Southwest Airlines Didn't Crash, but It Nearly Fell Apart …

2023 Proceedings of the ISCAP Conference ISSN: 2473-4901

Albuquerque, NM v9 n5907

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Teaching Case

Southwest Airlines Didn’t Crash,

but It Nearly Fell Apart …

Paul D. Witman

[email protected]

School of Management

California Lutheran University

Thousand Oaks, CA, USA

Jim Prior

[email protected]

Tracy Nickl

[email protected]

School of Management

California Lutheran University

Thousand Oaks, CA, USA

Scott Mackelprang

[email protected]

Abstract

The winter storm of late 2022 caused difficulties for many US-based airlines, but none more so than

Southwest Airlines. Like other airlines, Southwest canceled flights in the early stages of the storm. Their

attempted recoveries did not succeed due to procedural and technology issues, with the airline unable

to cope with the magnitude of canceled flights, aircraft and crews in the wrong places, disrupted

passenger plans, and luggage separated from its owners. Over the next several days, Southwest

canceled tens of thousands of flights, called in thousands of additional staff to support manual

operations, and flew a reduced schedule for several days before returning to normal operations. The

case provides numerous scenarios for you to analyze and research.

Keywords: Teaching Case, Supply Chain, Airline Industry, Risk Management, Scalability, Technical

Debt.

1. OPENING STORY

You planned a holiday trip to visit your family

months in advance. You arranged to take some

additional days off from work. Earlier this

morning, with trepidation, you dropped off Clyde

at a local kennel. Just now, while standing in line

waiting for TSA security screening, you learn that

your flight has been canceled.

The bad news ripples through the long line of

expectant flyers, who moaning and groaning,

jump on their phones, looking for travel

alternatives and calling relatives. You do the

same. But you quickly realize that this flight

cancellation is one of many, and your trip has

2023 Proceedings of the ISCAP Conference ISSN: 2473-4901

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probably ended before it ever started.

A brutal winter storm that swept across Central

and Eastern U.S. in late December 2022 led to the

cancellation of more than 12,000 domestic airline

flights the week before Christmas (Josephs,

2023). And while many carriers were able to

quickly recover - United Airlines had to cancel

approximately 36% of their flights, but they got

90% of their passengers to their destinations

within four hours of schedule - the story at

Southwest Airlines was far different (Miguens,

2023).

Days after major carriers were back to mostly

business as usual, Southwest continued to cancel

flights. From December 24th to the 31st, the

major carriers canceled 19,421 flights; Southwest

accounted for 72% of those cancellations -

14,042 (US Department of Transportation, 2023).

There were many impacts and, likewise, many

causes:

• Close to 3 million holiday travelers had

flight segments cancelled (Arnold, 2023).

Their attempts to reschedule were

hampered by overwhelmed phone

systems and a reduction in customer

service agents, as many stayed away

from work to avoid irate passengers.

• With planes available, pilots and flight

attendants sat idle due to multiple

challenges with crew scheduling

software.

• The financial toll on Southwest - more

than $1.1 billion in lost revenue (Arnold &

Skores, 2023).

We hope that this real-world case will help

students understand and analyze situations from

several fundamental perspectives. These include

technical debt, scalability, risk management, and

supply chain management. Note that all

references to people by first name only are real

people unless stated otherwise.

2. TECHNICAL BACKGROUND

There are a number of technical concepts that

apply to various aspects of this case, and we

identify and describe them briefly here.

Technical Debt

In technical circles, the phenomenon of deferred

maintenance is called ”technical debt.” When

citizens find that deep potholes in the road are

destroying their cars, they realize that their City

Council should have used their tax dollars to fix

the roads rather than taking a junket to the

town’s sister city in Asia. Technical debt within

computer systems, on the other hand, is not

nearly so easy to discern. Quite often, unless a

person is directly involved in the creation, care,

and feeding of a computer-based service, it can

be difficult or impossible to know the impact of

technical debt.

Technical debt can result from various causes and

appear in various forms(Besker, Martini, Lokuge,

Blincoe, & Bosch, 2018; Kruchten, Nord, &

Ozkaya, 2019):

• System Capacity limitations: Workloads

can outgrow a system’s design capacity.

