuasive — the DOJ is forwarding similar claims as well. And that’s before you even factor in that the complaints from the inside only make Capdeville’s case even more compelling:

The Transport Workers Union of America Local 556, which represents 18,000 of Southwest’s flight attendants, has complained that the airline’s holiday flight disruptions were “the result of years of refusal to modernize operations.”

Yeah… this is going to be a mess. And I am so thankful. I’m going to need some entertainment as I wait for new episodes of Komi Can’t Communicate and Bleach to come out. While it is hard to match their level of entertainment, a multibillion-dollar company with billions of subsidies and profit margins in the hundreds of millions scrambling to prove that they shouldn’t be made to pay every nickel and dime they’re legally obligated to comes pretty close.

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Southwest Airlines Hit With First Class Action Suit Over Holiday Meltdown [Corporate Counsel]

Earlier: Being Grounded Doesn’t Always Stop The Turbulence

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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