Airline industry grapples with tech failures and near-miss incidents

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• Geoff Bennett:

  It has been a very, very rough week in the aviation business, and especially for passengers.

  Delta Air Lines finally has most of its operations back to normal today after days of delays and thousands of flight cancellations connected to a tech outage that angered travelers and gave the airline a black eye. Delta's response is now being investigated by the Department of Transportation.

  Southwest Airlines is also being investigated by the federal government for a string of near-miss incidents involving its aircraft. Separately, Southwest also announced today that it's finally going to move to an assigned seating system for the first time in its history.

  Our aviation correspondent, Miles O'Brien, is here to catch us up on the latest.

  Miles, it's always great to see you.

  So let's start with this big move from Southwest. They are ending the cattle call boarding system. What's behind the big change?

• Miles O'Brien:

  Well this is about great expectations that have fallen a little bit.

  Right now, Southwest is profitable, but not as profitable as it has been over the course of many years. And it is not meeting the expectations of Wall Street. And so there are activist investors in the midst insisting that the management change the way it does business.

  But it's interesting. If you look at Southwest's history, this is about the most profitable airline ever, year after year of profitability, even after 9/11 or in the middle of recessions. In the '90s, when fuel prices were high, they had a hedge fund for fuel and managed to get around that.

  They have always done very well with that, having a very efficient, lean operation, flight attendants cleaning up the cabin, you name it. And so the idea that this company is troubled may be — they may be just caught up in the larger issue of the lingering aftereffects of the pandemic, which is affecting the airline industry systemwide.

• Geoff Bennett:

  And, look, as we said, Southwest is also now being investigated by the federal government for these near-miss incidents. Help us understand what the government wants to know more about.

• Miles O'Brien:

  Well, let's — first of all, let's be clear. This probably has nothing to do with what we just talked about in Southwest and the business model.

  But we do have something that may be related to COVID and its aftereffects. We have got about a half-a-dozen incidents, unusual altitudes on approach, very low in Tampa and Oklahoma City, a sudden dive after departure in Hawaii, a precipitous dive toward the ocean, a mildly aerobatic move called a Dutch roll on one flight, and then a flight in Portland Maine, where they took off on a closed runway before the control tower opened.

  All of these things speak to an issue of crew seasoning and perhaps training. And the FAA is going to be looking very closely at that. And I should point out that a lot of experienced crew members in the cockpit retired in the midst of COVID. And the aviation industry, wherever you look, has lost — had pretty much a brain drain. And that could be what's at work here.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Well, let's shift our focus to Delta, because they are finally getting back to normal, but there's still a lot of baggage that has to get to its right place. And there could be a big problem for this airline's reputation now.

  And what they're experiencing is actually very similar to what Southwest experienced last year. Why are these airlines, Miles, struggling with their systems like this.

• Miles O'Brien:

  Yes, it's interesting that the Southwest thing is what everybody thinks about, December of '22, a computer meltdown in the midst of bad weather and a heavy travel situation.

  But if you look at what happened there, it's kind of the opposite of what happened to Delta as far as technology. Southwest had a very antiquated system that got completely overwhelmed by events and more than 16,000 flights got canceled.

  Meanwhile, I was talking to aviation analyst Mike Boyd, who studies this pretty closely. He says Delta is by far the leader in adopting high technology I.T. and has a very sophisticated, complex, interwoven system, which gives the airline tremendous visibility on where its planes are, where people are, where bags are, how much fuel is in the tanks, where the crews are dispatched from, and on and on.

  But it's all connected. And so what can happen, which is what we saw, is, it's kind of like pulling the plug out from the outlet. Everything goes dark. And so the airline now is going to have to look at this like they look in the wake of an aircraft accident and try to figure out what went wrong to make it safe for the next time.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Well, in the time that remains, let's talk about the aerospace giant Boeing, because Boeing finalized this plea deal with the Department of Justice today, and they agreed to conspiracy to defraud the government on safety of the MAX 737 jets and they're going to pay a $243 million fine.

  But that's not all, Miles, because the space capsule, the Starliner, which Boeing manufactured, is still docked at the International Space Station with the astronauts it's carried and their return to Earth has been delayed once again. So what's going on there?

• Miles O'Brien:

  I don't know. It's a troubled company, to say the least, Geoff. And what a sad statement that Boeing is in this situation on the criminal counts.

  But it is a separate division. But you have to wonder if there is some sort of way to connect these two events. The Starliner capsule had all kinds of problems as it docked at the International Space Station in June. Thrusters didn't fire right, leaking, on and on and on. NASA has decided it doesn't feel completely comfortable with bringing the astronauts home as it is right now, because they don't fully understand what's going on.

  They're making progress on that. They're testing similar thrusters on the ground, finding some issues of degradation of seals, trying to understand all of this. The big deal from their perspective is, the hardware which is failing will burn up in the atmosphere when the astronauts come home.

  So they want to figure it out before that happens. And so, and, meanwhile, the astronauts, Butch Wilmore, Suni Williams, are getting quite an extended stay on the International Space Station. And we can only hope that NASA will pay their hotel and meal vouchers.

  (Laughter)

• Geoff Bennett:

  Yes, absolutely.

  Miles O'Brien, always a pleasure, sir. Thanks for being with us.

• Miles O'Brien:

  You're welcome.

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