Southwest Airlines executive tells Senate panel: "We messed up"

Southwest Airlines chief operations officer Andrew Watterson will tell lawmakers on Thursday that operational missteps led to the holiday travel debacle that led to more than 16,000 flight cancellations and millions of passengers getting stranded.

"We messed up," Watterson will tell the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in a hearing on Thursday, according to his prepared testimony. "In hindsight, we did not have enough winter operational resilience."

The holiday flight meltdown sparked outrage among customers as well as investigations from lawmakers and transportation regulators. Watterson described a series of snowballing problems, starting with a winter storm that was worse than they had expected and exacerbated by operational shortfalls.