Editor's note: This story was originally published on Oct. 27, 2017. We are republishing it as airlines monitor and respond to Hurricane Florence as it approaches the East Coast.
On a recent weekday afternoon, meteorologist George Tabeek sits in front of a bank of monitors at Southwest Airlines’ operations center, tracking a line of thunderstorms as it works its way across the Midwest.
The weather pattern is relatively routine, especially after the recent hurricanes that disrupted operations at Southwest and other airlines for weeks on end. But it’s still important enough to lead Tabeek’s daily afternoon briefing to a team of airline planners, schedulers and dispatchers, who will take that information and incorporate it into the carrier’s operating plan for the coming hours and days.
“We always want to stick to the science,” Tabeek said of meteorologists’ role in helping keep Southwest’s roughly 4,000 daily flights safe and on time. That means weighing visibility, cloud height, wind gusts, ground conditions and a variety of other factors to make sure it’s safe for airplanes to operate.
In an industry that thrives on predictability and where a day’s operations are choreographed down to the minute, weather is always lurking as a potential threat that can quickly disrupt the plans of tens of thousands of passengers.
Industrywide, extreme weather accounted for about 3 percent of flights being delayed in August, according to the Department of Transportation, but weather’s true impact is even bigger.
National aviation system delays — a category that includes non-extreme weather conditions as well as slowdowns caused by air traffic control, airport operations or heavy air traffic — accounted for nearly a third of all delays that month, while late-arriving aircraft, a common result of weather issues, made up 40 percent of delays.
“Weather is not our business, but it’s always in our business,” said Warren Qualley, Southwest’s manager of meteorology. “It touches every part of our operation.”
Better weather forecasting is a part of its business that Southwest has been investing in recently, hiring additional, on-staff meteorologists in an industry where outsourcing this function is common.
The bulked-up team, which now numbers 11 meteorologists, including Qualley, recently switched to an around-the-clock staffing presence compared with its previous schedule that covered 19 hours of the day. Southwest’s meteorologists also are undergoing training that will allow them to provide more detailed forecasts built for Southwest’s network and suitable for use in operations. Currently, Southwest relies on the National Weather Service for such reports.
“The National Weather Service does a really good job, but what they don’t know is our operating limits,” said Qualley. “We felt we could get a more tailored forecast out of our own people.”
It’s all about time
Southwest’s meteorologists are set up in the company’s network operations control center on its Love Field campus, a high-tech space filled with workstations and monitors where the carrier’s day-to-day operations are overseen. It’s a far cry from the days when the airline’s operations were tracked using chalkboards.
While meteorologists don’t directly make decisions about airline operations, the forecasts they provide are critical to helping prepare for and respond to weather conditions.
That could mean tracking the approach of a hurricane for days, supplying information to help coordinate the timing for evacuating employees, customers and aircraft. Or it could mean responding in the moment to a thunderstorm that pops up over Chicago, forecasting whether the storm will clear in time for an aircraft to land safely, or whether it should divert to a different airport.
“It is very important that you’re accurate in terms of the timing,” said Steve West, senior director of bridge operations at Southwest’s network operations control. “Everything we do as a carrier is time-based.”
West said the first forecasts of a given day are particularly important, as early delays can cause cascading effects throughout Southwest’s network. Unlike other major carriers that have planes flying back and forth from hubs, Southwest’s point-to-point network has planes bouncing from city to city around the country, meaning they can bring their delays with them, even to places where the weather is fine.
“If they’re accurate in the morning on the East Coast, it has effects on the West Coast as well,” West said. “Somebody may get delayed or canceled because that flight early in the morning has been delayed so long that we have to make an adjustment to the schedule.”
It’s not just the aircraft that meteorologists have to consider. Icy weather can slow employees or passengers getting to the airport, while extreme heat requires extra precautions to keep animals being flown on the airline in a cool space, Qualley said.
Challenging storms
Southwest Airlines canceled about 5,000 flights during hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, which disrupted operations throughout Texas, Florida and the Caribbean at a cost that’s been estimated at $100 million.
That meant long days for Southwest’s operations center, which had to work through a plan to shut down and then restart operations at affected airports while accommodating hundreds of thousands of passengers.
With no other major weather systems affecting the U.S. at the time, meteorologists at Southwest said they were able to focus on the hurricanes, which are easier to track than unpredictable thunderstorms.
“We’re looking ahead,” Qualley said. “‘Here’s when Irma is going to be through Florida. The weather will be good enough to operate at this day and time.’”
With hurricane season over, new challenges await in the winter, when storms covering broad swaths of the country can disrupt operations coast to coast.
“Last year, we had two winter storms that affected 44 of our airports, from San Diego to Portland, Maine,” Qualley said. “We try to be as proactive with the weather as possible. It’s always going to cause chaos, but it’s better to control that chaos by being out ahead of it.”
