Michael Hiltzik: Southwest's meltdown was born in America's cheapskate corporate culture

Through much of 2022, the most often-asked questions about Southwest Airlines concerned issues such as whether it would allow preassigned seating, start charging for all checked baggage and institute change fees — scrapping all those policies that have made the airline unique.

Today, the question on Southwest passengers' minds is: Will its planes get in the air at all?

Southwest's yuletide meltdown has been so widely publicized that it doesn't require a lengthy recap. Suffice to say that Wednesday, as I write, its 2,508 flight cancellations account for 90% of all domestic flight cancellations in the U.S. (The statistics are from flightaware.com.)

On Tuesday, Southwest accounted for about 84% of the more than 3,200 domestic flight cancellations.

That trend implies that as the country's other air carriers have begun to work out their own traffic snarls resulting from the massive