Southwest COO: We Can and Will Do Better

For many travelers who set out to make holiday memories in the final weeks of 2022, anticipated moments with family and friends were significantly delayed or dashed altogether by an epic winter storm that halted airline travel across the U.S.

Forecast-busting bitterness and unrelenting waves of cold, ice and snow combined in intensity, and with an unprecedented reach that gripped all airlines. Days of disruption from a weather event that affected all carriers became a crew event unique to Southwest Airlines, and it’s been well-documented that we let down our customers and our people who heroically tried to serve them.

It’s taken several weeks to sort through the complexity of contributing factors, and that work to understand lessons learned and root causes continues. Bottom line: We know we simply weren’t sufficiently ready for the unique conditions of this extreme storm. And, as we’ve stated countless times, we messed up and are very sorry for how the disruption meaningfully disappointed so many.

The culminating factors of the storm diminished the resiliency of our winter weather preparedness, and it effectively halted our operations at Denver and Chicago—two airports where 25 percent of our flight crews are based. Those shutdowns stopped the flow of fresh flight attendants and pilots who were expected to operate assigned flights two and three days down the line, and that created a record-high number of problems that came at us in a tsunami that required individualized solutions. It completely overwhelmed our processes for rescheduling and assigning crews.

Our technology never failed during this event, but the workflow we had set up around it couldn’t adequately overcome the size of the problem.