The holiday disaster of Southwest Airlines, which canceled 15,000 flights, should be blamed on ineffective regulation and a profit-driven orientation, rather than the bad weather from which other airlines recovered much more effectively.
Southwest’s computer systems are woefully out of date and became unable to cope with the magnitude of the irregular operations started by bad weather. Pilots and other employees were unable to let Southwest know where they were, and Southwest was therefore unable to assign crews to its flights, meaning there were planes ready to fly, pilots and flight attendants ready to staff them, and thousands of travelers ready to go, held back by an information technology disaster.
Sam Pizzigati reports that Southwest’s annual report of last year said, “Modifications and refinements to systems have been and are expected to continue to be expensive to implement and can divert management’s attention from other matters.”
What “other matters"? Well, shareholder value, of course!
