During Christmas and New Year’s, Southwest Airlines canceled almost 17,000 flights and stranded hundreds of thousands of people in airports across the U.S. The cost to the company’s reputation may be immeasurable, but Southwest estimated its immediate cost at a staggering $825 million.
Many factors contributed to the meltdown, but in the end, it boils down to poor software infrastructure. Flight scheduling is complicated generally, but particularly so for Southwest. Other airlines favor a hub-and-spoke model, bringing flights into major hubs like Detroit and then connecting to smaller airports on the spokes. In contrast, Southwest favors point-to-point flights, minimizing layovers. Crew members required to fly aircraft are dispersed across the country, and without a large hub, canceled flights are far more likely to strand personnel. A canceled flight in Dallas might mean that another flight in Los Angeles doesn’t have a pilot, and that might mean yet another flight in Las Vegas doesn’t have flight attendants. One canceled flight follows another like a row of dominoes. When poor weather slammed airports across the country during the week of Christmas, the entire house of cards came tumbling down.
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