The flight board shows cancelled Southwest Airlines flights at Pittsburgh International Airport in Pennsylvania on Thursday.
Photo:
BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS
Has the management at
spent too much time trying to please “stakeholders” with an environmental agenda and not enough time serving customers who need reliable air travel?
As for the wave of cancellations that left thousands of Southwest customers stranded over the past week, the failure appears to lie in the company’s relatively primitive information technology. The Journal’s Alison Sider reports:
When Southwest Airlines Co. reassigns crews after flight disruptions, it typically relies on a system called SkySolver. This Christmas, SkySolver not only didn’t solve much, it also helped create the worst industry meltdown in recent memory.
Airline executives and labor leaders point to inadequate technology systems, in particular SkySolver, as one reason why a brutal winter storm turned into a debacle. SkySolver was overwhelmed by the scale of the task of sorting out which pilots and flight attendants could work which flights, Southwest executives said. Crew schedulers instead had to comb through records by hand.
Ms. Sider has more from Southwest Chief Executive Officer
Bob Jordan
:
“We’ve talked a little over the last year about the need to modernize the operation and invest,” Mr. Jordan wrote Monday in a memo to employees. “This is why.”
In a November meeting with reporters, the CEO noted the airline had expanded faster than its technology. “I do think the scale and the growth of the airline got ahead of the tools that we have,” he said.
This isn’t the first time that a disruption has ballooned at Southwest, and the carrier’s struggle to put its operations back together shows how its increasingly complicated network needs a better technology foundation.
It may seem shocking that such a critical need was not prioritized at a business that has achieved so much…
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