Southwest Airlines confident changes made earlier this year will help avoid another winter meltdown
FORT WORTH (CBSNewsTexas.com) — Southwest Airlines is taxiing into the holiday travel season confident that changes made when the weather was warmer will help avoid another winter meltdown.
Flight delays were stacking up Tuesday night, with FlightAware showing 22% of the airline's flights impacted by a major East Coast storm, and passenger numbers up 8% over last year.
However, just one flight had been cancelled so far as the company maintained it is in a much better position to handle challenges to the travel schedule.
Southwest is looking to reassure passengers after the last 10 days of the 2022 travel season left thousands of them—and flight crews—stranded after a winter storm forced the cancellation of thousands of flights.
The airline went to work though over the next several months, committing more than $1.3 billion in technology investments, including upgrading software that assigns crews, and increasing phone system capacity for the customers and crews.
The company consolidated the team that designs flight schedules, with the team that oversees daily operations, and enhanced real-time dashboards to keep track of the network.
For winter operations, the airline had received 30 new deicing trucks, with another 70 expected next year, and dedicated more space for deicing operations. Much of the equipment was sent to Denver, Chicago, Nashville and Baltimore. In Dallas, it added two high-output heaters to keep equipment from freezing up which was an issue last year.
"Since the disruption, we've bolstered those systems with upgrades to address the specific issues we experienced during Winter Storm Elliott," chief operating officer Andrew Watterson told investors in an conference call in October.
After each of the three major summer holidays, the airline touted that it had completed 99% of its flights.
Still, the crews flying the planes aren't convinced the changes go far enough.
"I don't think we're prepared to deal with adversities whether it's an air traffic control outage or weather events, coming out of that meltdown," said Tom Nekouei, with the Southwest Airline Pilots Association (SWAPA.)
Nekouei said the airline is probably better prepared than it was, but that scheduling processes between the airline and its pilots still don't meet their desired standards.
The SWAPA is preparing for the possibility of a strike over some of those issues, as early as Dec. 30.