• System Integration limitations: Very

often, individual systems must cooperate

to make an overall system function end

to end - crews, planes, catering, de-icing,

passengers, baggage - all have to be

coordinated.

• Security limitations: Frequently,

investment is required to protect systems

with no improvement in system function.

• Product Lifespan limitations: Computers

don’t last forever, but sometimes

companies keep using them well beyond

their “end of formal support” date.

• Vendor Maintenance limitations: Support

for third party computer hardware or

software costs money and effort and may

have diminishing value as systems age.

• Process mismatch: Changing business

operations requires changes to systems,

and sometimes businesses skimp on that

- “there’s nothing so permanent as a

temporary solution” (a quote from one of

this case study’s authors, from industry

observations in banking).

• Failing to integrate technology acquired

through acquisition of other airlines.

• Business investment in customer-visible

software features which promise new

revenue versus investments in back-

office core processing can lead to systems

which lack capacity to meet customer

demand.

Southwest made a point of saying, in their action

plan, that the airline would spend over $1B on

“technology projects” in 2023. However, as in

prior years, they don’t specify whether or how

much of those projects are customer-facing,

versus how much is focused on improving the

stability and performance of the “back end”

operational systems required to get planes in the

air and back to the ground safely.

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Scalability

Scalability is a “desirable attribute of a network,

system, or process …, to process growing

volumes of work gracefully, and/or to be

susceptible to enlargement” (Bondi, 2000). In the

case of Southwest’s systems, a central question

of this case will be, were they scalable to handle

the load of the large volumes of activity that

ensued when flights were canceled? Southwest

had issues with crew and flight scheduling

systems (the systems that tracked crew location,

rest status, and contractual obligations), as well

as with crew reporting and authorization systems.

Pilots and cabin crew members were required to

dial a voice phone number to report their status

and location. Due to staffing constraints, that

number sometimes forced crew members to wait

up to 9 hours before they could begin to get

scheduled.

Similarly, passengers who tried to reschedule

their flights had to wait on hold for hours as the

Southwest customer service lines were jammed.

Those wait times were due both to the shortage

of trained customer service staff, as well as to the

lack of reliable information about how to schedule

those passengers on new flights. While customers

did have the option of conducting those activities

online (which the crew did not), most unhappy

customers want to talk with a real person to

ensure against further surprises.

Root Cause Analysis

Root cause analysis refers to the process of

attempting to discern the most fundamental, or

root, cause of a problem or situation. It is often

conducted, conceptually, by repeatedly asking

“why” after identifying a partial cause for a

problem. The goal of root cause analysis is to

focus on solving the fundamental cause, and to

avoid solving what amounts to a symptom, rather

than solving the underlying cause (Rooney &

Heuvel, 2004).

As an example of this process, for this situation:

Question: Why did Southwest Airlines have a

cascade of failures which led to a loss of

service which lasted for days and cost the

company between $725 and 825 million?

Answer: Because unusually severe weather

caused travel disruptions that overwhelmed

the scheduling system’s ability to manage all

of the airline’s scheduling and logistics needs.

Question: Why?

Answer: Because the system was not

designed nor provisioned to deal with such a

high level of disruption and the subsequent

logistical complexity.

Question: Why?

…

This line of questioning has taken us nearer to the

real cause of the outage: A lack of investment in

mission critical IT resources which left the

company with dangerously high technical debt.

Now that the causal analysis has drilled down to

a more relevant ‘why’ question, useful

explanations for the failure can be proffered.

Risk Management

Risk is a concept that is not unique to business or

technology - it is fundamental to many aspects of

everyday life. Risk refers to the probability that a

certain type of event will occur. Impact, in

contrast, is the magnitude of damage that might

result should the event occur. Risks are usually

perceived as having negative outcomes (injuries,

damage, cost, and the like), though sometimes

they are positive (we most commonly focus on

risk as being related to negative outcomes).

