Southwest’s CEO says the airline now understands what went fallacious throughout the December meltdown and claims it wasn’t dangerous era.
NEW YORK — The CEO of Southwest Airlines driven again Tuesday in opposition to the view that his airline’s December breakdown was once led to via a failure to make investments sufficient cash in crew-scheduling era, as a substitute blaming extraordinarily chilly climate that compelled it to prevent flying at some airports.
Southwest mentioned it’s purchasing extra deicing vans and lining up further deicing pads at key airports and purchasing extra engine covers and warmers to avoid a repeat.
The airline additionally mentioned it’ll build up staffing throughout extraordinarily chilly climate, and it’ll support telephone methods for patrons and staff.
A critical winter typhoon simply ahead of Christmas affected all airways, however Southwest struggled far more than the others to get better. It wound up canceling just about 17,000 flights in 10 days ahead of resuming a typical agenda. Unions for pilots and flight attendants mentioned era used to reassign crews to planes slowed down, and staff spent hours on dangle once they known as headquarters for directions.
Robert Jordan mentioned all the debacle may well be traced to Southwest’s lack of ability to stay flying in extraordinarily chilly climate at key airports together with Denver and Chicago Midway.
“I do not think we have a chronic underinvestment in technology,” he mentioned at a JPMorgan investor convention. He repeated a prior estimate that the Dallas corporate will spend greater than $1.3 billion on information era this 12 months.
Jordan additionally defended the airline’s trade style in opposition to critics who say its point-to-point direction map makes it extra inclined to flight disruptions that get started in a single a part of the rustic — led to via dangerous climate, for instance — after which ripple around the community.
The frozen stipulations in Denver and Chicago began the mess, he mentioned, “and it would have caused the issue no matter what the network structure was.”
Southwest mentioned in a submitting that it continues to be expecting to document a loss for the primary quarter, with lingering fallout from the December disaster cutting revenue by up to $350 million. That is on most sensible of an $800 million drop in fourth-quarter pretax source of revenue that Southwest attributed to the meltdown, which is being investigated by federal officials.
Shares of Southwest rose about 1% in noon buying and selling.
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