Southwest to apologize to Senate panel for December meltdown, CNBC reports

Southwest Airlines intends to apologize in front of a Senate panel on Thursday over its meltdown in December that stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers around Christmas, Leslie Josephs of CNBC reports. "In hindsight, we did not have enough winter operational resilience," Chief Operating Officer, COO, Andrew Watterson said in written testimony, according to CNBC. The company canceled over 16,700 flights between December 21 and December 31 because its crew-scheduling software could not keep pace with the massive flight disruptions caused by winter weather. The meltdown made an $800M pretax hit and drove the carrier to a net loss for the quarter. Watterson intends to tell the committee the company has since made short-term improvements to communicate more easily with crews and improved tools that keep track of the operation’s stability. These improvements have made Watterson "confident in our flight network and the schedules we have published for sale," the COO said. Reference Link