The Southwest curse strikes again

The FAA temporarily grounded all departing Southwest Airlines flights nationwide yesterday morning at the request of the airline itself. In a statement, Southwest said a vendor-supplied firewall went down unexpectedly, causing a brief loss of connection to some data that’s essential for flight operations.

While the incident wasn’t anywhere near as bad as Southwest’s system failure in December – which led to 16,700 canceled flights compared to ~2,000 delayed flights yesterday – it still added an extra ~30 minutes to nearly half of the airline’s domestic flight schedule in the morning.

✈️ Zoom out: If you’ve grown used to looking at flight monitors and seeing bad news, there may be some good news on the horizon. Following a past few years marked by widespread delays and cancellations, the airline industry has taken a number of steps to address the issue.

These efforts – which include cutting flight capacity, lowering requirements for pilots, and hiring more air traffic controllers – have coincided with a decline in delays and cancellations. Some 26% of all US flights were delayed or canceled this past January, per the latest federal data, down from 31% in January of last year.

And this drop is better-timed than in an Odesza song; it comes as Americans aren’t just tweeting about #wanderlust – they’re living it.

• In a CNBC interview last week, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said the airline is projecting “record advance bookings for the summer.”
• Late last month, the State Department revealed it was receiving an “unprecedented” 500,000 passport applications per week, about 40% higher than the previous all-time record set last year.