Southwest Airlines' (SWA) chief operating officer Andrew Watterson said the carrier "messed up" and did not show "enough winter operational resilience" during late December storms that led to it cancelling 16,700 flights.
Addressing a US senate hearing on strengthening airline operations and consumer protections, Watterson confirmed the carrier planned to spend $1.3bn in 2023 on upgrading IT systems after an outage contributed to the flight cancellations.
"From December 21st to December 29th, Southwest experienced a historic event with a combination of challenges we hadn’t experienced before. What began as a weather event on December 21st turned into a crew scheduling event by December 24th," Watterson told the senate's commerce, science and transportation committee.
"I want to take a moment to sincerely and humbly apologise to those who were impacted by this disruption," he said.
Sharon Pinkerton, vice president of Airlines for America, an industry body representing the biggest carriers in the US, said airlines typically do not announce mass cancellations.
"The system had to deal with the impacts of Hurricane Ian in September and Hurricane Nicole in November, among others, and in the final week of December the country was hit with a bomb cyclone. Despite all these events, preliminary data show that US airlines completed more than 97% of flights at U.S. airports in 2022", she said.
Less than two weeks after Southwest's outage, an IT glitch at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) saw a nationwide flight grounding order. But airlines cancelled "just 2 percent of flights" in the month, Pinkerton said.
Southwest was criticised during the hearing by the head of its pilots union, the Southwest Airlines Pilots' Association (SWAPA).
"What SWAPA pilots saw – and have known for years – is that SWA struggles to manage nearly any disruption, regardless of the cause," said Casey Murray. "Our recent history – and the data shows – a pattern of increasingly disruptive operational failures, mis-prioritisation of resources, and hollow leveraging of our culture to cover up poor management decisions."
Paul Hudson, the president of consumer group Flyersrights, told the hearing that airlines "are incentivised to deliver poor service" and accused Southwest of ignoring calls by staff to upgrade "grossly outdated technology".