Southwest CEO talks of recent troubles
Southwest Airlines faced another potential crisis — just two weeks after its holiday meltdown — as the Federal Aviation Administration shut down all flights in the United States for nearly two hours Jan. 11.
Southwest canceled more than 400 flights and delayed over half its remaining flights that day. But instead of the same crew scheduling malfunctions that led to the cancellation crisis during the peak holiday travel period, Southwest was functioning normally the next day.
At the center of this has been CEO Bob Jordan, who was promoted to lead the Dallas-based company a year ago. He already had said upgrading technology was a priority, but that came too late for the fiasco in December.
Jordan talked with the Dallas Morning News last week. This interview has been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.
Q: Was the recent FAA notification outage and ground stop a stress test for Southwest after the issues over the holidays?
A: We deal with irregular operations all the time. We don’t deal with events like a two-hour ground stop. So, yeah, it was absolutely a test. We put in a lot of things in December that helped us to get back to the full network this time. We created a group of new, trained crew schedulers. I think it was about 100 that we can pull in at any time. We actually activated part of that group in case we had a large set of crew scheduling transactions. It worked really well. We’ve also got procedures now to see more early warning detection around irregular things in the network. We are just calling it operational hypercare — more leadership and eyes on the operation. We had a lot of folks that were here all night.
Q: With what Southwest went through and the FAA issues, is there a technology problem across the industry?
A: I can’t speak for the FAA, but I think no. Every company has a lot of technology. We spend $1 billion a year on technology. We’ll talk a lot about the crew-solving software. We actually have done eight new releases of that in the last year. So you’re always working on stuff, and then you have stuff that is older. What you don’t want are single points of failure where an issue can take down a critical system.
Q: Crew scheduling and SkySolver have been discussion points for a while. Did you know it was this vulnerable?
A: I don’t think I would use the word vulnerable. I think what happened is we had a historic storm. I’m not excusing what happened. I mean, we messed up for our customers. We messed up for our people.
We’ve done eight releases of SkySolver, and we’re working on a release with (GE) right now that would automatically solve those old problems.