New details emerge in air travel meltdowns involving FAA, Southwest

The Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday identified the contractor involved in the outage of a safety bulletin system that led to a national ground stop, and said it would bar personnel directly involved from accessing agency buildings and systems during an investigation.

The announcement came one day after the Transportation Department released new details of its investigation into flight disruptions at Southwest Airlines that left more than 1 million travelers stranded over the holidays. The two high-profile incidents, which occurred within a three-week period, are the latest to cause scores of cancellations and delays for travelers amid a pandemic-era travel boom.

In the most recent problem for air travelers, an outage to the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, system began when contract workers inadvertently deleted data, leading to a nationwide halt to air traffic on Jan. 11 for the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The FAA on Thursday identified Bethesda-based Spatial Front as the contractor behind the mishap. The company indicated it had more than 50 staff members at FAA offices working on more than 90 “mission critical” systems, including the NOTAM system, according to an archived version of its website. That information had been removed from its site as of Thursday morning.

Melanie P. Harrison, Spatial Front’s director of business development, said Thursday that the company would issue a statement soon.

The first recent travel disruption occurred in late December, when Southwest canceled more than 16,700 flights over an 11-day span.

Federal regulators, who launched an investigation into the matter, said Thursday they are examining whether executives at Southwest misled customers by selling tickets for flights they knew the carrier couldn’t operate. Asked about the probe during the company’s Thursday earnings call, Andrew Watterson, the carrier’s chief commercial officer, said Southwest was fully staffed for the holidays and there are no indications of a schedule that was “out of whack.”

Southwest on Thursday announced that the operational breakdown would cost the company $800 million in related expenses. As a result, the air carrier reported a $220 million net loss in the final quarter of 2022, surprising some analysts who expected that the airline would turn a profit despite the problems.

Executives said the company also doesn’t expect to post a profit this quarter stemming from the December cancellations.

Southwest’s chief executive, Bob Jordan, said the airline had been on track to report a profit for the final three months of 2022 but the “historic level” of last-minute flight cancellations during the days around Christmas overwhelmed the company’s systems for scheduling and staffing flights.

“We disrupted thousands and thousands of customers and really made a mess for our employees and customers, and I can’t apologize enough for that,” he said. “At the end of the day, that kind of disruption cannot happen again.”

Jordan and other executives outlined steps the carrier is taking to avoid a repeat, noting the carrier will spend $1.3 billion on technology in 2023, an increase over what it spent the previous year. It has hired an outside firm to review the incident and said the report should be complete in weeks.

Jordan also said Southwest is cooperating with lawmakers, who will hold hearings on the cancellations and with the Department of Transportation as it conducts its own review.

Meanwhile, aviation safety issues and corporate accountability of another sort were the focus in a federal courthouse in Fort Worth.

Boeing pleaded not guilty Thursday on a charge that it conspired to defraud the United States over the safety of its 737 Max jets – something the company had avoided when it signed a deferred settlement agreement with the Justice Department on Jan. 6, 2021.

Thursday’s court appearance was mandated by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor after a protracted and ongoing legal fight led by relatives of the 346 people killed when a faulty automation system forced down Max planes in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019.

Family members are asking the judge to require Boeing to meet three “conditions of release” in connection with the arraignment: that Boeing commit no new crimes, that Boeing’s safety and ethics practices be subject to a judicial monitor and that details of what Boeing has done to improve safety as part of the deferred prosecution agreement be released to the victims and public “to assure that the efforts are effective,” according to court filings.

Boeing declined to comment Thursday, but it has previously told the court that it has continued to meet the terms of its agreement with the Justice Department, which it says establishes what actions it must take. Boeing said in court filings that although the families faced “unspeakable losses,” they are not entitled to overturn the agreement.

“Boeing was and is entitled to rely on that contract,” it said.

Alaska Airlines, American Airlines and JetBlue Airlines also reported earnings Thursday.