There are several fundamental approaches to

managing risk (Ahmed, 2017). One can avoid the

risk, transfer it to someone else, reduce it to

acceptable levels or simply accept it.

• Avoidance: If a risk is determined to be

too high, then you avoid the activity that

creates the risk.

• Transfer: In many cases, the risk can be

transferred to another party.

• Reduction: Risk reduction is a common

step for processes or activities that

cannot be avoided, and where the risk

cannot be transferred to another party.

• Acceptance: In some cases, the best

option is to accept a risk. If steps have

been taken (as in the above strategies) to

reduce or mitigate the risk, the remaining

level of accepted risk is known as

“residual risk.”

Sometimes, organizations take an approach that

externalizes some part of their risk. This means

that they (deliberately or inadvertently) transfer

some of their risk to external parties - customers,

vendors, employees, etc. In Southwest’s case,

some have argued that Southwest’s choices for

technology investment essentially transfer some

of the impact of these risks to various other

parties. Pilots and cabin crews are left away from

home and without work; customers are left

stranded somewhere during their travels,

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sometimes without their luggage. Some of these

external parties may be compensated, but often

they perceive that compensation to be

inadequate. The details of that transfer of risk and

impact are not calculated here, but it is clear that

some parties believe they did not agree to take

on that risk, and were not compensated

appropriately (e.g., Arnold & Walters, 2023).

Airline Industry Issues

Managing an airline industry requires dealing with

several specific challenges due to the nature of its

operations and competitive environment. Supply

chain challenges are common to all industries;

airlines in particular have very large and

expensive equipment (planes) that are hard to

move and are highly regulated, making the airline

industry somewhat uniquely challenging.

Similarly, airlines sell a product (seats) that are

highly time-sensitive – when the aircraft door

closes, the value of an empty seat immediately

goes to zero.

Challenges include:

• Crew rest requirements - flight and cabin

crew members are limited in how many

hours they can work in a row, and how

much rest/sleep time is required before

they can fly again.

• Pilots can “declare” a fatigue issue, even

if they’ve just finished a rest period.

• Getting all the pieces in the right place at

the right time is critical (Belhadi et al.,

2021; Vieira & Loures, 2016):

✓ Aircraft, crew, landing rights, gate

space, fuel, catering supplies, and

ground crews all must be ready in

time to get the plane in the air and to

land and unload it at the other end.

✓ Passengers must know the plane is

going to fly and be ready to board.

Unlike retail, where an unsold object

can be sold the next day, an

unsold/unoccupied seat on a plane

generates no revenue.

✓ The plane must be flight-ready, which

means it must have been inspected

and maintained by ground crews and

flight crews before the flight. Some of

this is expected to be handled on a

daily basis, when the plane is parked

overnight in its expected location.

✓ Planes are not generally expected to

sit idle for more than a day or two,

and an idle period triggers a need to

do additional maintenance and

testing. In this case, some of that had

to be done away from the usual

locations, requiring that maintenance

workers be moved to those airports.

Southwest operates an unusual routing system,

relative to its major US airline competition. Most

airlines operate with a small number of hub

airports, and most flights begin or end in one of

the hubs – a hub and spoke approach. Southwest,

in contrast, uses a point-to-point model. In this

model, flights tend to go direct from one

destination to another and back again, but do not

routinely transit through a central hub airport. As

such, getting aircraft back to a starting point for

a new day of flying is much harder to do with most

flights starting from smaller and less “busy”

airports (Sider, 2022a).

Potential Impact of Social Media on

Communication and Amplification

Communication occurs quickly and in real-time in

social media. The potential amplification/reach of

media in general and social media

communications specifically, including posts,

shares, comments, and “likes/dislikes” can be

significant, multiply very quickly, and amplify

things intentionally – or unintentionally. This is

particularly important during a crisis and presents

a modern-day challenge for firm leadership and

the marketing and PR teams, as social media

empowers the users and requires that firm’s focus

on effectively influencing perceptions, behaviors,

and knowledge. If the strategy is not well thought

out and executed, it can have a significant impact

on the brand – especially if the communication is

not seen as authentic. Also, in the absence of

information, people often make things up to fill

the void, and those things tend toward the

negative (Zide, Elman, & Shahani-Denning,

2014).

