Chaos in the skies and airports of the United States. In this case, the consideration is not a set phrase, an exaggeration or the partial vision of travelers about delays in air transport. Southwest, the world’s leading low-cost airline, had to completely stop its operations this Tuesday due to possible computer problems that have affected the entire flight network of the company during the morning. The problem has been of such magnitude that the company’s management has requested the FAA, the highest transportation authority in the United States, to be able to completely stop its operations, progressively grounding all its aircraft.
The stoppage of a company’s operations is a serious problem and the domino effect that occurs throughout a day, since the planes that do not arrive at the destination airport can no longer make the following flights, becomes a setback of enormous dimensions in a giant company. The numbers of this airline are enormous: it has a fleet of just over 770 planes, all of the 737 model. Next to it, Vueling, even though it is not one, seems like a small company with its fleet of 124 Airbus. The American airline, famous for having a very Spartan service, operates an average of 4,000 flights a day, the bulk of them internal, which has made it the largest air carrier in the country.
The company was born in 1971 in the state of Texas, where it continues to maintain its central services half a century later. From its early days, it chose to differentiate itself from the rest of the North American airlines due to its low prices and offering a point-to-point operation, without connecting flights at hub airports. It also stood out for operating a single aircraft model to save costs and for having cabins with a single class. That was a philosophy that began to be studied by businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. There were other attempts, although this was the most observed.
One of those interested in Southwest’s business model was Tony Ryan, creator of Ryanair. That trademark, so famous today, identified a small regular airline in the mid-1980s that began its history with a 15-seater turboprop in Waterford, Ireland. Mr. Ryan sent one of his tax advisers to Texas. His mission would be to thoroughly study the operations of the Texan airline and try to replicate the formula to extend it throughout Europe. The young executive who crossed the Atlantic and returned to Ireland full of ideas, became Ryanair’s CFO in 1988 and a decade later became CEO. By applying, with some nuances, Southwest’s radical low-cost policy on this continent, he created a different way of operating and flying. O’Leary and his way of understanding the business changed the industry forever.
What Southwest today has called a “technological problem” to refer to the cause that has stopped its operation, adds to the black days experienced last Christmas, a stage in which air traffic intensifies spectacularly throughout the country . As of December 21, delays multiplied and flight cancellations numbered in the thousands. The cause of the whole problem was made public in the middle of the holidays: to save costs, the company maintained a very outdated system of assigning flights to the crews. When it failed, the telephone and manual system had to be used to coordinate a huge operation, which stalled the operation of the company. The federal government Department of Transportation launched an investigation to find the real causes of all this in order to force the airline to correct its policies. Almost four months later, Southwest has once again shown the fragility of being a giant airline with a structure that may not be the most appropriate for its needs as soon as problems appear on a day-to-day basis.
