In a Senate hearing held yesterday, February 9th, the Chief Operating Officer for Southwest Airlines, Andrew Watterson, stated that the airline's scheduling software will undergo a major upgrade today, February 10th. The promised upgrade comes following one of the largest airline scheduling disasters in history, as in late December 2022, most of Southwest Airlines' operations crumbled. The collapse of the airline's operations primarily came at the hands of an outdated scheduling system. Southwest has pledged to fix these mistakes and has ensured that nothing of the sort will ever happen again.

Executive testimony

In mid-December, a string of winter storms prompted thousands of flight delays and cancelations across the USA. However, most airlines recovered from the disruptions over the next several days. Southwest, on the other hand, did not. The system used to assign crews to planes became overwhelmed with the high volume of changes, causing it to fail. This led to more than 16,000 flight cancelations and cost the airline an estimated $800 million.

Since the problems first arose, the airline has been under heavy public scrutiny for the failure and for inadequately compensating displaced passengers. While Southwest temporarily fixed the problem by restarting the system and rebuilding its schedule from the ground up, the damage had already been done. This wave of cancelations led the US Senate to hold the hearing yesterday entitled "Strengthening Airline Operations and Consumer Protections."

Photo: Denver International Airport

For the hearing, the committee requested that the airline send a senior executive to represent the airline. Watterson was chosen for this role as the airline reports that the CEO, Bob Jordan, had a previous commitment. During the hearing, Watterson claimed that the airline is taking all necessary action to prevent such a disaster from occurring again. Watterson said the problems occurred due to how winter operations were handled. He later assured the committee that the airline would make changes, stating,

"The root cause was how we handled our winter operations, and that's where you will see us put some focus over a multiyear period because that's what started the dominoes falling and the last domino was the crew scheduling system."

Later in his testimony, Watterson stated that the flight scheduling system did have an issue that contributed to the meltdown. He said that while the problem will be fixed Friday, February 10th, the airline still plans to replace the entire flight scheduling system. The Dallas Morning News quoted Watterson sharing the following,

"With regards to our flight scheduling software, there's a specific issue we had during the disruption and a fix will be put (Friday) into production. But the overall flight scheduling system, we were looking to upgrade and replace that, so we've conducted a request for information from software vendors to evaluate those, and we'll be going to a request for proposal here after we have the findings from our assessment."

Legislative pushback

Throughout the hearing, Watterson and other airline representatives were questioned by committee members regarding the meltdown. Most of the questions regarded the airline scheduling technology and how much the airline values said technology. Watterson responded by stating that the airline highly values its operational systems, sharing that it invests approximately $1 billion per year in technology. He also shared that the airline will spend $1.3 billion this year on upgrades.

Photo: Joe Kunzler | Simple Flying

Aside from technology questions, Senator Ted Budd from North Carolina asked if the inherent issues with the company were related to poor management more than they were due to antiquated technology. Budd asked,

"Is it really a technology problem or is it a management problem?"

By asking this, Budd has suggested that the actual problems may reside deeper in the airline with management, who has not ensured that adequate attention and resources are diverted to these systems.

What do you think of these promised fixes? Let us know in the comments below.

Source: The Dallas Morning News, Axios