Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 106 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?

#31

Post by Terretta »

mikewarot wrote: post #4

How could a CEO let this persist for more than an hour? Is there nobody with the leaderships skills to just give everyone free flights and promise everything will be sorted while having people record who worked and who flew and what services were used as best they can? The software failed, just Jerry-rig something up to get people where they need to be, let the accountants and programmers clear up the mess after the…

> have someone work out ... by hand

How many minutes for that someone to work out where a plane is, how to crew it legally, and where it should go?

How many planes crews and flights are backlogged?

Re: Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?

#32

Post by sokoloff »

mikewarot wrote: post #4

How could a CEO let this persist for more than an hour? Is there nobody with the leaderships skills to just give everyone free flights and promise everything will be sorted while having people record who worked and who flew and what services were used as best they can? The software failed, just Jerry-rig something up to get people where they need to be, let the accountants and programmers clear up the mess after the…

If your FAA-approved operations specifications (ops specs) say that "all revenue flights will be approved for dispatch via process X", you better make sure that all flights are approved by that process, not by Enterprising Ernie on a whiteboard somewhere.

Re: Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?

#33

Post by MontyCarloHall »

A related question: can Southwest ever fully recover from this? Their reputation had taken such a hit that many loyal customers will hesitate to fly with them again, and even more fairweather customers will permanently cross Southwest off their list of carriers to consider flying with.

Their stock price is only down ~10% since the meltdown, which seems extremely optimistic to me.

Re: Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?

#34

Post by n1b0m »

Unlike other airlines that operate directly to and from hub airports, Southwest tends to operate a point-to-point service, meaning that when one flight is disrupted, there may not be spare aircraft and crews to pick up the route, leading to disruptions through the scheduling chain

Re: Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?

#35

Post by marcus0x62 »

hrunt wrote: post #13
mtmail wrote: post #2

Via reddit/r/bestof https://old.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/zw5lsl/southwest_pi... "So the storm came and it impacted ground ops so bad that many many crews were now “unaccounted” for and the system in place couldn’t keep up. Then it happened for several more days. By Xmas evening the CS department had essentially reached the inability to do anything but simple, one off assignments. And to make matters worse, the ph…

> "I used to work for a large company trying to fill the void [huge gap in the market for good aviation scheduling software], and our software was damn good too. SW was one of the airlines interested, we would demo it exactly like the scenario today, but it was "too expensive" and they stayed on their homebuilt stuff." This is a common situation in any industry. A company has a solution it self-developed in its infan…

> It does not help that system replacement projects often go over budget and introduce other problems that cost more money.

If justifying speculative future benefits to the CFO is the first strike against these sorts of projects, this is the second strike — the operations team has likely been burned by failed IT modernization projects before. How hard are you going to fight for something you aren’t 100% sure is even going to work?

Re: Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?

#36

Post by punkrex »

What's being skipped over in a lot of reporting is that Southwest has serious issues maintaining ground staff staffing, and has been struggling with that the entire pandemic because they refuse to pay market rate. This means that planes can't be unloaded and turned around in any reasonable amount of time. I gave up completely on southwest after I was stuck on a plane for 4 hours this summer, because of lack of ground crew to unload the planes, and thus planes were stuck on the tarmac.

Add on to that the latest technology woes, the storm was just the thing that tipped over a company that had cut operational capacity to the bone.

Re: Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?

#37

Post by greggarious »

I basically only used them for the PIT -> LAS direct flight for Defcon, and while I never got enough miles or whatever for any kind of formal loyalty program, I got the impression that a decade and a half of respecting sky law[1] got me some conversations most passengers don't get to have :-)

One of their pilots once confided the reason he had to have them plant a drink cart in the aisle while he popped out to use the bathroom was because they're given such little time between connections they can't even stop at a urinal. (They flew too close to the sun, and they had a cascading failure. Womp womp!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK1HINtjdHY

Re: Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?

#38

Post by mitchell_h »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #33

A related question: can Southwest ever fully recover from this? Their reputation had taken such a hit that many loyal customers will hesitate to fly with them again, and even more fairweather customers will permanently cross Southwest off their list of carriers to consider flying with. Their stock price is only down ~10% since the meltdown, which seems extremely optimistic to me.

Yes. I'm a very frequent flyer, and used to be far more frequent. No one, and I mean no one, flys southwest because it's their choice. "Southwest is the greyhound of the sky" is a well known phrase. You fly southwest because it's slightly better than being cramped on 3 legs of a 50-60 seat commuter jet. Your home airport dictates which airline you take. Unless another airline steps up and takes some of the routes & provides better planes, you're stuck with SWA.

Re: Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?

#39

Post by foobarian »

ww520 wrote: post #9
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #7

Basically what I read was the former CEO was accountant educated and focused on stock price and financials and ignored system upgrades for like a decade. That coupled with their decentralized nature of operating (no hubs or star pattern) the recent storms caused their systems to not “know” where people or planes were even though the people knew where they were. That knowledge is the critical feature because hours of…

Ah so bean counting treated IT as a cost center and cut CapEx to the bone. Running things with no reserved capacity, crew wise and system wise, is just asking for a catastrophic fall off the cliff style shutdown. Edit: a simple queue theory can explain why no reserved capacity leads to system breakdown.

The question is, will they still come out ahead even accounting for the catastrophic shutdown? Maybe once a year is fine

Re: Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?

#40

Post by kjellsbells »

grantc wrote: post #29
hrunt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I used to work for a large company trying to fill the void [huge gap in the market for good aviation scheduling software], and our software was damn good too. SW was one of the airlines interested, we would demo it exactly like the scenario today, but it was "too expensive" and they stayed on their homebuilt stuff." This is a common situation in any industry. A company has a solution it self-developed in its infan…

It can be cost-driven, but it's just as likely to be complexity-gated (w/ cost frequently being implementation driven and a proxy for complexity). The cost comes from actually unwinding a gnarly legacy system (that may be less than well understood) and making the successor system work. Also, Gall's law has entered the chat: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that work…

You just described the last 30 years of the US phone network.
Post reply on HN