Airlines Boost Resilience To Navigate Weather Woes

It is nearly 80F in Dallas when Southwest Airlines executives sit down for a post-summer interview—and thoughts are already moving to ice, with their sights set on November and beyond.

“It’s Thanksgiving right now in crew planning,” quips Mark Sutcliffe, vice president of crew planning and analytics. “We’re focusing on those holiday schedules, certainly, and really thinking about deicing.”

Southwest Airlines has been focused on improving operational resilience to disruptive weather events over the past 18 months. Its summer performance points to “further evidence of the progress we’re making,” CEO Bob Jordan said in a statement following the Labor Day travel period.

Welcoming a record 54 million customers across more than 414,000 flights over May 24-Sept. 2, the carrier improved its on-time performance by 2 percentage points compared to 2023, with a 99.3% completion factor. Southwest closed out the season having achieved a 99.9% completion factor on more than 14,500 scheduled flights over the Aug. 30-Sept. 2 holiday weekend.

The airline has made considerable investments in its technology and team since the December 2022 disruption that began with Winter Storm Elliott and cascaded into a multiday event as the carrier worked to realign crews, schedules and aircraft. The resulting action plan has upgraded airport infrastructure, equipment and preparedness; enhanced cross-team collaboration; and accelerated investments in tools for irregular operations.

One of those tools is CAIRO (Crew and Aircraft Integrated Recovery Optimizer), which can be called into play as a last resort if plans fall short or conditions change.

“The example I always use is, if this building was on fire and you needed to activate the sprinkler system, CAIRO is kind of that sprinkler system,” Sutcliffe says. “Whatever plan we built, if something went wrong with that plan—maybe the weather changed, there was a technology issue—whatever it is, we have the ability, then, as kind of a Plan B, to activate CAIRO.”

Southwest believes the concept is industry-leading, allowing the airline to determine quickly which parts of the crew network are out of position, focus on the areas it can repair, cancel where it must and ultimately reset the network.

“The most sensitive network that an airline has is its crew network, and that’s simply because it’s people,” Sutcliffe explains. “If you ever really fall behind, that’s where that mountain becomes so difficult to overcome.”

CAIRO was activated on Christmas Eve 2023, when a large amount of fog disrupted operations at Chicago Midway International Airport. That helped Southwest come out of an unplanned event in stable condition. “Though Southwest cancellations ticked up slightly, operations got back on track quickly thereafter,” Morgan Stanley analysis noted at the time.

CAIRO was not activated this summer. “We’ve invested in that tool to use in an emergency," Sutcliffe notes. "You’re always doing everything you can to avoid the use of that tool.” 

Boeing aircraft delivery delays have allowed Southwest to buffer its summer schedule more than in previous years, with extra pilots available to make that work, aiding its improved completion factor. But a unique element is also in play, involving new collaboration among the teams responsible for planning and execution.

Adam Decaire is senior vice president of network planning and operations control, overseeing two groups that lived in separate functions until about a year and a half ago.

“This is the first time, I think, that any major carrier has put network planning with network ops control,” he explains, also pointing to internal alignment with crew scheduling. “We’re able to get on the same page, and then we go out and we execute.”

Lessons from this summer are helping to build momentum going into winter, he says. Teams already are conducting tabletop exercises and coordinating with different groups to plan for potential disruptions.

“We’re getting out in front of it a little more effectively,” Decaire says. “We are on it a lot quicker. We’ve had tech outages, and you haven’t seen them, you haven’t heard about them. . . . We’ve just set ourselves up a little more effectively, and we’re just maniacally on that to make sure that we’re constantly improving as we’re getting ready for winter operations.”

Facing a Stormy Future

Weather is the leading cause of U.S. air traffic delays, accounting for 60% in 2023, according to FAA data. Climate change projections are factoring into airlines’ long-term planning, including the potential for increased coastal flooding, extreme heat and more severe storms, among other risks (AW&ST Sept. 18-Oct. 1, 2023, p. 32).

In recent years, substantial weather-related disruptions over busy holiday travel periods have not only affected Southwest, but have also spurred change at American Airlines and United Airlines.