Impression management theory (Goffman, 2002)

establishes the correlation between branding and

managing others’ impressions, while signaling

theory (Spence, 1973) addresses how this plays

out in social media impacting employees,

customers, the media, and other stakeholders.

Impression management requires controlling and

managing others' impressions through the

information presented. In social media, the firm

is working to control its brand and social media

influencers are simultaneously working to

maintain and control their own brands,

consequently weighing in on posts and providing

their perspectives that influence perceptions

(Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre,

2011). Social media also provides the

customers/passengers the ability to partake real-

time in the conversations and influence the

dialogue, often done in their personal social

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media accounts and delivered as part of the

passengers’ personal brands (Van Zoonen,

2009).

The wide variety of stakeholders with potentially

competing priorities creates a complicated

landscape to navigate for the firm and often

requires a sophisticated multi-pronged approach.

The signaling theory in social media occurs when

signals are sent in social media to influence the

receiver’s perceptions, behaviors, and

knowledge. The receiver then determines if the

signal is authentic and impactful enough to

influence/change their perceptions. The multi-

stakeholder participation in the conversation

occurs in personal and corporate (both internal

and external) networks and platforms making it

difficult to influence – especially if there are not

clearly defined strategies, policies, procedures,

and trained effective staffing.

Crisis Communication Considerations and

Tools

Bukar et al (2020) conducted a systematic

literature review and found that the three most

popular response strategies to a crisis are:

rebuilding/apology followed by

denial/scapegoating and then, diminish/excuse

(see Figure 2 in the Appendix). Southwest’s

response strategy for the recent crises is

primarily based on apology with some information

strategy that will be further discussed in the

scenario, below.

Social Media-based Crisis Communication

Models

At a strategic level, it helps to consider three

models - Integrated Crisis Mapping (ICM),

Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT),

and Social Mediated Crisis Communication

(SMCC) - that link stakeholder emotions and the

response strategy as outlined in Figure 1.

Jin & Liu's (2010) SMCC model and framework

can then be applied tactically to help further

assess potential gaps, issues, and opportunities

in Southwest’s crisis communication strategy.

See Figure 3 in the Appendix for an overview of

that approach.

Figure 1 – Integrated Crisis Management

Strategy (Vignal Lambret & Barki, 2018)

3. DISCUSSION SCENARIOS

The following scenarios may be assigned by your

instructor as individual or group exercises. Each

is designed to be self-contained, so you could

analyze any one scenario on its own, and from

either a technical level or an organizational level.

Scenario 1 - Where’s my luggage?

Along with the numerous pains associated with

canceled and rescheduled flights, many

Southwest Airlines customers suffered an

additional headache - lost luggage. They’d check

their bags, wade through security, discover that

their flight had been canceled; and, at some

point, ask themselves… Where’s my luggage?

For many passengers who were fortunate enough

to book new flights and reach their intended

destination, they’d arrive to discover that their

luggage wasn't there. Unable to get concrete

information from baggage agents, who genuinely

didn’t know where their bags were, many

travelers would return to the airport multiple

times to check for their luggage while having to

purchase replacement clothing and belongings.

The reversed result was all too common as well.

Travelers unable to get to their destination

canceled their travel plans - only to discover that

their luggage went without them to their

destination, leading to additional time and cost

spent retrieving their bags. These separations

were frustrating and problematic, as some

checked luggage included pets, car keys,

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Christmas presents, and critical medications

(Sider, 2022b).

Across the country there was chaos in Southwest

baggage claim areas as passengers searched for

their luggage. Among them were a few good

Samaritans, who while searching for their own

luggage, took time out to text random phone

numbers that they saw on luggage tags, letting

their owners know where their bags were.

Southwest Airlines has for years carried the most

luggage of any U.S. carrier, in part because they

allow every passenger up to two bags for free.

They have a good record evidenced by a low

frequency of mishandled bags, lower than

competitors in general. However, Southwest does

not offer baggage tracking capabilities that are

common to many other airlines (Sider, 2022b).

