A lawsuit against Southwest Airlines and a fine against Frontier Airlines are more steps that the Transportation Department is taking to punish airlines that keep causing flight delays.
The agency said that the lawsuit it filed in California’s U.S. District Court on Wednesday says that Southwest illegally ran flights that were always late and messed up people’s travel plans. It says it wants “maximum civil penalties.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement, “Airlines have a legal obligation to make sure that their flight schedules give travelers accurate times for when flights leave and arrive.” “Today’s action tells all airlines that the department is ready to go to court to protect passengers,”
The Transportation Department said that its review showed that Southwest, based in Dallas, ran two flights that were always late: one between Chicago Midway International Airport and Oakland, California, and the other between Baltimore, Maryland, and Cleveland, Ohio.
The office said that between April and August 2022, 180 flights were canceled because of the constant delays on both flights. This happened for five months in a row.
Southwest complained in a statement that the agency was too focused on flights from more than two years ago and not enough on its long-term record.
Southwest has had more than 20 million flights since the DOT’s Chronically Delayed Flight (CDF) policy was made public in 2009. There have been no other CDF violations. “Comparing these two flights to how well we’ve done over the past 15 years makes any claim that they are part of an unrealistic schedule laughable,” the company said. “Southwest was the best at what it did in 2024; more than 99% of its flights went off without a hitch.”
Frontier Airlines was fined $650,000 by the department. Of that amount, $325,000 had to be sent to the U.S. Treasury, and the other $325,000 had to be put on hold if the company didn’t have any planes that were consistently late for the next three years. Frontier, which is based in Denver, wouldn’t say anything.
The news comes less than two weeks after the Transportation Department fined JetBlue $2 million for frequent delays. This was the first time the agency punished airlines for being late on certain routes. The agency said that JetBlue’s frequent delays were due to “unrealistic scheduling.” JetBlue then said that planes being late were partly the fault of the government, which runs the air traffic control system.
An aviation data company called Cirium said this month in a study that Southwest was the fifth most on-time of the 10 North American airlines it looked at. Last year, 77.8% of arrivals and just under 77% of departures happened on time. Delta Air Lines, on the other hand, got 83.5% for landings and 83.7% for departures.
After a run of problems last year, including flying at very low altitudes while still miles away from an airport, federal regulators paid more attention to Southwest Airlines. In July, the government Aviation Administration said it wanted to make sure the carrier was following government safety rules. The FAA wouldn’t give any specifics, but it did say that it is always changing how it watches over planes based on risk.
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