![]() ![]() ![]() Third, he said, the company needs to come up with plans for key airports where pilots and flight attendants are based. Second, it needs to make incremental patches and changes to its crew modeling software. “But preemptively canceling is so hard because people can get upset and you lose money, especially if the weather isn’t that bad.”Īndrew Watterson, who took over the chief operating officer job in October from longtime leader Mike Van De Ven, said the company has come up with a three-pronged plan to prevent another meltdown while it accelerates a total overhaul of the flawed crew scheduling software.įirst, executives created a system for the company to take over pilot and flight attendant rescheduling manually, using a team of about 1,000 volunteers at corporate headquarters who made phone calls to find out where crew members were and when they could fly again. “One of the emerging best practices that is so painful is to preemptively cancel if there is bad weather in one region,” Pomeroy said. Southwest has planned its biggest flight schedule in history for the coming months, including more than 130,000 flights in July, according to Cirium. Pomeroy said Southwest has few options but to cut schedules again, particularly during peak periods when planes are more full and there are fewer options to rebook passengers. “You need all three.”Īfter a wave of mass cancellations in 2021 and early 2022 as the airline industry recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic and reduced workforces, carriers such as Southwest cut thousands of flights heading into the summer in order to make sure it could handle a surge of leisure travelers. “It’s really people, process and technology,” Pomeroy said. “The world’s best software is not going to get you out of this situation.” Blair Pomeroy, an assistant business professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a former employee at American Airlines, United and Qatar Airways. “It’s always reliability versus cost structure, and reliability is expensive,” said H. (Alex Wong/Getty Images / Getty Images) A Southwest Airlines spokesperson said Quinonez 'created a situation onboard Flight 700 that jeopardized the entire flight and created an unsafe. ![]()
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