Challenge
Southwest Airlines operates one of the busiest and most extensive aviation networks in the world, with more than 72,000 employees and thousands of flights moving across the system each day. Ensuring employee and customer safety, protecting assets, and proactively identifying operational risk are critical to Southwest maintaining reliability and compliance. As part of its strong safety culture, Southwest generates around a thousand safety-related incidents per month – from injuries and illnesses to equipment and aircraft damage – all of which the airline must capture accurately and consistently.
For many years, supervisors had to use different tools and workflows to capture incident details. If a single event involved several distinct areas – an injury, equipment damage, etc.– they often had to enter the same information in multiple systems. This process was confusing, time-consuming, and error-prone. Those inconsistencies resulted in data quality issues, making deep analysis extremely difficult.
“When reports were stored in different places, it was hard to understand how everything tied together,” says Don Carter, manager of the safety information management system (SIMS) analytics team.
The SIMS team conducts hundreds of analyses each year. These analyses use incident data to identify hazards, monitor risk across the operation, and evaluate whether mitigations deliver the intended effect. The team shares these insights broadly across the organization, including monthly reports to executives.
The team also needed precise, structured inputs to generate reliable insights that executives were looking for. Something as simple as a misspelled word can prevent an incident from grouping with similar events. If this happens regularly, important indicators and trends can easily be missed.
Supervisors across the operation complete incident reports, but many interact with the system only occasionally. Southwest needed a reporting process intuitive enough for occasional users – yet powerful enough to fuel the analysis it required.
Solution
Southwest partnered with Riskonnect to consolidate all injury, illness, and incident reporting into its Health & Safety solution.
Every incident, injury, and damage report starts in Riskonnect. Safety reports, flight information, scheduling details, and other operational information are automatically added. The SIMS team then feeds that data into Southwest’s analytics environment to produce deeper insights.
“Riskonnect is one of our most important tools for evaluating hazards, identifying trends, and tracking how effective our mitigations are over time,” Carter notes.
Every leader at the company completes annual training through SWA University on how to submit incident reports. This approach ensures that even employees who use the system only a few times a year are comfortable recording incidents. The system also guides users through the incident-reporting process to ensure consistency and completeness.
Results
Southwest Airlines now has a unified reporting structure that strengthens analysis, decision-making, and safety culture across the operation. Safety, ground operations, and HR teams all rely on the same information to understand events and collaborate on next steps. Relevant injury data is also shared with Southwest’s TPA for workers’ compensation claims, eliminating manual processes and reducing delays in claim payments. “We have a long history with Riskonnect. It’s so reliable, and our teams understand it well,” Carter adds.
Uniformity of data across the organization improves data integrity and supports a reporting culture based on clarity and accountability. With stronger data quality and consistency, Southwest can easily analyze trends, spot emerging risks, and track year-over-year changes that would otherwise remain hidden. The company also has data to precisely evaluate the effectiveness of safety mitigations.
Says Carter: “If something didn’t lead to the improvement we expected, we can investigate why. That used to be much harder.” Insights from this analysis are shared monthly with senior leaders, including the airline’s COO.
The long-standing relationship with Riskonnect supports the safety program as it continues to evolve. With Riskonnect’s help, Southwest now refines categories, enhances usability, and strengthens the reporting experience with ongoing improvements. Riskonnect enables enterprise-wide safety insight, helping transform raw incident data into actionable insights that protect Southwest’s employees, customers, assets, and operations.
As Carter explains, “Our program continues to advance, and Riskonnect has been able to grow right along with it.”
For more on health and safety systems, download our ebook, A Guide to Using Root Cause Analysis, and check out Riskonnect’s Health & Safety solution.
