A senior executive of Southwest Airlines saidsorry to a Senate committee Thursday for a December disaster and stated the airlinecompany is updating softwareapplication to aid repair its failure to reassign teams after the winterseason storm.
The president of the Southwest pilots’ union informed senators that airlinecompany leaders neglected calls to enhance innovation for years, then mishandled the healing from the storm — losing track of workers and operating more than 500 empty flights while travelers were stuck on the ground over the vacations.
The remarks came throughout a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee, which focused on the Southwest breakdown as it started to probe disturbances that impact millions of air tourists every year.
“We understand this won’t be the last snowstorm to hit this nation. So let’s figure why Southwest’s operations collapsed and what requires to modification so this neverever occurs onceagain on Southwest or any other airlinecompany,” stated the committee chair, Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.
Democrats on the committee were disappointed that Southwest didn’t respond to cautions from its unions that it required to enhance its crew-scheduling system long priorto December’s fiasco in which the airlinecompany canceled almost 17,000 flights, stranding more than 2 million consumers.
“You were alerted,” Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., informed Southwest’s chief operating officer, Andrew Watterson. “That mismanagement definitely led to genuine discomfort, genuine damage for households.”
Cantwell stated she heard from constituents who got no assistance or guidelines from Southwest after their flights were canceled.
“They were on their own, all of them,” she stated.
Republicans and a lobbyist for the airlinecompany market utilized the hearing to argue versus propositions — consistingof ones that President Joe Biden promoted this week in his state of the union speech — to enforce brand-new guidelines on airlinecompanies, such as broadening payment for postponed flights and restricting airlinecompany costs.
Republicans stated such steps would cause fares to ri