Ultimately, many thousands of Southwest Airlines

customers went almost two weeks before they

got their luggage back (Gimbel, 2023; Sider,

2022b).

Questions

• As an airline customer, how might you

protect yourself from such an outcome?

• What information system solutions could

Southwest Airlines have had in place to

minimize this disruption?

• What other questions or observations can

you make about this scenario as it relates

to risk management, technical debt,

information, and information systems?

Scenario 2 - Where’d my flight crew go?

The brutal winter storm triggered a cascading set

of challenges. Thousands of Southwest Airlines

customers were affected, as were flight crews,

increasing the overall impact and delaying

recovery of normal operations.

As the storm continued, ground crews were

required to work overtime - in frigid conditions.

Some of them developed frostbite and many of

them called in sick. As ground operations slowed,

more flights were canceled. Cancellations in, for

instance, Denver led to cancellations in Dallas,

Chicago, etc. as planes and/or their crews

wouldn’t arrive from Denver (Leff, 2022). Steve,

a passenger passing through Denver on another

airline that day, reported seeing 2-3 thousand

people in line at Southwest counters.

In normal conditions, as part of their point-to-

point model, it’s very common for Southwest

flight crews to start their day in one city and finish

their day in another city after numerous flights.

With this once-in-a-lifetime storm, the many

cancellations caused planes, pilots, and flight

attendants to not be where they needed to be,

adding to challenges for the next day’s flights.

Once many Southwest pilots and flight attendants

were out of position, Southwest’s outdated crew

scheduling system failed to keep up with the work

of rescheduling, notifying, and relocating them.

In a message to the company, Southwest Chief

Operating Officer Andrew Watterson said, “we

had aircraft that were available, but the process

of matching up those crew members with the

aircraft could not be handled by our technology.”

He added that the process had to be handled

manually, which was "extraordinarily difficult”

(Sangal, Hayes, Chowdhury, Hammond, & Powell,

2022).

One possible contributor to these failures might

be found in Southwest’s investment strategy.

Recent capital expenditures, which includes

technology projects, have been $1 billion in 2019,

$515 million in 2020 and $505 million in 2021.

Similarly, the number of employees in their

business group which includes technology

workers dropped 27% from 2018 to 2021, while

overall full-time employee count dropped just 6%

over the same time period (Arnold & Walters,

2023).

Questions

• How could Southwest Airlines

communication systems be improved to

more easily allow flight crew personnel to

update their location and availability

when phone systems are overwhelmed?

• Compare and contrast Southwest Airlines'

“point-to-point” scheduling methodology

to their competitors’ “hub and spoke”

approach, including pros and cons of

each.

• What other questions or observations can

you make about this scenario as it relates

to risk management, technical debt,

information, and information systems?

Scenario 3 - Rebecca gets delayed by a

firewall, and (sort of) changes planes

On March 30, 2023, Southwest released its

“action plan” (Southwest Airlines, 2023) to

address the issues that arose in December 2022,

hoping to put its operational challenges behind it.

But Just a few weeks later, on Tuesday, April 18,

a firewall failed in a Southwest data center, which

grounded all Southwest flights. On that same

Tuesday, Rebecca was on her way from New

Orleans to Dallas, and on to California for a brief

visit with old friends. Her flight, and hundreds of

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others, were delayed for an hour due to failure of

“a vendor-supplied” component. The component

failure blocked access to “operational data,”

preventing flights from boarding or departing.

The winter breakdown, along with the April 18

failure, has been blamed by many on “technical

debt.” In the April 18 case, Southwest’s published

analysis reported the problem was a single third-

party component, specifically, a firewall (Lampert

& Singh, 2023).

In Rebecca’s case, even though her takeoff from

New Orleans was delayed by an hour, and her

layover in Dallas was reduced from two hours to

40 minutes, it turned out that the re-scheduling

system worked in her favor. She wound up right

back on the same plane for the trip to California,

and that leg of the journey landed on time.

However, while on the ground in Dallas, she had

to get off the plane and then get right back on

that same plane, using her second boarding pass.

