Southwest Promotes IT Directors Right After Christmas Crisis
After a Christmas crisis that saw around 16,700 flights canceled, you’d expect heads to roll at Southwest Airlines, but that’s not the case.
Instead, several company executives — including the vice president in charge of aircraft network planning — will be promoted.
Southwest on Monday announced a quintet of leadership promotions it said are part of structural changes that began last September that “will strengthen our operational execution and better serve our employees and customers.”
The most notable promotion goes to Adam Decaire, SWA’s former vice president of network planning, who is now the company’s senior Veep for network planning and network operations control (NOC).
SWA describes its NOC as “the heart of important operational decisions and coordination,” which includes staff such as dispatchers, meteorologists, crew planners and others who keep its network of aircraft running smoothly…usually.
Southwest said Decaire’s promotion “creates a tighter feedback loop between schedule design and schedule execution while adding resiliency and reliability to the network,” and said he has championed the design and deployment of new network planning technologies and solutions at SWA .
“[Decaire] will continue to provide its extensive knowledge of the airline’s network combined with a unified organization that brings network planning together with the NOC,” Southwest said.
Decaire replaces Andrew Watterson, who was promoted to SWA’s Chief Operating Officer in October. It’s unclear how much involvement Decaire had in alleviating the Christmas mishap, and SWA told us it “would not comment on staffing matters”.
Additional promotions announced today include new leaders in the company’s marketing and customer experience team, culture and communications group, legal department and sales.
No chief optics officer?
While Southwest let us know that the date for yesterday’s announcement was set as early as November, it didn’t seem to pause to consider changing decisions after the lousy Christmas.
COO Watterson blamed outdated scheduling software for the late December glitch that left thousands of passengers stranded for days — something that falls squarely in Decaire’s wheelhouse.
According to the New York Times, Southwest is unique among major airlines because it uses a point-to-point flight schedule model that allows it to fly faster and cheaper routes without a central hub.
It also means that if there is a disruption in the flight plan and planes fail to land at major hubs, there will be no standby ground crews available to fill the gap. With flights canceled and crews unavailable, the disruption tore through Southwest’s flight network, leaving them with only one option to reset: return crews to their original locations and start over.
IT issues were also blamed, with some pilots and crew having to wait hours to reach Southwest operations staff, who were overwhelmed with requests.
Customers stranded in the mess filed a lawsuit in late December, alleging SWA failed to promptly refund tickets and breached its contractual obligations to its passengers.
Southwest pilots say leadership is to blame
It’s unclear what kind of changes Decaire will bring to SWA’s flight schedule, or if he’ll be able to prevent a future mishap without an overhaul so extensive it changes Southwest’s business model.
However, one thing is crystal clear: the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association believes major changes are needed.
“How did we go from being the most stable and profitable airline in history to the largest meltdown in airline history,” asked Tom Nekouei, 2nd vice president of SWAPA, in a blog post. “In our case, it’s three words: lack of leadership,” said Nekouei.
Nekouei said that SWA executives sent many “sweet ‘sorry’ and ‘I love you’ messages, written by the company’s communications department and reviewed by legal counsel, which he says “obscure actual corrective actions, which are absolutely necessary to get out of this graveyard spiral that the so-called executives of our company have put us in.”
System-wide outages at SWA have increased in frequency over the past 15 years, Nekouei said, and “were all the result of conscious operational, human or technical infrastructure investment decisions made at the senior levels of our organization.”
Nekouei said there was no real accountability from decision-makers for the numerous mishaps SWA has suffered over the years, arguing instead that Southwest repeatedly let the same people do the same thing, despite their mistakes.
“Many of us thought that this event might be the final straw rousing Southwest’s board of directors from its fiduciary slumber… It’s clear that Southwest’s management is circling the wagons, as they always have in the past.” , the union VP said.
In an SEC filing last week, Southwest said it expects losses in the fourth quarter, with pretax earnings likely to fall by $725 to $825 and net operating expenses rising on customer compensation efforts. ®
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