Apparently Southwest is one of the biggest offenders in the airline industry when it comes to not investing in their IT infrastructure. You can only get away with that sort of debt for so long.
I knew someone who was working on this, my understanding was technology infrastructure was a huge blocker to their plans for international flights. The scheduling system required many hours of downtime every night to process. It effectively ran from the moment the last airport on the west coast closed to start of operations next day east coast and it was just getting longer.
If that's true, and I have no reason to doubt it, the blame will fall squarely on the team who were asking for IT investment, and not the leadership who said no to them.