Questions

• Given Southwest’s published analysis of

the April 18 issue, what is the alleged

cause of the delay?

• Is the alleged cause, from the prior

question, really the root cause? If not,

what more fundamental causes can you

identify?

• Do any elements of this explanation seem

potentially misleading or unsupported?

• What other questions or observations can

you make about this scenario as it relates

to risk management, technical debt,

information, and information systems?

Scenario 4 - Flight and cabin crews ask,

“Why do I have to call to reschedule? I can’t

just click a button?”

Mary and Sam (fictional characters based on a

composite of related individuals), Southwest

flight attendants, had landed in Burbank and

ended their workday as the winter storm started

to have its effects. Sam realized he was not likely

to be assigned a flight any time soon, so he

rented a car and drove three hours to visit friends

near Los Angeles. Mary stayed at a hotel near the

airport. Both would need to let Southwest know

where they were at the start of their next duty

period. Janice (also a fictional composite), the

pilot on that Burbank flight, still had several hours

left in her duty period, and stayed at the airport.

Southwest requires crew members to use a voice

telephone system to deliver the data required to

allow its crew scheduling team and their software,

called SkySolver, to make informed scheduling

decisions. SkySolver’s job (working with other

systems) is to get the crews, planes, and

passengers aligned, assigned, and positioned for

their next flight, and to let crew members know

where they have been assigned (Sider, 2022a).

When large numbers of crew members were

reassigned, due in this case to canceled flights,

the task of collecting crew data and delivering

assignments was messy and ultimately not

scalable without adding large numbers of

additional staff in the crew scheduling call center.

There are a number of constraints around how

Southwest, and all airlines, can schedule crews.

For pilots, so-called “Part 117” rules control how

much rest a crew member needs to have between

assigned duty periods (which often include

several flights) and between flights. Both flight

attendants’ and pilots’ assignments are governed

in part by union rules. Some of those rules may

have been involved in forcing the voice-based

dialog on crew scheduling (Snyder, 2023).

About those three Burbank crew members: Janice

had been scheduled to fly out of Burbank, but her

destination airport was closed. She tried to reach

someone at Southwest to arrange to make

another flight, but to no avail - she was on hold

for several hours, and then her duty period

expired. Sam was trying, at his friend’s home, to

get scheduled for the next day, but no luck. Mary

returned to the airport the next day and was able

to reach Southwest’s crew assignment team by

phone early in the day and get scheduled for a

flight out of Burbank. But even that was difficult,

as it took significant time to find all of the crew

members and get them to Burbank, ready to fly.

Questions:

• In looking at this series of events, what

seems to be the bottleneck in the system

as described from the crew members’

viewpoint?

• What alternative methods of data

collection might be used instead?

• If you were consulting for Southwest,

what fundamental changes would you

recommend they make to their crew

availability and scheduling system?

• What other questions or observations can

you make about this scenario as it relates

to risk management, technical debt,

information, and information systems?

Scenario 5 - A Myriad of Problems

Readying an airplane for flight requires many

steps by many teams. Schedulers assign a plane

and flight crew. Reservation systems compile a

list of expected passengers. When the designated

plane lands, ground crew members guide the pilot

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to the terminal gate and connect the passageway

to the plane. As passengers disembark, baggage

handlers move luggage off the plane, while other

teams clean the cabin and bring in food. And, all

the while, gate agents are readying passengers

for boarding.

Winter weather - particularly devastating with

Winter Storm Elliott - often adds additional steps

to the preparation process. Frost, snow and/or ice

on any of the critical surfaces of an airplane can

affect takeoff performance. Under these

conditions, maintenance workers and the ground

crew follow deicing/anti-icing procedures.

Then, throw into the mix Southwest's self-

inflicted challenges - crew scheduling software

unable to scale as needed, phone systems

swamped due to insufficient staffing levels - and

you get a myriad of problems:

• Southwest gate agents struggled to

provide flight crews with passenger

manifests, leading to delays as crew

members walked through cabins checking

off passengers against a paper print out.

