Southwest Airlines attributed its latest disruption to flight activity Tuesday morning to data connection “issues” resulting from what it called a firewall failure. In a statement to AIN, the airline said a vendor-supplied firewall went down, causing the unexpected loss of some “operational data.” Southwest teams worked quickly to minimize flight disruptions, but not soon enough to allay frustrations on the part of inconvenienced customers.
A tweet posted by the FAA indicated that Southwest asked the agency to pause all departures until it resolved the computer problem. About an hour later, the FAA lifted the pause at Southwest’s request.
The latest interruption follows more serious meltdowns last October and over the Christmas holiday, prompting criticism from its pilots’ union over what it characterized as antiquated and inefficient scheduling processes. It remains unclear whether this latest disruption bears any connection to previous cases, however.
In an interview late last year with AIN, Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) president Casey Murray placed the blame for previous disruptions squarely on management’s failure to adequately address its scheduling deficiencies.
“Here's really the simplest way that I've tried to explain it: Southwest can't connect pilots to airplanes. That's their failure,” said Murray. “At the start of any given day, whether it was two years ago, five years ago, yesterday, we are staffed and have the pilots…it’s the fragility of the network that's the problem. It is when something happens and their outdated programs start trying to work solutions that the failures start.”
Murray noted that flight attendants have encountered the same problem because they work under the same outdated scheduling system. Members of both groups have found themselves flying what he called “circular deadheads” created by an automated scheduling system called SkySolver, a proprietary program whose genesis traces back to the 1990s.
He explained that the union had suggested solutions to the problem for five years and that the subject stood as a central point of contention in ongoing contract negotiations. Although Murray conceded that the airline’s point-to-point network model has challenged Southwest dispatchers more than those at airlines using a hub-and-spoke system, he insisted they could manage the situation with the “right tools.”