The Southwest Airlines meltdown that’s stranded thousands of passengers across the U.S. has its root in outdated technology that analysts and its unions have warned about for years.
Southwest’s system — flying point to point instead of the hub-and-spoke model used by rivals — is a point of pride, deeply embedded in its five-decade history and helps it reach many medium-size markets. But the behind-the-scenes technology that makes it possible to schedule crews and aircraft all proved brittle this week after a severe blizzard halted thousands of flights, just as it did in a similar systemic collapse in October 2021. When the computers weren’t up to the task, humans had to step in to hunt down pilots and flight crews by telephone in order to manage passenger backlogs.
"People have a right to be really angry and annoyed,” Cowen analyst Helane Becker said Wednesday in a Bloomberg Television interview. "They should have invested years ago in these systems and they just didn’t.”