• Although terminals were filled with

passengers stuck due to delayed and

canceled flights, gate agents often

couldn’t create tickets for them, leading

to flight delays and open seats once

flights finally took off.

• Seth, a Southwest pilot, landed at Orange

County airport in California, an hour

behind schedule. On the tarmac, he

discovered that there were no open gates

due to already gated flights suffering their

own delays. This led to further delays.

• Veronica, another Southwest pilot, was

asked to “deadhead” as a passenger to

Albuquerque (so she could pilot a flight

starting there), but then her flight leaving

from Albuquerque was canceled. There

were countless instances of flight crews

deadheading, sometimes multiple times,

trying to set them up for assignments

that never materialized.

Trying to recover, Southwest reduced the number

of planned flights, giving them time to get flight

crews and planes into proper position to return to

normal operations. Even this approach led to

challenges. Planes can’t remain parked for long,

so they were put into both short- and long- term

storage, which required that they rotate through

their entire fleet to keep their planes from sitting

idle too long. Workers had to travel in order to

maintain those planes (Sider, 2022c).

Questions

• What changes to Southwest’s systems

might have made it easier to find a full

flight crew in a situation like this?

• What further problems result from these

challenges?

• What other questions or observations can

you make about this scenario as it relates

to risk management, technical debt,

information, and information systems?

Scenario 6 - People are saying what? Is an

apology enough?

On December 29, 2022, as reported in multiple

media outlets (Muntean & Wallace, 2023), the

Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg,

whose office received thousands of complaints,

sent a letter to Robert Jordan, the Southwest CEO

and posted it on the Department of

Transportation’s (DOT) website (Buttigieg, 2022).

The letter confirmed their phone conversation and

stated four key priorities: getting passengers to

their destinations, providing services for

disrupted passengers, providing appropriate

refunds, and reuniting passengers with their

luggage.

On December 30, Robert Jordan stated, "This has

been an incredible disruption, and we can't have

this again" (Sider, 2022c). Southwest has

repeatedly apologized in the media. On March 30,

2023, Southwest posted their “Final Summary

and Action Plan” on their website outlining three

key root causes: “Winter Operations” - a lack of

winter infrastructure, equipment, and staffing,

which impacted flight crews; “cancellation waves”

that overloaded the system and forced a

reversion to manual processes; and “cross-team

collaboration” - communication process gaps

created bottlenecks and issues. The report adds

an information response strategy component and

indicates significant progress has been made but

it does not address the technology issues to any

substantive level.

Unfortunately, Southwest has continued to have

technology issues and based on social media they

are continuing with the “apology response

strategy” and appear to still be lacking cross-

team collaboration regarding messaging, as key

components of their marketing communication

and PR strategy are at odds, as outlined below.

On Tuesday morning, April 18th, José was flying

from Miami to Dallas when his plane was

grounded on the tarmac. The longer they sat, the

more concerned he became. José pulled out his

cell phone and searched Facebook to see if

anything had been posted - he quickly found

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many posts all stating things like: “Heads Up -

Southwest asked the FAA to pause all nationwide

departures due to technology issues … this is

crazy as it has been less than six months since

Southwest had to cancel 15,000 flights”.

José found a lot of other posts with similar

information. He began skimming them when a

new post popped up with the following embedded

in the post: “This from Southwest: As a result of

the intermittent technology issues that we

experienced, we should hopefully be resuming

our operation as soon as possible. We apologize

for any inconvenience this may cause, but we’re

hoping to get everyone going ASAP. STAND BY”

(Nick Beres NC5, 2023). José began to read the

352 comments (many from very unhappy

stranded flyers) and decided to share the post as

425 others did, to try to help any of his friends

and family who might also be traveling.

José scrolled back to the top of his feed, and when

it refreshed, he noticed a new post from another

passenger - PAUSE CANCELED - GET READY TO

SIT AND WAIT……THERE WILL BE DELAYS! - this

post already had 3,000 likes and 1,000 shares.

An hour later the flight attendant announced,

“The issue has been resolved, and we are getting

in line to take off. Please take your seats."

