Southwest CEO Addresses Airline’s Technology Issues

Is technology, or a lack thereof, the reason why massive cancellations and flight delays continue to plague Southwest Airlines?

For the second time in less than four months, Southwest had thousands of flights delayed or canceled this past weekend – one woman reported that her flight from San Jose, Calif. to Las Vegas was canceled six times to the point where she finally bought a ticket on Delta to get home.

It happened in June because of what Southwest called “a systems issue” that resulted in more than 2,000 impacted flights.

It happened from Friday, October 8 to Monday, October 11, with the airline saying it was a combination of “weather problems and other external constraints.”

In fact, it happened almost six years ago to the day, October 11, 2015, when the Dallas-based carrier blamed “intermittent technology issues” when its website, mobile app and phone centers crashed.

While issues have happened to other airlines, it seems Southwest is the airline that is most often hit. Southwest CEO Gary Kelly appeared on CNBC’s ‘Squawk on the Street’ program this morning and said the most recent problems were not a matter of being understaffed since it adjusted its fall schedule accordingly, or of under-spending on technology, or that the airline’s pilot’s union – which just filed a lawsuit to block a proposed employee COVID-19 vaccination mandate – had conducted a ‘sick-out’ to coincide with the suit.

But technology seems to be the common thread here, and Southwest Airlines Pilots Association union president Casey Murray told The Associated Press that Southwest’s operation has become “brittle” and “cracks under the slightest pressure.”

Kelly told Jim Cramer on CNBC that the technology issues that occurred back in June were human error, so it wasn’t a lack of technological capability it was simply, in one case, not adhering to a procedure. As for what happened over the weekend, Kelly said “people who understand airlines” know what happened.

“I think people again that, that understand how airlines work, when you get behind, it just takes several days to catch up and the fact that we’re basically caught up (Monday) and today supports the assertion that we’re making here,” Kelly said. “But we were significantly set behind on Friday and it just takes several days to catch up.”

Kelly explained that Southwest operates a linear network and not a hub and spoke system like a United or American or Delta. That is, it goes from point to point without a defined system of connections.

When the weather delays in Florida hit over the weekend, combined with the air traffic control issues, it created a domino effect for the airline.

“About half of our airplanes touch the state of Florida. We’re one of the largest airlines in the country. So, by the end of the day we had significant numbers of airplanes and flight crews that were totally out of position,” he said. “It’s very unusual. It wasn’t anything that Southwest caused. If you go back to the June outage, that was us. That was a technology outage and those are few and far between. But it’s been a rough summer and I’m not offering any excuses. Our customers didn’t get their best from Southwest Airlines; that’s not what we want.”

But Murray, the pilot’s union president, said the airline uses antiquated crew-scheduling technology that leads to cascading disruptions when flights are canceled in one part of its network.

Kelly refuted that, saying Southwest has “wonderful technology” and has deployed new systems for reservations, maintenance and record-keeping software. The carrier is in the midst of hiring 5,000 workers so it can have “more cushion in the operation so we can absorb the kind of blow that we saw last Friday better.”

Yet Kelly admitted the technology could be improved.

“In this particular case, it would help for us to have better tools to recover,” he said. “So, there aren’t perfect optimization tools to re-flow airplanes when we have a setback like we did on Friday. And then, secondly, there’s technology that’s required to reschedule our flight crews, So we have flight attendants, we have pilots, we have airplanes and once it gets behind, it’s just difficult to get that back together. I think the opportunity is to improve on that process. It’s called repair. It’s complicated, but we definitely have some good opportunities there for the future.”