Southwest Airlines CEO Addresses Customers About Holiday Cancellations and Changes

This week, Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan emailed customers an update on the December 2022 “crash” that left passengers stranded, thousands of flights canceled and the carrier needed a massive upgrade to its system.

In an email, Jordan said the Dallas-based company “currently plans to spend more than $1 billion of our annual operating plan on investments, upgrades and maintenance of our IT systems.”

Sheldon Jacobson, an aviation researcher, data scientist and systems professor at the University of Illinois, said he expects work to be done behind the scenes, even though it’s been less than a month since holiday flights were cancelled.

“They offer to upgrade their computer system, their software, their communications network. So if something as complex as what happened over the holidays happens again, they will be ready,” Jacobson said. “They will pass and behave as if another major weather event has occurred in their system. Not on their primary system, but on a secondary system, and they’re going to test it, test it, and stretch it to the absolute maximum.”

In the email, Jordan gave a list of actions that have already been taken and what will happen next.

The email reads:

Immediate action: Following the outage, we quickly implemented mitigation measures to further reduce the risk of future outages that could interfere with customers’ travel plans. Some of these efforts already underway include:

• Establish additional operational personnel that can quickly mobilize to support crew rescue efforts.
• Improvements to our crew communication technology to effectively communicate with large numbers of crew members during frequent schedule changes.
• Update and upgrade our crew recovery system to not only address current and future schedules, but also provide the ability to optimize established schedules as they are revised during non-scheduled operations.

Go forward: While we have mitigated risks in the short term, we are taking additional steps to analyze developments and provide thoughtful recommendations for future action.

• We engaged independent global aviation consulting firm Oliver Wyman to complete the assessment of the event and provide recommendations on additional mitigation elements we should consider.
• Our Board of Directors has appointed an Operations Review Committee that works with management to understand developments and help monitor the Company’s response.
• We are committed to keeping you updated on how we are progressing in this effort, as well as additional steps to prevent a similar event from happening again.

“Are they ready right now? They have backups so they can back up a response if needed, but their idea is much more than a patchwork quilt,” Jacobson said. “They are looking to systematically transform their technology and their infrastructure so that they can truly respond as effectively and quickly as other airlines have shown.”