“And it's really just not scaled for an operation that we have today.” “We're still using not only IT from the '90s, but also processes when our airline was a tenth of the size,” Murray told Morning Edition Wednesday. Pilots union president Casey Murray, interviewed by NPR Wednesday, blamed the antiquated software for Southwest’s problems this week. “And I would even say, why wasn’t the board of directors asked questions about that?” “I think this was benign neglect on the part of the leadership at Southwest across several administrations,” he said. He added that problems at Southwest may extend past the executives. “There’s no question that Southwest needs to have an extreme navel-gazing from top to bottom.” “Southwest has completely mismanaged the customer service, they’ve completely mismanaged the public relations,” Hamilton said. Hamilton likes Southwest’s current CEO Bob Jordan – but he’s not convinced Jordan handled this week’s meltdown well, noting the leader’s video apology showed “zero empathy toward passengers.” It grew slowly as a low-cost carrier, only adding additional cities when Kelleher, who died in 2019, believed Southwest could make money.ĪP The list of Southwest Airlines flights cancelled grows at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, Thursday, Dec. The plan behind record profits began simply: Southwest launched in 1971 with short hops from Dallas to Houston, Dallas to San Antonio, and back again. But while most other major airlines declared bankruptcy during the resulting economic downturn, Southwest did not. The airline became the most consistent money-maker in the business, boasting 47 consecutive years of profits until the pandemic. “But the policies of being a skinflint on technology fall to Herb Kelleher and every succeeding CEO since then.” “I know that he's regarded as kind of a patron-saint of Southwest Airlines and of the Dallas-Fort Worth area,” Hamilton said. Now the company is facing what experts say is the logical result of the company’s years-long strategy of growth without sufficient technological investment: a historic meltdown that led to thousands of holiday flight cancellations that impacted hundreds of thousands of people.Īviation analyst Scott Hamilton, with the west coast Leeham Company, said Southwest’s issues date back to the company’s profit-focused co-founder. Up until this disastrous week, Dallas-based Southwest Airlines had braved blizzards, ice storms, hail, hurricanes, the Wright Amendment and competition - and emerged largely intact through its 51-year history.īut as the company expanded, pilots, flight attendants and other employees complained aging software failed to get them where they needed to be when flights got delayed or cancelled.
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