Southwest Airlines is buying more de-icing trucks, lining up additional de-icing pads at key airports, and buying more engine covers and heaters to avoid a repeat of the airline's December breakdown.
A severe winter storm just before Christmas affected all airlines, but Southwest struggled far more than the others to recover. It wound up canceling nearly 17,000 flights in 10 days before resuming a normal schedule. Unions for pilots and flight attendants said technology used to reassign crews to planes bogged down, and workers spent hours on hold when they called headquarters for instructions.
“I do not think we have a chronic underinvestment in technology,” he said at a JPMorgan investor conference. He repeated a previous estimate that the Dallas company will spend more than $1.3 billion on information technology this year. Jordan also defended the airline’s business model against critics who say its point-to-point route map makes it more vulnerable to flight disruptions that start in one part of the country — caused by bad weather, for example — and then ripple across the network.
The frozen conditions in Denver and Chicago started the mess, he said, “and it would have caused the issue no matter what the network structure was.” Southwest said in a filing that it continues to expect to report a loss for the first quarter, with lingering fallout from the December crisis cutting revenue by up to $350 million. That is on top of an $800 million drop in fourth-quarter pretax income that Southwest attributed to the meltdown, which is being investigated by federal officials.
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