Duane Pfennigwerth : Hey, thank you. I wanted to ask you about work rules. And if they are modernized and aligned with operational recovery. There’s been so much written about technology gaps fairly or unfairly. The media is really run with those talking points. I’m not sure if you’re willing to go there, but for example, do your pilots need to call into a call center to verbally confirm reassignment? It seems like the numbers that would have been required in this event would overwhelm any call center, and it feels like maybe there could be an app for that. Any thoughts on that would be great.
Bob Jordan : Duane, this is Bob. I’ll just start and then Andrew has got a lot more detail than I do, but I think I’d break it into two pieces. We have electronic notification in place for our crews. And there’s more work to do there in terms of there’s all kinds of things that you use electronic notification for. But that’s — yes, there’s been some report that that’s out in place. It’s absolutely in place. What we need to work on is the — and it’s a contractual change electronic acknowledgment. So that’s which I believe Andrew does not require — in other words, to know that, that has been acknowledged, for example, accepting a crew reroute. That’s a contractual change to do that. Obviously, to — for the operation, you have to know not simply that it was delivered electronically, but it was acknowledged and it’s going to happen.
So there is work to do. There is some work to do on the electronic notification, but we do have that capability. But there’s also, I think, even more work to do on the contractual piece of this, which is the acknowledgment. And obviously, those two contracts are open, and that’s a piece of what our negotiators and teams are working on. But Andrew, if you want to add.
Andrew Watterson : Yeah. I think crew communication was a problem during the event, not the problem. So we definitely want to improve that. We have some means, consistent with the current contracts, to have some level of electronic communication with our flight crews. Both have learned from this. I think we will incorporate that in our negotiations. I think we will wait until we finish the negotiations before we kind of design the next generation of electronic communication tool with our crews because it must respect the contractual agreement. So I think this event will get us all aligned on the need for improving that. And once we get that ironed out in the open contracts, then we’ll go and develop the next generation of that electronic communication.
Duane Pfennigwerth : That’s helpful. And then just on my follow-up, I’ll stick with you, Andrew. Can you comment on what percent of your network is out and back flying? And I know it’s too early to prescribe the medicine here. But any thoughts on your ability to increase out and back or if that might be a potential solution?
Andrew Watterson : I can’t recall off the top of my head. I don’t want to give you a number for fear of being wrong. We have, in the past — this comes up a lot. We’ve put into our schedules in like test areas of the region out and back. So we did this in Midway, I think, three years ago or four years ago. And so we put this around the system to see if that improves anything by increasing out and back to certain percentages, and we haven’t found that to be the case. We found other things we can put into our schedule to help with on-time performance. And part of the move actually with the moving network planning and our control center under one roof is because it is difficult to nail down how to incorporate recoverability into your schedule, even though everyone seems to have an opinion.
We know we can incorporate crew needs overall. We’ve gotten very good at that, maintenance needs, ground-up needs. We can model to a good level of detail the predicted on-time performance for a schedule. But how does one define what’s a recoverable schedule is actually more difficult to contact design than you might imagine. So bringing the two groups together, we can create a tighter feedback loop through smaller continuous improvement efforts to test and learn smaller iterations of recoverability built into the network is the design — the desire behind this idea of moving them under one organization, and they’ve already started that. We’ll see cross-pollination of people who work on our control center now working in our network planning to help design schedules, people who design schedules, doing a tour in the control center to learn what’s like to operate it.
And so we think that tighter linkage should help us incrementally improve recoverability into the schedules. But we’re definitely — all years about doing that but they kind of out and back is something that gets thrown around. And really, we haven’t seen how that can have a direct cause and effect improvement.
Duane Pfennigwerth : Appreciate the thoughts.
Andrew Watterson : Thanks, sir.
Operator: And the next question will come from Savi Syth from Raymond James. Please go ahead.
Savi Syth : Hey, good morning or good afternoon. Just on the hiring, you talked about staffing was not the issue. I was kind of curious if you could provide a little bit more color on the hiring plans this year and the cadence. Because if you look at your capacity growth, there’s a lot more capacity growth in the second half. And I think that’s something that kind of causes some concern given just a lot of growth coming in and given having to address some of these operational issues. So could you talk a little bit about the hiring cadence here?
Bob Jordan : Savi, it’s Bob. Absolutely. And then, Andrew, if you want to chime in, just in terms of where. But the — yes, there’s obviously timing to hire and their timing to train and become proficient, especially in certain areas like the ramp. And so it’s a piece of why we actually came in above our targeted hiring for ’22 is to get ahead of that for ’23. So some of that will be front loaded a bit in ’23 as we prepare for capacity in the back half. Our hiring in ’23, the plans right now, I think we hired just over 11,000 in ’22 net. It’s roughly 7,000 net in ’23. So it actually falls roughly 40%, again, because there’s a piece of the ’22 hiring that was a setup for ’23. And again, we don’t — there’s no evidence that we were not staffed for the holidays or that we’re not currently staffed.
We are well staffed. The one exception in terms of the change from year-over-year pilots, we hired net roughly, I think, just under 1,000 pilots in ’22. The plan is to hire net roughly 1,700, I think, in ’23. So that actually is increasing. Our classes, we’ll watch them every single day. We’re just down meeting with potential new hires earlier this week. We’re having no trouble attracting terrific pilots to Southwest Airlines, no trouble filling classes. There’s been some discussion of attrition, are you seeing higher attrition in our pilot area. Our attrition last year, I think, in our flight ops group was under 1%. We’ve got a lot more new hires, which you would expect it to be a little bit elevated there. But it’s, again, under 1% and roughly normal.
So we’re not seeing any issue attracting pilots to Southwest Airlines. But Andrew, I don’t know if you want to talk any more detail about just where.
