It’s been over three months since Dallas-based Southwest Airlines’ historic holiday meltdown that stranded millions of passengers across the country.
Since then, the carrier has testified in a senate hearing, been poked at on Saturday Night Live and unveiled steps to move past one of the largest disruptions in the carrier’s 52-year history.
CEO Bob Jordan, who was promoted to lead the company over a year ago, said despite the downturn from the disruption, there’s still room to grow and learn from the past. Jordan points to future opportunities for growth, more hiring and a stronger operation in an interview with The Dallas Morning News.
This interview has been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.
Q: Can you frame out the possibilities of how to grow within the confines that you have at Dallas Love Field, DFW Airport?
A: I’ll be real generic because we are always thinking about the question. There’s nothing active to talk about. It’s really like any large metro area, you rarely have just one. A lot of times you rarely have two airports. You have secondary airports in the Metroplex. Because Love Field is capped, the options are to look at other places that you could serve in the Metroplex. Obviously, DFW could be one of those, other airports can be available as well. Just know that we’re constantly looking at and think about that because of two things. We want to serve the community. And second, those can be very long-life projects to bring to bear. When you pick a location, it may take a long time to bring that to fruition, whether that’s because of a lease question or a facilities construction question. Again, it’s 2025 and beyond before we can do that in any case, but we want to keep growing. We want to keep serving the people of Dallas-Fort Worth.
Q: If the McKinney voters approved the bond issue in May, is that a viable option for Southwest Airlines?
A: I think a lot of the devil’s in the details. I would rather not speak to it, just except that we’re large. When we come into a location, we bring a lot of customers and so any facility would have to be able to support what we would bring to the community or to the airport.
Q: 2025 is coming faster I think than we can anticipate. At what point would you have to start talking to an airport? Would it be now or would it be six months from then or?
A: We’re always talking. We talk to airports constantly because we opened in 18 new cities during the pandemic. We didn’t start from scratch. Those are airports that we had been talking to and they were in the queue.
I think goal one is to get our lease extended at Love Field, because it’s important we invest in the airport. We have a traffic base in Dallas and beyond we serve the airport like no other. Nobody’s going to use the facility like we do. To me, job one is ensuring our future for a long time at Love Field. Past that, we have a duty to our customers, we have a duty to our shareholders to keep growing here. We’ll look at all options.
Q: By the end of the year, when you’re back to the full schedule, how many pilots do you have to hire in 2023?
A: Net of retirements, we hired roughly 1,800 last year, and we’ll hire roughly 900 this year to get to that point.
Q: The root cause report that you talked about. Has Southwest Airlines released that publicly?
A: We’re still working on the final report from Oliver Wyman and combining it with the internal reviews and the board review. We wanted to be transparent and quick in getting the information out there. What you see on the microsite is the summary. There’s two things. There’s a graphic summary of what happened and what we’re doing. There’s a 10 or 12-page detailed narrative which is effectively that final summary of what was in that final report.
Q: I want to ask about the senate hearing from February. Your absence became a talking point among lawmakers. So just point blank, where were you? Do you regret not being there?
A: Not to get into governmental affairs too much, but I’m not dodging your question. I promise. There’s a way you go about understanding what the hearing is about and who needs to show because of that — and they called Andrew. I was more than happy to go, but it was about our operational performance. He’s the expert. He’s our COO. Andrew was the right person to show.
Did that cause issues? It’s hard to know. I made the decision that he was the right person. Again, the committee called Andrew. I was traveling. We negotiated on days and that was the day we were given. The date that I couldn’t do. At the end of the day, I think it was all fine. Andrew did a fabulous job, was very transparent and I think he answered the questions. But again, those are choices that you’ve got to make.
Q: With the improvements you’ve put in place, what’s going to be the acid test on whether those actually address the root causes that you’ve been talking about. Is it another historic winter storm?
A: The number one acid test to me is that we continue to run a great operation and then we manage these large-scale irregular events because they’re going to keep happening. We don’t tilt over, we don’t repeat. The second is going to be a continued recovery of trust from our employees and the trust of our customers which we’re seeing and very grateful. We’re seeing that today.
Q: Did you see the SNL skit?
A: I did not watch it. I’m not naïve. I’m an optimistic person and what matters is that we execute and that we take care of our customers. What matters isn’t what is on SNL. And I’m not against SNL.
Q: Folks are already talking about how busy summer is going to be for travel. Post-disruption, are there different approaches you’re taking toward summer?
A: No. 1 is come into the summer as prepared as possible. The No. 1 thing is have the right staffing levels. We’ve ensured that we have the right ramp staff, the number of pilots matches the aircraft we can fly. We’re really in good shape with our flight attendants. No. 2 is have the systems in place so that we understand early on if there’s any indication that the operation is sort of going left or right of what we would expect. We put in a lot of early warning indicator dashboards that helps us see that. The third is a hyperfocus by leadership on the very thing you just talked about, if you begin to get into an issue. The fourth is a more sophisticated way to think about what’s happening.
