Southwest Airlines and CE Gary Kelly struggle to cope with carrier's darkest hours

Six days after some of Southwest Airlines' worst moments, the carrier still is trying to resume normal operations. The system wide operational meltdown the airline suffered last Wednesday exposed — in many ugly ways — the fragility of the house of cards from which CE Gary Kelly has managed to wring hundreds of millions of dollars in profit in recent years. In the days after the meltdown began, sources inside Southwest spoke of gruesome experiences on the front line, as hundreds of planes and thousands of pilots and flight attendants were out of position — to say nothing of tens of thousands of customers left in the lurch — when Southwest began its first feeble attempts to put its house back in order last Thursday. The near total disarray made it impossible to resume normal operations easily or quickly. <br/>