Bad weather across the country in the days before Christmas forced airlines to cancel thousands of flights. But as conditions improved, Southwest struggled to return to normal operations.
Eventually, the airline canceled thousands more flights to reset its network, stranding customers and forcing them to make other plans. All told, the airline canceled 16,700 flights, more than a third of its schedule, from Dec. 21 through Dec. 31.
The airline’s unions blamed a failure by management to update crew scheduling systems and software. Southwest said that it spent about $1 billion annually on technology and that its systems had functioned as designed but had been overwhelmed by the number of last-minute changes that had to be made quickly because crews were far from where they needed to be.
“You’re trying to solve these problems. And as you’re solving them, you have more problems,” Mr. Jordan told The New York Times this month. “More cancels, more problems; more cancels, more problems. We just couldn’t keep up with the volume — volume we’d never seen before.”
While the airline said its technology had worked as intended, it acknowledged that its automated software could not help reassign crews from canceled flights that were no longer where they were expected to be. As a result, Southwest had to manually adjust crew schedules. The company asked the software maker, GE Digital, to modify that system and said on Thursday that an update was weeks away.
The airline said it had taken several other steps to prevent a similar meltdown, including more closely monitoring for potential problems, increasing staffing and upgrading tools used to schedule and communicate with crews. Southwest also hired Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm, to investigate what had gone wrong.
“Immediately following the disruption, we moved swiftly to put mitigation efforts in place to reduce the risk of future operational disruptions and help fortify our operational resilience,” Mr. Jordan said on Thursday.
