Buttigieg Ignored Warning Signs That Caused The Southwest Holiday DISASTER

Thousands of Southwest Airlines flights were cancelled in the last week, stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers across the country. And the only thing Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg did was send an angry letter to the airline. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Thousands of Southwest Airlines flights were canceled in the last week, stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers across the country. And the only thing our transportation secretary did was send an angry letter to the airline. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins joins me to talk about what's happened. He needs a hell of a lot more than an angry letter to the airline, doesn't he? You know what bothers me about this is the week before all this catastrophe started, he's on the air saying, you know, DOT, we have it under control. Travel, there's not gonna be any impediments this year. Everything's good. But what we've learned now is time and time again, mayor Pete was told, take a look at the airlines, they're getting ready to crumble where it comes to heavy traffic. Go ahead.

You know, this is a really interesting story here, because at, at first I talked about this last week and I said, listen, this guy's not to blame. Obviously, you know, as the transportation secretary, he oversees it, but he didn't do this. But when you look into this and you look at what Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders did all the way back, in I think April, they told him, listen, we've got major problems with these airlines. We've gotta do something about it. But then 4th of July weekend comes and goes. Thousands of people stranded just like over the holiday. Nothing happens. Thanksgiving, same thing happened. A month later, Christmas and New Year's holiday, same thing happened. So Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna warned about it for almost a year, telling him, you have to do it and laying out what he needed to do.

Farron, they gave him the details.

Yes.

Okay. Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders said, here, you don't seem to understand what the hell you're doing in Department of Transportation. So let us help you. So they said, the problem you got with these airlines is they've taken all of this money from the government, remember during the covid issue, billions of dollars. And that, rather than putting it into their infrastructure, rather than taking their computer system that was way, way outdated, especially Southwest Airlines, way outdated. Rather than making improvements, they paid themselves bonuses. They paid themselves dividends. They bought back their own stock. And so this guy knew. They're, look, Democrats who wanna support Mayor Pete as if he's really, really a presidential hopeful, come on. I mean, this, this guy has no chance in a president, presidential run. But the, the guys people that wanna support him say, look, he didn't know. If I hear he didn't know one more time, I will scream. He clearly knew the details of it, the infrastructure failure, the software failure. They didn't even buy new software. Every, all the other airlines were buying new software because they said, we're worried about this. He's told specifically this airline didn't do something about it.

Well, and you also have the, the airline unions, the, the pilots groups, the flight attendants groups that have been warning Southwest itself for years, saying, your system is so outdated, you can't even keep track of us. You don't know where we are.

Mm-hmm.

when you need us.

Mm-hmm.

And they warned him again, this is gonna cause problems. It's gonna cause delays. You don't have a proper system to reach out to us and get us in there. You don't even have a system like the other airlines do in place for when this flight is canceled, how to reroute it. You've done no planning at all for your airline.

Yeah. It's, it's even worse than that. It, when you take it down to the, to the, the very basics.