LOS ANGELES — Thousands of canceled flights. Countless separated bags. Millions of angry passengers.
Southwest Airlines’ costly holiday meltdown highlighted how quickly airline operations can go off the rails, particularly when you add bad weather to the complex calculation of how to get crews on the right planes at the right time.
The Dallas-based airline has pledged to do better. Southwest’s chief executive said the company would invest more than $1 billion to upgrade its IT system, and on Thursday during the first quarterly investor call since the fiasco, company executives spent significant time pledging that the year-end failures would not be repeated. In all, the company canceled more than 16,700 flights, sharply more than other airlines, which recovered faster from the multi-state storms than Southwest did.
