A Southwest Airlines executive apologized for the company's holiday season meltdown in front of a panel of senators on Thursday.
The airline company canceled nearly 17,000 flights and stranded more than two million customers between December 21 and December 31 following a winter storm, far more than any other airline. The Senate Commerce Committee questioned executives in a hearing that focused on those disruptions.
"Let me be clear, we messed up," Southwest Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson told senators. "I want to sincerely and humbly apologize to those impacted by the disruption,"
"In hindsight, we did not have enough winter operational resiliency," Watterson explained.
The Southwest executive assured the committee that the company has been working to improve its systems.
"We are doing a system-wide review of our preparedness for winter operations and will implement any measures necessary to mitigate the risk of an event like this occurring in the future," Watterson said.
The company has budgeted $1.3 billion for 2023 investments, upgrades, and maintenance of their IT systems.
Democratic Senator Ed Markey, unsatisfied with the executive's explanation, demanded the airline company give a "cash hardship payment" to those affected.
Some Republicans, however, were more sympathetic with the airline company.
"I've had multiple conversations with senior leadership at Southwest. I'm confident they understand it was an epic screw-up and that they are committed to doing everything possible to prevent its recurrence," Sen.Ted Cruz of Texas said.
Watterson testified the airline had reimbursed 273,406 customers, and that every impacted customer had been emailed flyer points, along with an apology.
But, the airline company would not pay customers directly for their inconvenience unless it was "reimbursement of a flight they took in the disruption," Watterson said.
The U.S. Transportation Department is also investigating Southwest for its flight scheduling throughout the disruption.
Astra aborted the launch for NASA ELaNa 41 Mission out of Cape Canaveral on Monday due to what was described as a minor issue, but the company's stock fell nearly 14 percent following the news. Jim Cantrell, CEO and co-founder of Phantom Space, which builds and launches spacecraft of its own, joined Cheddar to discuss the scrubbed mission. “The last thing you want is for this to go wrong, you're better to err on the side of safety expectations,” Cantrell explained, noting that the mission delay was a normal event.
Dating app Bumble announced its first acquisition, expanding into Europe by picking up Fruitz, a French Platform. The Fruitz app allows its users to convey dating preferences through fruit metaphors.
Meat production giant Tyson Foods reported a beat on its Q1 earnings. In spite of obstacles posed by supply chain issues and inflation, the company exceeded expectations on earnings per share and revenue.
TC BioPharm, a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing cell therapy products targeting, went public on the Nasdaq in January. CEO Bryan Kobel joined Cheddar to talk about the company's IPO launch, its cancer-fighting therapeutics tech, and its potential for using its research to treat COVID-19. "The opportunity here for us is to really get safety data and covid and expand into other areas," Kobel said. "So from COVID, where we hope to treat patients, hopefully maybe the elderly population, populations that that really can't handle the antivirals because they're too hard in the system, well then we'll expand out into maybe severe influenza Ebola, other viral and viral infections where we think we can be helpful."
The gaming industry has been under the spotlight so far this year following some big mergers and acquisitions. This week featured earnings of three major gaming companies, but also Meta and for the latter, things are not doing too hot. Joining Cheddar News to break it all down was Kenny Rosenblatt, President and Co-Founder of Arkadium.
