DOT Files Lawsuit Against Southwest Airlines for Chronic Flight Delays

The lawsuit was filed jointly with the Department of Justice in the U.S. Northern District of California.

In its investigation, the DOT said it found that in 2022, a flight from Chicago to Oakland, California, arrived late “on 19 of 25 trips by an average of over an hour.”

However, Southwest made no adjustments and instead chose to promote the flight “with an unrealistic schedule,” it said. The flight continued to be delayed, “arriving late 16 out of 27 trips by an average delay of 80 minutes,” it said.

Over the next three months, the flight was more than an hour late more than half the time, the DOT alleged in the lawsuit.

Other flights, such as one from Baltimore to Cleveland, exhibited similar late patterns.

“This flight was late more than half the time for at least five consecutive months, with average monthly delays as high as 96 minutes,” the DOT alleged.

The delayed flights resulted in 180 flight disruptions between April and August 2022.

“Federal regulations prohibit airlines from promising flight schedules that do not reflect actual departure and arrival times,” the DOT said. “Unrealistic scheduling is considered an unfair, deceptive, and anticompetitive practice that disrupts passengers’ travel plans, denies them reliable scheduling information, and allows airlines to unfairly capture business from competitors by misleading consumers.”

A Southwest spokesperson told The Epoch Times that the company is disappointed that the DOT chose to file a lawsuit about two flights that occurred more than two years ago and noted that in 2024, the airline “led the industry by completing more than 99 percent of its flights without cancellation.”

“Since the DOT issued its Chronically Delayed Flight (CDF) policy in 2009, Southwest has operated more than 20 million flights with no other CDF violations,” the spokesperson said. “Any claim that these two flights represent an unrealistic schedule is simply not credible when compared with our performance over the past 15 years.”

The DOT also fined Frontier Airlines $650,000 in civil penalties for chronically delayed flights.

A Frontier Airlines spokesperson told The Epoch Times that the company is not commenting on the fine.

In a statement to The Epoch Times, the airline company defended itself by stating that it works “very hard“ to operate its flights ”as scheduled.”

It said it had invested “tens of millions of dollars” to minimize flight delays that were related to “ongoing air traffic control (ATC) challenges in the Northeast and Florida.”

“Through these efforts, we have seen significant operation improvements in 2024 including better on-time performance during this year’s peak summer travel season,” JetBlue said.

The company said responsibility for flight delays lies equally with the federal government, which operates the country’s ATC system.

“The U.S. should have the safest, most efficient, and advanced air traffic control system in the world, and we urge the incoming administration to prioritize modernizing outdated ATC technology and addressing chronic air traffic controller staffing shortages to reduce ATC delays that affect millions of air travelers each year,” it said.

Austin Alonzo contributed to this report.