10 months into job, Southwest’s CEO faces a giant crisis

After Southwest made it through Thanksgiving with few flight cancellations, Bob Jordan, the company’s CE, was in a celebratory mood. At a meeting with Wall Street analysts and investors this month at the New York Stock Exchange, he said the company’s performance had been “just incredible.” But a few weeks later, over the Christmas holiday, Southwest’s operations went into paralysis, forcing the company to resort to mass cancellations. The debacle has raised questions about Jordan’s performance and has prompted employees and analysts to ask why the company has been slow to fix well-known weaknesses in its operations. Other airlines fared far better during the extreme cold weather over Christmas weekend than Southwest, which after days of disruption canceled more than 2,500 flights on Wednesday, vastly more than any other US airline, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking service. The airline has already canceled more than 2,300, or 58%, of its flights planned for Thursday. Travelers, lawmakers and even employees are increasingly demanding answers from Southwest and Jordan. While the company has repeatedly apologized for its performance, it has provided few details about how things went so wrong and what it is doing to right its operations. The company said on Wednesday that Jordan and other executives were not available for interviews. In a video posted on Southwest’s website late Tuesday, Jordan, who became CE in February after three decades at Southwest, implied that the airline was caught out by a rare event. “The tools we use to recover from disruption serve us well 99% of the time,” he said, “but clearly we need to double down on our already existing plans to upgrade systems for these extreme circumstances.”<br/>