Senators grill Southwest Airlines over holiday meltdown

About seven weeks after an operational meltdown upended domestic air travel and holiday plans, a top Southwest Airlines executive faced tough questions Thursday from a Senate committee looking for answers about how the carrier will prevent a repeat.

Andrew Watterson, Southwest’s chief operating officer, repeatedly expressed regret for problems that led to a disruption of plans for more than 1 million travelers.

“I want to sincerely and humbly apologize,” he told committee members, many of whom shared stories of constituents caught in the meltdown. “We understand that for many, this is the most important trip they take all year.”

Lawmakers and regulators have become increasingly focused on flight disruptions in recent months, with many asking whether legislation is needed to hold airlines accountable for taking care of customers after problems occur. Thursday’s questioning of Southwest followed a Tuesday hearing before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which focused on aviation safety and the Federal Aviation Administration.

The two hearings are the first of several that will spotlight struggles in the industry and help Congress set priorities as it begins deliberations on an FAA funding measure. The air safety agency suffered its own problems last month, when it ordered a nearly unprecedented ground stop amid a breakdown of its pilot notification system.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, called Southwest’s December breakdown “an airline debacle of enormous proportions.”

“I do believe this sector needs a more effective policeman on the beat,” she said. “I think that this incident shows us that we have to get serious about this.”

Republicans countered that additional regulations would likely lead to higher fares.

“I am confident Southwest understands this was an epic screw-up and they are doing everything possible to prevent its recurrence,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the committee’s leading GOP member. “The airline has already paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in reimbursements. The question of whether Southwest did enough will be answered by the public.”

Lawmakers repeatedly pressed Watterson about why executives ignored years of warnings from employee unions that the carrier was on the verge of a collapse.

Watterson said he and other executives are moving quickly to prevent a repeat. In an interview with The Washington Post on the eve of his testimony, he said an upgrade to the scheduling system that was blamed for part of the carrier’s woes would be in place Friday, filling a critical gap in Southwest’s ability to manage staffing when flights are canceled on short notice.

He also said the carrier is putting short-term fixes in place that include an early warning dashboard to flag issues before they escalate, backup teams of employees who can deploy as needed and an upgraded phone system for customers. Longer-term fixes will include a reexamination of how Southwest manages severe weather events. The airline hired the firm Oliver Wyman to examine what went wrong and how to fix it.

Watterson said Southwest has issued more than 273,000 passenger reimbursements and has nearly 11,000 requests pending. The reimbursements included a variety of expenses, including tire chains, strollers and the cost of additional days of pet-sitting. He said all but 200 pieces of luggage - because they lacked identification - have been returned to customers.

Watterson said Southwest executives’ 2022 bonuses would be reduced because of the problems. As a condition of receiving billions in federal pandemic relief funds, air carriers were barred from raising executives’ compensation, issuing dividends and buying back stock, but those prohibitions were lifted in September.

Watterson testified alongside Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association union; Paul Hudson, president of consumer group Flyers Rights; Sharon Pinkerton, senior vice president for legislative policy for Airlines for America, an airline trade group; and Clifford Winston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“Our hearts are broken,” Murray said. “The December 2022 meltdown is as tragic as it was historic. (Our) singular goal in participating in today’s hearing is to help ensure it never happens again.”

Cantwell and others also pressed Watterson about Southwest’s lack of investment in critical technology, why it took longer for the carrier to recover than other airlines and what steps the airline is taking to prevent a repeat.

Earlier this week, Cantwell met virtually with families whose Christmas celebrations were disrupted by Southwest’s problems.

One woman described how her son couldn’t get home from his military base in Georgia; a man said he ate Christmas dinner in an Arby’s and drove halfway across the country; and a woman said she was only able to track down luggage using Apple AirTag trackers.

“It was clear that there was a system failure at Southwest,” Cantwell said after hearing their stories.

Alex Kain, who had Christmas dinner at Arby’s, said he was to fly home from Albany to Seattle on Dec. 23. He was greeted with chaos as he arrived in Denver for a connecting flight.

“We saw people crying, sleeping on the floor, there were long lines at restaurants,” Kain said.

He scrambled to make alternative plans when his flight was canceled, hoping to avoid being stranded. Kain ended up driving from Denver to Redmond, Ore., where he got a flight to Seattle to avoid crossing mountains by car in winter conditions. The extra logistics cost $3,000.

The passengers recounted their struggles to reach Southwest employees as they sought information about their flights and options for alternative travel.

Cantwell said Southwest must honor commitments it made to reimburse passengers for their expenses. The Department of Transportation also has said it expects Southwest to provide reimbursements it has promised, and would view failing to do so as an unfair practice subject to fines.

Cruz on Thursday also took aim at the FAA’s recent struggles and compared its response to that of Southwest. The Jan. 11 outage of the agency’s Notices to Air Missions system, which warns pilots of possible hazards, led to a nearly two-hour ground stop of domestic flights.

Acting FAA administrator Billy Nolen is expected to appear before the Senate committee next week.

While many have blamed shortcomings in Southwest’s technology infrastructure, Watterson said the carrier’s crew scheduling software was only one of the issues the airline encountered as it tried to recover from a fierce winter storm that hit Denver, one of its largest bases.

“What we saw were problems that started in one area cascaded into another,” he said. “The last domino was losing the use of the crew [scheduling] system. But there were other dominoes before it. That was really the problem.”

In Southwest’s case, colder-than-expected temperatures in Denver hobbled operations, making it difficult for crews to de-ice aircraft. With flights unable to depart, the carrier ran out of gate space and ended up with aircraft and crew members out of position. As the storm moved across the country, other Southwest bases, including Chicago, were similarly affected, Watterson said.

While other airlines quickly rebounded, Southwest was unable to dig itself out, culminating in the carrier’s decision on Dec. 26 to reboot its entire operation. Ultimately, the carrier canceled more than 16,700 flights before resuming normal operations.

At Tuesday’s hearing before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, lawmakers focused on aviation safety and, in particular, the FAA’s ability to respond to long-standing safety concerns.

Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) noted that while the U.S. has an enviable safety record - no passengers have been killed in scheduled domestic passenger flights for 11 of the past 13 years - recent incidents have heightened concerns. This past weekend in Austin, air traffic controllers cleared a FedEx plane to land on the same runway where a Southwest passenger jet was taking off, with the planes coming within 100 feet of each other. Last month at John F. Kennedy International Airport, a pilot had to abort a takeoff to avoid hitting another jet crossing the runway.