Southwest Airlines Co.’s operations chief plans to tell U.S. senators that the carrier’s scheduling systems became overwhelmed during a late-December storm, leading to a breakdown that forced thousands of flight cancellations and cost the company more than $1 billion.
The winter system moved across the U.S., triggering a cascading series of problems for Southwest that weighed on the carrier’s ability to communicate among its teams and get crew members in place, according to prepared testimony from Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson.
“As the situation escalated and close-in cancellations grew, Crew Scheduling simply couldn’t keep up with the overwhelming volume of changes,” Watterson says in the testimony, a copy of which was seen by Bloomberg. The executive will appear Thursday before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee to discuss the recent issues.
