Last week, Southwest CEO Bob Jordan deflected criticism of his airlines’ holiday meltdown that saw nearly 17,000 flights canceled.
In January, Southwest was sued for its purportedly outdated tech infrastructure, which the airline has allocated $1.3 billion to upgrade, but Jordan is claiming that extremely cold weather instead forced many of the cancellations.
To combat this problem, Southwest says it is buying more deicing trucks, deicing pads, engine covers, and heaters, according to an AP report.
Captain Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilot Association, said that Southwest has been having issues with its technology for nearly two years.
“We’ve seen these sorts of meltdowns occur on a much more regular basis and it really just has to do with outdated processes and outdated IT,” Murray said, according to CNN.
“It’s phones, it’s computers, it’s processing power, it’s the programs used to connect us to airplanes — that’s where the problem lies, and it’s systemic throughout the whole airline,” Murray added, per CNN.
Jordan had a different point of view, instead citing the extremely cold weather at Denver and Chicago Midway as the reason for flight cancellations.
“I do not think we have a chronic underinvestment in technology,” Jordan said at a JPMorgan investor conference, according to the AP.
The CEO also shielded criticism of Southwest’s point-to-point system, saying the cold weather “would have caused the issue no matter what the network structure was,” per the AP report.
The point-to-point system of air travel does not use hubs but connects locations directly without any disruption of services, according to Aerospace-Technology.com. This leads to shorter flights with closer turnaround times, but it also means if a disruption occurs, the system can get out of whack quickly.
Southwest competitors American and Delta airlines utilize a hub-and-spoke network, which could be part of why they were able to weather the storm in December.
On the day after Christmas, 70% of Southwest flights were canceled. Delta had 9% of its flights canceled, while American had less than 1%, according to WFAA.
Southwest has maintained the position it took immediately following the cancellations.
“It’s just the sheer size of this storm,” Southwest Airlines official Jay McVay said on December 26, per WFAA.
Southwest said in an 8-K filing on Tuesday that it expects to report a first-quarter loss due to the fallout from the flight cancellations in December. The airline says it expects to lose an additional $300 to $350 million this quarter because of the operational disruption.
That comes on top of the $800 million it lost in pre-tax income during the fourth quarter as a result of the cancellations.