For American, two days of high winds at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport over the 2021 Halloween holiday weekend triggered cascading delays and cancellations that left pilots and flight attendants timed out or out of position. At the time, representation for its pilot union cited an antiquated IT system as a major problem, describing it as slow to react and without modern staffing algorithms. For United, a July holiday weekend in 2023 became what its CEO would call “one of the most operationally challenging . . . in my entire career” as an overwhelmed scheduling system compounded the effects of severe weather.

The airlines prioritized investments in crew technology after each event, and the enhanced preparedness appears to be paying off.

“Despite significant flight disruptions in July brought on by the global CrowdStrike outage, summer storms and record-breaking air travel volumes, the year-to-date cancellation rate remains below 2022 and pre-pandemic levels,” noted the U.S. Transportation Department in late August.

When the global IT outage occurred on July 19, American had operations restored by evening, running a near-99% completion factor the following day (AW&ST Aug. 12-Sept. 1, p. 21). Explaining his airline’s quick response, American CEO Robert Isom pointed to lessons learned and technology built.

“What we have to go through just in terms of weather across our network, it gives us great experience in terms of disruptions,” he said after the outage. “One of the things that we’ve learned is that in terms of any disruption, you better keep track of your aircraft, certainly, but also your crews, wherever they are. . . . We’ve built technology, and we’ve done the right things to ensure that we take early precautions, early steps.”

Overall, the carrier says it has set a new standard in recovery after severe weather disruptions, which was not the case several years ago.

“Pre-pandemic we would have major storms at Dallas-Fort Worth or in Charlotte, and two days after the storm we’re still struggling a bit, and our customers were asking, ‘What’s going on?’ and we said, ‘We’re not going to do that anymore,’ ” Chief Operating Officer David Seymour says.

The key, Seymour stresses, is keeping continuity with crews. “When I talk about our resilience, our recovery from major events, that is where we have really made a difference compared to everybody else,” he says. Comparing performance of American’s upgraded crew recovery tool with its pre-pandemic version, Seymour notes that the airline’s ability to solve disrupted crew schedules has improved roughly 60-70%.

“We’re now pushing 80-90% of our crew solutions solved in minutes,” he says. “And that’s the difference because your crews are your most precious, most constrained resource that you have during the operating day.”

Additionally, the internally developed HEAT (Hub Efficiency Analytics Tool) dynamically moves the airline’s flight schedules around when severe weather impacts its large hubs, utilizing an advanced algorithm. American says the tool reduces cancellations considerably and can even help prevent ground delay programs—a traffic management procedure Seymour refers to as a “blunt knife” compared with American’s more surgical approach.

“In a lot of cases now, when we have major events in our big hub operations, the FAA and the system command center just outside of D.C. will ask our air traffic control desk in our ops center, ‘American, are you going to run HEAT?’ ” Seymour says. “They prefer when we do because when we run it in our big operations, in a lot of cases, the FAA is not putting in ground stops and ground delay programs because we’ve solved the problem for them.”

Operating teams at United over the past year also have invested in technology and improved processes to enhance recovery from irregular operations. An improved ability to recover more quickly has led to not only a more reliable operation but also a more cost-effective one, Chief Financial Officer Michael Leskinen says.

“Notably, crew-related disruption expenses, such as premium pay and deadheading costs, are much lower than we have seen during similar events in prior years,” Leskinen said during a second-quarter earnings call. “The full impact of these improvements drove approximately one point of [cost per available seat mile excluding fuel and net special items] improvement in [the second quarter] compared to our own expectations.”

Cultivating Resiliency

The worst planning teams are focused only on their own plan, says Sutcliffe, who describes Southwest’s enhanced internal collaboration as providing a more holistic view across the operation. As it gears up for the winter, the airline will continue to focus on resilience—the skill to bounce back from disruption, stronger and readier for the next.

“No matter how bad today gets, we want tomorrow to start fresh, and there’s proof in our ability to do that—even during the Elliott winter storm, we were able to go from 1,500 flights to 4,200 the next day,” Decaire says. “What you’ll see in our numbers is that we start tomorrow a lot faster, and we’re much more resilient because we have that in our mindset.”