- Senator Ted Cruz took to Twitter to blame President Joe Biden for mass cancellations of flights over weekend
- Southwest Airlines cancelled more than 1,000 flights Sunday, and 808 Saturday, leaving passengers stranded
- The Dallas-based airline said air traffic control staff shortages and poor weather lead to the nixed flights
- President of Southwest Airlines Pilots Association said delays were due to staffing and a ‘poorly run operation’
- Cancellations came two days after the firm’s pilots’ union asked a court to block a COVID vaccine mandate, sparking rumors that a pilot walk-out had been to blame for the cancellations
- Rumors have swirled on social and traditional media that pilots may have walked out over the mandate
- On Sunday, Jacksonville Aviation Authority COO Tony Cugno refuted the rumor in a letter, saying that the delays were in fact due to staffing issues at the Jacksonville International Airport
- He claimed that many controllers had been getting their first or second COVID-19 vaccinations, which required them to take two days off to recover – leaving JAX air control short staffed
By Charlotte Mitchell and Michelle Thompson | 10 October 2021
DAILY MAIL — Senator Ted Cruz has blamed what he called an ‘illegal vaccine mandate’ for mass flight cancellations by Southwest Airlines, which left thousands of passengers stranded over the weekend.
Cruz took to Twitter on Sunday to share an article on the nearly 2,000 cancellations by the airline, writing: ‘Joe Biden’s illegal mask mandate at work!
‘Suddenly, we’re short on pilots & air traffic controllers.’
Cruz’s comments came amid speculation regarding the cause of the mass cancellations, with a pilot’s union blaming a ‘poorly run operation’ while the airline pointed to bad weather and staff being off after getting vaccinated.
The cancellations came two days after the firm’s pilots’ union asked a court to block a COVID vaccine mandate, sparking rumors that a pilot walk-out had been to blame for the cancellations.
Rumors have swirled on social and traditional media that pilots may have walked out over the mandate.
The Dallas-based carrier cancelled more than 1,000 flights on Sunday and 808 on Saturday – equivalent to 27 per cent of its entire schedule for the day – over the holiday weekend.
By comparison, on Sunday, American Airlines cancelled two per cent of its flights while Spirit Airlines axed two per cent of theirs, according to FlightAware.
The president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association told News4Jax that the delays were due to staffing and a ‘poorly run operation.’
Meanwhile, Southwest blamed a combination of inclement weather and staffing shortages at Jacksonville Air Traffic Control Center in Florida for the disruption. […]
I have the eery feeling that we are seeing Atlas Shrugged play out before our eyes, in real-time.
The real Devolution – individuals simply walking away, absenting themselves from an increasingly dysfunctional civilisation, propelling it towards its inevitable end.
Politicians, media, technocrats, religions – any collective institution – all left in utter confusion and a complete inability to understand or explain what is going on, because it is all taking place at the level of unaggregated individuals, taking responsibility for their own survival and abandoning the roles they’ve filled.
Supply-chain havoc, shortages, institutional failures – travel, food, energy, lawlessness – if these things become more prevalent, and the reactions to them become more panicked and less effective, then we will know that Atlas has indeed Shrugged.
I do not agree with Randian Objectivism as a philosophy (although I’m hardly qualified to argue the point), nor is it a matter of approval. I simply think it may be the best description of what is happening right now. To mix metaphors outrageously, we may be finding out that our entire civilisation has been built on a house of sand, and the chickens have finally come home to roost.
Very valid theory, and John Galts may be transpiring at some level, perhaps with police, pilots, doctor, nurses, baby boomers, and military with 20 years under their belts or enough accumulated wealth from the bubbles to check out. But the plebs down the food chain are still in a world of hurt. I definitely believe the woke companies will fail in the next phase.