Southwest Airlines hopes to end a week-long debacle and bring back nearly 4,000 flights on Friday as it anticipates how to avoid a repeat of one of the worst operational disasters in its history.
After canceling more than 15,700 flights over an eight-day period since Dec. 22, the Dallas-based airline announced Thursday it finally has pilots, flight attendants and planes available to return to a normal flight schedule on Friday . To make that happen, the company had to ground two-thirds of its flights between Tuesday and Thursday to stem a cascade of cancellations that was escalating by the day, leaving millions of passengers stranded over the Christmas holidays.
Officials blamed poor weather and an “overwhelmed” crew rescheduling technology system that couldn’t keep up with the task of reassigning thousands of pilots and flight attendants after winter weather hit key bases in Denver and Chicago.
But during a media call Thursday, CEO Bob Jordan, chief operating officer Andrew Watterson and other senior executives at Southwest lacked answers as to whether or not another meltdown might occur.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 35 years in terms of network impact, transaction levels, solution complexity and all of those things — none of them as excuses,” Jordan said during the call. “But there will be priorities to respond to this because we don’t want this to happen again for our customers or our employees.”
Southwest leaders are unsure how many passengers will need to be accommodated in the coming days because the disruption was so profound that many chose other modes of transport, bought expensive last-minute flights from other airlines or missed their vacations altogether due to the collapse lasted more than a week and extended over the Christmas weekend.
About 2.3 million passengers were disrupted during the meltdown.
“We don’t know how many people still have to travel,” Watterson said. “It depends, so to speak, on who still wants to travel. And that’s how easy it is for me to see in the first five days of the year that there’s room for people if they need to travel.”
As late as Wednesday, Southwest told employees, many of whom were still stranded in hotel rooms far from home, that they would try to reset the flight schedule on Friday. Southwest announced it to customers Thursday morning and shared it with the public later in the day. Southwest has also put Friday and weekend tickets back on sale after halting sales earlier in the week to prevent those bookings from being canceled and to make room for pilots and flight attendants to relocate.
Southwest has spent the last two days devising a plan to get pilots and flight attendants back in position to resume travel originally planned before the meltdown. The reduction of around 2,500 flights a day gave the airline the resources to track down flight attendants and pilots scattered across the country and develop a strategy to end the cascading problems.
Because the automated systems for reassigning pilots and flight attendants were useless, Southwest trained a group of about 1,000 employees to help with the manual rescheduling of crew members and called them one at a time, Watterson said.
After the company went through this series of weather and operational disruptions, the company could reapply this process in the event of another mishap, Watterson said.
Otherwise, it will take years for the airline to fully re-implement new technology systems for crew planning.
“It’s just a big and complicated project,” Jordan said. “That’s not meant to be an excuse; it is just a fact.”
“I think a discussion from that will be what we can do in critical areas of the plan to accelerate this and accelerate this development.”
The company has been working to upgrade and replace older technology, but it will take time, he said.
“We have a very big plan every year for infrastructure spending – capital plan and technology and other areas, but a lot in technology,” he said. “And the systems are complicated. In some cases we have legacy systems. And it’s just a time it takes to loop through those replacements. So these are multi-year projects.”
The delays and cancellations have already prompted an investigation by the Department of Transportation and a scrutiny by politicians in Washington, DC
Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Thursday sent a letter to Jordan urging the company to look after customers who are being financially impacted by the travel disruptions.
“These frontline workers are not to blame for managerial failures,” Buttigieg wrote in the letter. “I hope and expect that you will comply with the law, take the steps outlined in this letter, and promptly notify me of Southwest’s efforts to right customers who have been wronged.”
And after meeting with representatives from three of the company’s unions on Wednesday, Rep. Colin Allred, D-Dallas, and Jake Ellzey, R-Arlington, issued a joint statement on Thursday, which said in part:
“There has always been strong bipartisan support in Congress for the growth of Southwest Airlines…
“However, it is clear that Southwest has been taking unacceptable risks and trying to operate with an unacceptably low level of error — both in terms of staffing and technology — for some time, and that this crisis was both foreseeable and preventable.
“The payment of hundreds of millions of dividends to shareholders and a healthy profit for the first three quarters of this year clearly demonstrate that Southwest can afford to address the issues at hand, but has chosen not to.” They urged Southwest executives to compensate passengers fairly and take action to prevent future meltdowns.
As customer cancellations piled up along with mountains of baggage at airports across the country, Southwest Airlines tried to tell customers it planned to honor “reasonable requests” for reimbursements for hotels, food, transportation and even tickets from other airlines.
“We have informed our customers that if we cancel their flights, they are entitled to a full refund,” Chief Commercial Officer Ryan Green said. “If they have had to make alternative travel arrangements, we will reimburse customers for those travel expenses. We ship a customer’s bag to them for free. And in the last few days we have been ramping up websites to make it as easy as possible for our customers.”
The company will look into recovering the costs of other extenuating circumstances from the flight disruptions, he said.
However, Green acknowledged that there are complications, e.g. B. Determining which claims are appropriate for reimbursement and determining how long all claims will take to process.
“Realistically, it’s going to be several weeks before we get back to customers here,” he said. “We work as carefully as possible and automate as much as possible to process them quickly. But our goal is to get this done as quickly as possible.”
Southwest has canceled just 39 flights for Friday as of Thursday noon, according to Flightaware.com. More than 2,000 flights per day have been canceled this week, which stretches back to Monday.
Southwest Airlines Pilots Association President Casey Murray said the airline spent Wednesday returning crew members to their home airports for distribution on Thursday and to begin regular flight on Friday.
“The hope is to start Friday fresh with everyone in the right place,” Murray said.
While Southwest only operated about 1,500 of its 4,000 daily scheduled passenger flights this week, it also operated 104 “ferry flights” Thursday just to move crew members and planes around the system to be ready for Friday, Watterson said.
Southwest plans to offer nearly 4,000 flights per day over the New Year’s weekend as millions of travelers look to return home, to college and back to work after the holidays.
Union leaders have blamed the airlines for letting the company’s technology lag woefully behind the demands of such a complex operation.
In the memo, Watterson said they plan to put pilots and flight attendants on flights they were originally scheduled for, rather than trying to create the duties from scratch.
“Customers want to fly what they originally bought, so actually moving to that schedule requires the fewest changes and is the least disruptive,” Watterson said.