An executive for Southwest Airlines is set to apologize at a Thursday Senate hearing for its holiday meltdown that resulted in thousands of canceled flights and stranded passengers, acknowledging that the airline “messed up” and that they’re working to make it up to their customers.
According to prepared testimony shared with POLITICO ahead of a Senate Commerce Committee scheduled for Thursday morning, Southwest COO Andrew Watterson will “sincerely and humbly” apologize for the situation and promise that his airline is now “intensely focused on learning from this event by taking immediate mitigation efforts.” That includes a systemic review by a third-party company and internal assessments and reviews.
“Let me be clear: we messed up,” Watterson will say. “In hindsight, we did not have enough winter operational resilience.”
Southwest has been under a microscope since December, when a winter storm sparked a cascade of internal failures that meant Southwest had to cancel a majority of its flights for nearly a week as it struggled to match crews to planes across its sprawling network.
Beyond congressional hearings like Thursday’s, the Transportation Department is also keeping a close watch on the airline to ensure it properly reimburses customers for the disruption. DOT has also announced it is separately investigating the airline for whether it scheduled flights that it knew it wouldn’t be able to staff.
The airline had “precanceled” some flights ahead of the storm, Watterson will explain, but conditions were bad enough that they couldn’t keep up with even the modified schedule, especially at the key airports of Denver and Chicago, their two biggest hubs through which 25 percent of their crew members move.
As the storm moved east, internal communications “deteriorated,” resulting in “compounding, frequent, close-in flight cancellations,” rather than their “normal practice of batched pre-cancellations further in advance of departure times.” He said that created a volume of required changes to crew schedules that “overwhelmed” their crew scheduling processes and technology.
He said the airline is prioritizing “enhancements” to its crew software but defended the soundness of its flight network.
Southwest also prioritized making it up to their customers with no-cost rebooking, granting reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses — “which have totaled hundreds of millions of dollars to date” — as well as quickly creating a webpage for customers to request refunds and reimbursements, which were processed quickly, using automation. They also prioritized the return of bags to their rightful owners, Watterson will say.