José got to Dallas 3 hours late and met his son at

baggage claim. As they waited for his bags, José’s

son showed him a post from “The Points Guy,” an

influencer that he follows. The post said:

“UPDATE: Southwest Airlines flights resume after

IT issues cause systemwide ground stop.

Southwest Airlines grounded its entire operation

on Tuesday morning, citing unspecified IT issues.

The airline did not give a time for the fix. Here’s

the latest. (536 comments and 321 shares)”.

On April 21, 2023,the Department of Justice’s

(DOJ) legal arm joined the investigation (Skores,

2023). “The investigation is focused on whether

Southwest engaged in unrealistic flight

scheduling which is illegal under federal law and

whether Southwest provided timely refunds and

reimbursements to affected passengers as

required,” the spokesperson said.

Questions

• Given the responses of the public and

stakeholders (media, passengers,

influencers - “The Points Guy,” DOT, DOJ,

and others), how successful has

Southwest been in managing perceptions

about the technology and technical debt

issues?

• What would you advise Southwest to

consider doing immediately/in the short

term based on recent activities and

results?

• What advice would you give to the

Southwest leadership about their brand?

• What other questions or observations can

you make about this scenario as it relates

to risk management, technical debt,

information, and information systems?

4. ADDITIONAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Please feel free to use these prompts as you and

your instructor see fit, to conduct additional

research and analysis of this painfully spectacular

failure.

Social Media Engagement and Artificial

Intelligence: Social media obviously provide a

mechanism for significant numbers of people to

publicly impact a company’s brand. Responding in

a timely manner to individual comments is

impossible using human-powered responses.

However, recent developments in generative

artificial intelligence may change that dynamic.

Consider the risks and tradeoffs associated with

using so-called generative AI to respond to

customer social media postings and share your

insights.

Action Plan Review: Southwest Airlines has

published their action plan (Southwest Airlines,

2023) about three months after the winter

disruption settled down. Read the document (see

reference list) and provide feedback per your

instructor’s guidance about some particular

aspect of the plan. This could be an assessment

of the plan’s candor, an analysis of the timeline

called out by the plan, comments on the relative

investments in infrastructure and inward-facing

technology vs. external or customer-facing

technology, or others.

Outsourcing, Customizing Software, and

Technical Debt: Outsourcing is the process of

moving a logically consistent unit of work to

another company, paying that company to do the

work for your company. Southwest used

outsourcing to get access to the flight- and crew-

scheduling software called SkySolver. They are

reported to have acquired this technology from

GE’s Aviation Services unit and have heavily

modified it to suit their specific needs. What are

the tradeoffs and risks of buying or licensing

software from someone else and then

customizing it? What are the advantages and

disadvantages? Why not just build one’s own

technology for operations like this, since that

gives you much more control of how the system

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works? 
 
5. CONCLUSIONS 
 
Airlines are not easy businesses to run. They are 
capital  and  labor  intensive,  they  are  subject  to 
impacts from weather, politics, public health, and 
other  unexpected  issues.  And  they  are 
competitive,  seeking  not  only  to  provide  good 
price and performance for customers but also an 
appropriate yield for every seat on the plane, and 
to keep planes in the air and generating revenue. 
 
The Southwest Airlines 2022 Winter cancellation 
storm provides an opportunity to dig deeply into 
the  need  for  scalability,  the  challenges  of  risk 
management  and  technical  debt,  and  the  wide 
variety of challenges of managing airline supply 
chains. In addition, it brought up the challenges 
of brand  management  amidst  a  crisis. We  hope 
that this provides you with a useful and accessible 
tool  to  apply  these  fundamental  business  and 
technology  concepts  to  real-world  events  with 
very real-world impacts. 
 
6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
 
The authors appreciate the support and insights 
of various industry experts who provided insights 
for  this  case.  The  authors  also  appreciate  the 
productive feedback provided by their peers, and 
by the reviewers and conference chairs. 
 
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Appendix 1 – Figures

Figure 2 – Bukar Study of Crisis Response Strategies (Bukar et al., 2020)

Figure 3 – Integrated Crisis Management Strategy (Jin & Liu, 2010)