Southwest Meltdown Shows Airlines Need Tighter Software Integration

During the winter storm, amid a huge volume of changes to crew schedules to work through, SkySolver couldn't handle the task of matching crew members and which flights they should work, executives of the Dallas-based carrier said. Southwest's software wasn't designed to solve problems of that scale, Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson said Thursday, forcing the airline to revert to manual scheduling. Unlike some large rivals with hub-and-spoke networks, Southwest planes hopscotch from city to city, which may have been another complicating factor. Many carriers still rely on homegrown solutions, which largely were built on legacy mainframe computers, analysts say. Analysts and industry insiders say the airline industry is overdue for a massive technology overhaul that would take advantage of highly scalable cloud technologies and fully connect disparate sources of real-time data to better coordinate crews with aircraft.