Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan is tempting fate over another Christmas meltdown promising on Thursday that “it will never happen again.”

• That’s like then-American Airlines CEO Doug Parker trumpeting that they would ‘never lose money again’ at Investor and Media Day in 2017.

• And when United CEO sent out an email to customers that they would be the airline that was reliable over the 2021 holidays before melting down. They trumpeted already having required employees to get vaccinated, before the federal government started requiring other airlines to do it, as well as not having furloughed pilots like American did.

At the end of last year, between Christmas and New Years, Southwest Airlines melted down – stranding around two million passengers and costing the airline around $1 billion dollars.

The long tail event began in Denver where a storm occurred, there wasn’t enough de-icing equipment, and there weren’t enough rampers – who all started calling in sick. But bad weather, that all the airlines were facing, cascaded and Southwest lost control of their operation.

There were too many inexperienced people and Southwest’s systems couldn’t keep track of so many flight attendants in the wrong cities and those systems couldn’t rebuild so many flights once planes and crew were out of position.

This is very, very unlikely to repeat for this year’s holidays. Southwest has made some new investments over the last year, but mostly the 2022 holidays were such a confluence of unlikely events paired together, at the same time, that it’s simply unlikely to reoccur this year.

The airline’s game plan to prevent another Christmas meltdown consists of:

• Getting everything in order for first flight of the day. Delays stack, so make sure any maintenance issues are handled overnight.

• Better tech and more de-icing equipment in Denver, Chicago Midway and Nashville and they’ve added supplies like heaters to help crew work in cold weather.

• More training and reorganization of employees.

• SkySolver rebuilds schedules but wasn’t up to the gargantuan task of rebuilding the entire schedule on the fly last year. So they rebuilt about 40% – 50% of their flying each day manually during the meltdown. They have better tools to track and reassign crew to flights now, too.

Ultimately too many things failed at once last year that they spiraled out of control. Southwest should be better positioned to recover this year – but they probably won’t be tested the way they were at Christmas 2022.

But Bob Jordan should really “go outside, turn around three times and spit” so that he doesn’t “tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing.”

And for passengers, no matter what airline you’re flying, it’s a good idea to consider buying a backup reservation on a different airline. In a world without change fees (excluding basic economy), book something for a few hours later on another carrier and cancel it once your preferred flight is underway. If you’re a frequent flyer, you wind up with a credit you’ll use later. Even better is booking the backup as a mileage award so that you can just cancel and redeposit the miles – with U.S. airlines now usually at no fee.