You probably shouldn’t add on to your house if it has a crumbling foundation. When you do that, you might get away with it for a while but eventually, the entire thing will come crashing down.
That’s essentially what happened when Southwest Airlines (LUV) suffered its holiday meltdown. The airline kept getting bigger but it was building upon a technology that was not ready to handle a bunch of things going wrong at once.
Basically, it was a literal perfect storm where bad weather hit and Southwest’s software was unable to keep up with the changes. That paralyzed its fleet leaving tens of thousands of passengers stranded and quickly undermining the goodwill the airline had built up over decades.
The airline’s pilots – who are in negotiations for a new contract – blamed the airline for not investing in its technology and shared a public letter essentially saying this was predictable. That could not have helped the public’s general feelings about Southwest nor would the company’s ongoing labor negotiations with its flight attendants.
Now, with both its pilots' union and its flight attendant union still without a contract, the airline is attempting to not just fix its problems, but also to grow. That’s a dangerous plan, but it’s one CEO Bob Jordan tried to justify in a sit-down interview with the Dallas Mornings News.
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Southwest’s CEO Talks Growth
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the airline is that it can’t pause all growth while it fixes what’s broken. That’s at least partly because it takes years to move into a new airport and sometimes an airline has to make its move when opportunities present themselves.
It’s an ongoing process where Southwest actually grew quite a bit due to other airlines’ covid woes.
“We’re always talking. We talk to airports constantly because we opened in 18 new cities during the pandemic. We didn’t start from scratch. Those are airports that we had been talking to and they were in the queue,” Jordan told the paper.
Basically, airports only have so many slots and when some become available, it makes sense for a growing airline to grab them. Southwest has done that at the same time it’s working to replace the thousands of pilots who retired during the pandemic. The airline hired 1,800 new pilots last year and plans to add another 2,300 this year.
It has not yet returned to its full pre-pandemic schedule but expects to by the end of 2023.
Southwest Is Ready for Anything (Maybe)
Southwest has publicly shared details on the investments it intends to make in everything from improved software to more ice-removing equipment and personnel. Jordan seemed to hedge his bet a little bit when he talked about whether those changes will be enough.
“The number one acid test to me is that we continue to run a great operation and then we manage these large-scale irregular events because they’re going to keep happening. We don’t tilt over, we don’t repeat,” he shared.
Jordan says the airline will enter the busy summer season in a strong position when it comes to staffing.
“We’ve ensured that we have the right ramp staff, the number of pilots matches the aircraft we can fly. We’re really in good shape with our flight attendants. Number two is have the systems in place so that we understand early on if there’s any indication that the operation is sort of going left or right of what we would expect. We put in a lot of early warning indicator dashboards that helps us see that,” he told the paper.
