{"id":438592,"date":"2022-12-28T00:01:13","date_gmt":"2022-12-28T00:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uat.esri.com\/en-us\/industries\/blog\/?post_type=blog&p=438592"},"modified":"2025-04-07T22:19:30","modified_gmt":"2025-04-07T22:19:30","slug":"what-planners-can-learn-from-southwest","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/industries\/blog\/articles\/what-planners-can-learn-from-southwest","title":{"rendered":"What Planning Departments Can Learn from Southwest Airlines"},"content":{"rendered":"

Telling the temporary (and unwilling) residents of airports in Chicago, Houston, Denver, and a couple dozen others \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d or \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d is unlikely to get you a warm response. As of Tuesday, December 27, about 87% of all U.S. flight cancellations are Southwest, according to FlightAware and CNN. Tomorrow, that number is expected to reach a staggering 99%. There is no immediate correction to this in sight. In fact, many would-be passengers have been told they are unlikely to get home in the next 72 hours. You wouldn\u2019t have to try hard to find someone or a friend of someone that is being directly impacted by this today.<\/p>\n\n

The knee-jerk reaction is to think that the weather caused this, but you\u2019d be only partly correct. On the day after Christmas, in the midst of Winter Storm Elliott, while Southwest canceled over half its flights, no other airline was above a 15% cancellation rate, and all but two were in single digit percentage rates. But I come here neither to praise nor bury Southwest (tip of the hat to Marc Antony). The catastrophe that Southwest is experiencing provides a lesson to be learned by city and county planning departments across the country.<\/p>\n\n

We\u2019re learning from internal memos, employee statements, and customer interactions that the business systems there are the crux of the problem. Captain Casey Murray is the president of the Southwest Pilots Association and he told CNN, \u201cWe\u2019ve seen these sorts of meltdowns occur on a much more regular basis and it really just has to do with outdated processes and outdated IT.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Southwest is learning in a very painful way what happens when an organization holds on to legacy technology for far too long under the misguided belief that updating it will be costly, obstructive, and time-consuming.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

There are many planning departments at local governments across the nation who are in a similar situation.\u00a0 They have dated workflows and legacy technology in place to deal with modern challenges and demands from developers, administrators, colleagues, and the public.\u00a0 What does this look like?<\/p>\n\n