Guest Post: Southwest’s Airplane Disruptions

Today’s guest Post comes from Prof. Howard Weiss, who upon returning from Europe, observed an aggregate planning problem.

From October 10 through October 12, 2021 Southwest canceled more than 2400 of its flights due to bad weather and air traffic control problems in Florida, reported The Wall Street Journal (Oct 21, 2021). Your Heizer/Render/Munson Aggregate Planning chapter (Ch. 13) discusses planning for the airline industry and more specifically about airlines that use hubs. But Southwest does not use hubs. Rather it operates a very complex spider web-like point-to-point route network, and thus a flight between two cities in California can be impacted by bad weather in Florida, for example. According to Southwest’s COO, “40% to 50% of the airlines’ planes flow through Florida nearly every day, and many crews change there. So when we have a disruption, a significant disruption, in Florida, it tends to spread to our entire network.” By Friday night, he said, the airline had “well over” 100 planes and crews “that weren’t where they were supposed to be.” 

Your textbook suggests that for successful Aggregate Planning there should be:

1. Accurate scheduling of labor hours. 
2. An on-call labor resource
3. Flexibility of individual worker skills.
4. Flexibility in output rate

These suggestions are difficult for any airline to follow but even more difficult for Southwest. Of course, the cancellations led to a large increase in the number of customers trying to reach Southwest and because telephone staffing did not increase this led to waits of several hours to reach customer service.

Classroom Discussion Questions

1. What could Southwest do to appease customers whose flights were cancelled?
2. How does Southwest’s on-time performance and cancellation rate compare to other airlines’ performance in general?