Southwest Airlines Resumes Ticket Sales, Prepares to Restart Regular Flights Friday

Southwest has canceled more than 15,000 flights in the past week, according to FlightAware. By midmorning Thursday, the airline had scrubbed 39 flights scheduled for Friday.

Southwest’s top executives told employees that shrinking down had helped. The operation has stabilized, and they said the airline is ready to ramp back up again.

Chief Executive Bob Jordan told employees Thursday morning in a video message that the smaller network is running well—95% of its flights were on time Wednesday—and that the airline is ready to return to normal on Friday.

“Together we did what we needed to do to set ourselves up to operate our regular schedule tomorrow,” he said.

Union leaders who represent Southwest’s pilots, flight attendants and other workers have faulted the airline’s lack of investment in technology over the years for many of its problems. Southwest is also facing heightened scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers, who have said they are closely monitoring the airline’s response to the crisis.

Executives have acknowledged the need to upgrade inadequate platforms, like the SkySolver system that it uses to redo crew schedules during disruptions and that was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the disruption over the weekend.

Their more immediate task this week has been to piece the airline back together—making sure that pilots and flight attendants are where they need to be, trying to reunite lost bags with their owners, and ensuring that planes are tuned up and ready to go.

Southwest executives said ticket sales were resuming after the airline had limited bookings on remaining flights for much of this week, hoping to avoid a scenario where customers bought seats on flights that would ultimately be canceled. The airline also wanted to make sure seats would be available to take pilots and flight attendants where they had to be on Friday, Chief Operating Officer

Andrew Watterson

said Wednesday night in the internal update.

“It looks like the pieces are in place on the crew side for everyone to be covered for Friday morning,” he said. To get to that point, Southwest sought volunteers to help work through a deluge of tasks to repair schedules for pilots and flight attendants.

Baggage Stuck in Southwest Airlines Cancellation Fiasco

At the height of the disruption, the airline’s crew schedulers had to revert to manually assigning pilots and flight attendants to flights when automated software couldn’t keep pace with the volume of changes. Even with the smaller schedule, the group was overwhelmed by the remaining workload, Mr. Watterson said in a previous update this week.

Former crew schedulers working in other areas of the business stepped in to triage inbound phone calls, according to a memo Wednesday from

Lee Kinnebrew,

Southwest’s vice president of flight operations, and

Brendan Conlon,

vice president of crew scheduling. Other employee groups were being trained to support overwhelmed schedulers.

“We returned to kind of normal operations in crew scheduling, which is a key point in our recovery,” Mr. Watterson said Wednesday. “Now we’re focused on how we go back to our original schedule,” he said, adding that the airline would reinstate some flights to get people in place.

Southwest’s ground-operations staff worked to scan thousands of missing bags to figure out where they’d all ended up. The airline set up new call centers to investigate lost items and update customers, Mr. Kinnebrew and Mr. Conlon wrote. The final step was to coordinate with

FedEx Corp.

and other delivery companies to truck bags between airports and reduce the strain on the airline’s remaining flights this week, they wrote.

Running a smaller schedule introduced some new technical challenges, executives said. Planes can’t stay parked for long before they need to be put into short- or long-term storage, so the airline had to rotate through its fleet to ensure that aircraft weren’t sitting idle too long with the smaller schedule. Maintenance workers had to fan out to different locations to perform checks on planes that weren’t in their usual locations,

Kurt Kinder,

vice president of maintenance operations, wrote to employees Wednesday.

Mr. Jordan said Wednesday that he remains focused on solving the underlying problems that triggered the week’s chaos.

“If anybody is worrying about who’s accountable, I’m accountable for this,” Mr. Jordan said. “We’ll come out of this a better airline.”

Write to Alison Sider at [email protected]