Spirit Air problems include absence of IT management

January 31, 2001 —

The top executive at Spirit Airlines Inc. today confirmed that the company's conversion to a new employee scheduling system threw its flight operations for a loop during the New Year's travel rush. And the discount airline's current lack of a CIO was a contributing factor, he added.

Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Spirit stranded passengers for up to four days in cities including New York and Detroit last week after a Jan. 1 conversion to the new software for scheduling and tracking the flight crews and ground workers assigned to its planes. The problematic system rollout led to numerous delays and cancellations of Spirit's flights (see story).

Jacob Schorr, the airline's president and CEO, said the crisis wasn't touched off by a crash of the new system or other technical problems. Instead, the problems were caused by lack of familiarity with the software on the part of Spirit's end users -- a situation that snowballed at the airline after winter storms affected air travel in the Northeast.

While the new scheduling system had been run in parallel with the airline's old one from September through the end of last year, Schorr said users couldn't negotiate the software fast enough to keep pace after the storms began forcing flight cancellations. That, in turn, brought the airline's planes to a near-complete halt.

"The people who operated the software were no longer as fast with it, even though they were proficient and they were trained," Schorr said. "It's one of those situations where your fingers aren't connected to your brain anymore, and we weren't prepared for that."

Flights were also booked to capacity due to the crush of holiday travelers, making it more difficult to reaccommodate stranded passengers after the problems emerged, he added.

Compounding the situation even further was the fact that Spirit's CIO job is vacant, said Schorr, who held that position until he was promoted to CEO in mid-2000. The airline began interviewing potential CIO candidates last month but has yet to hire a replacement.

A hands-on IT executive might have been able to foresee the impending crisis and warn Spirit's crew staffing department away from doing the software conversion at such a busy travel time, Schorr said. "The only way we could have avoided this problem was to have called off the conversion," he noted. "But we obviously didn't see the problem coming."

The staffing department wanted the conversion to occur on Jan. 1 because the airline needs to track pilot and crew flight hours on a calendar basis in order to ensure that workers don't exceed flying limits set by the Federal Aviation Administration. Making the switch a week or two later would have required the initial records for this year to be moved from the old system to the new one.

"Up until now, it's been our policy to let individual departments manage their own projects and not involve [the IT department]," Schorr said. "That's going to change. We need to have our tech people more involved."

Schorr said the airline will have to spend at least the rest of this month trying to win back the passengers inconvenienced by the problems. The crisis also will lead to organizational restructuring at Spirit, he said, although he added that specific changes haven't been decided on thus far.

On Sunday, Spirit announced that it had returned to "business-as-usual operation." Schorr said flight activities were restored to normal, with the new software remaining in place. "It was a matter of knowing how to use it," he said.

Computerworld