A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 departs Los Angeles International Airport en route to Las Vegas on September 19, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.
Kevin Carter | Getty Images
The Department of Transportation on Wednesday sued Southwest Airlines, alleging the carrier operated chronically delayed flights, and fined Frontier Airlines for late-arriving flights.
The lawsuit follows a $2 million DOT fine on JetBlue Airways for similar allegations.
The lawsuit and fines come at the end of the Biden administration, which has taken a harder line toward consumer protections than previous administrations.
The DOT said that Southwest’s flights from Chicago Midway International Airport to Oakland, California, and from Baltimore to Cleveland arrived late nearly 200 times between April and August 2022.
The DOT said each flight was chronically delayed for five consecutive months and that Southwest was responsible for more than 90% of the disruptions.
It defines a flight as chronically delayed if it is flown at least 10 times a month and arrives more than 30 minutes late more than half the time. The calculation includes cancellations and diversions.
“When an airline knows that a particular flight is consistently late, it is essential that the airline adjusts its schedule,” the DOT said in its lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Oakland, California. “But on many occasions, Southwest has chosen not to make such adjustments, and instead has continued to market its flights using unrealistic schedules. By doing so, Southwest has caused significant harm to its customers.”
In response, Southwest said it “is disappointed that DOT chose to file a lawsuit over two flights that occurred more than two years ago.”
The carrier said that since the DOT issued its chronically delayed flight policy in 2009, the airline operated more than 20 million flights with no violations of the policy. “Any claim that these two flights represent an unrealistic schedule is simply not credible when compared with our performance over the past 15 years,” Southwest said in a statement.
Separately, the DOT fined budget carrier Frontier $650,000 for operating chronically delayed flights, though it added that $325,000 would be suspended if the airline doesn’t operate any repeatedly delayed flights over the next three years. Frontier declined to comment.
