Southwest already entered the crisis hamstrung by the grounding of the aircraft it’s counting on for future expansion, the Boeing 737 MAX. You’d think that to weather the worst devastation in modern airline history, a tempest whose ferocity and duration were totally unpredictable, Kelly would play defense by onboarding a strategy of chopping costs and otherwise hunkering down. “The COVID hit was far more damaging because we kept getting false dawns, then it would go on and on.”
“9/11 was awful, but we recovered quickly,” he observes. COVID might not be a short, quick shock like 9/11, but a long-lasting plague that hammered commercial aviation harder than any other big business. carrier, couldn’t even guess at how long the mysterious virus would ground America’s travelers. This time, Kelly, whose 17-year tenure makes him the longest-serving CEO for a major U.S. Yet within months Southwest roared back to post steady profits. He recalled that in the days after the World Trade Center attack, when he as CFO sent similarly disastrous figures to the budget carrier’s legendary cofounder, and his own mentor, Herb Kelleher. How do we recover?’” Marveling at a 97% drop in traffic from 2019, and a cash burn of $200 million that week, Kelly couldn’t help wondering the same thing. It said, ‘We have no words to describe the damage. “I’d never read a message from the finance staff anything like that dark. But the “color” that accompanied the report for the week of April 5, 2020, evoked the lowest of low-down blues. “Each week when the finance team sent me the figures for our operations, they would provide commentary that was typically upbeat,” he told Fortune.
The numbers that the Southwest Airlines CEO surveyed in April of last year were unspeakably catastrophic, and he had no indicators to foresee if the pandemic signaled a brief nosedive or a slow-motion crash.
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