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Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?

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

#41

Post by jen20 »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #26
ww520 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. For me they had brand prominence because of various customer friendly things like bags fly free, sit where you want, etc. It will take a mountain of good reports from other people over a significant period of time for me to want to fly with them.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen the plane-boarding hunger games of sit-where-you-like referred to as a customer-friendly thing.

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

#43

Post by ethbr0 »

pavlov wrote: post #27
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this age of more or less fully network connected devices, this kind of a setup seems archaic in the extreme, probably likely to be some hangover from the 70s or 80s.

Airline systems are some of the oldest computing architectures in use. The Sabre reservation system was created by IBM for American Airlines in the 1950s — when a computer filled an entire building floor and was built out of vacuum tubes — and remains actively used today by multiple airlines. The programming language has been switched several times over the past 60+ years, but essential compatibility remains.

Indeed. Probably the only equally complex and old dynamic computing systems out there are railroad and federal economic ones.

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

#44

Post by logosmonkey »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #17
phil21 wrote: post #15

From what I know... Not affiliated at all with the airline industry, but I fly a lot and tend to nerd out on this stuff... Their crew (and flight) scheduling software functions in a manner where it more or less simulates a "perfect" day of operations. Airplanes take off on time, land, and continue on. If anything disrupts this simulation, crew members had to call in and talk to someone to update the computer system t…

In this age of more or less fully network connected devices, this kind of a setup seems archaic in the extreme, probably likely to be some hangover from the 70s or 80s.

Apparently Southwest is one of the biggest offenders in the airline industry when it comes to not investing in their IT infrastructure. You can only get away with that sort of debt for so long.

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

#45

Post by CoastalCoder »

marcus0x62 wrote: post #35
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 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…

> How hard are you going to fight for something you aren’t 100% sure is even going to work?

Tangent: maybe I'm just tired of this industry, but I have trouble imagining myself "fighting" to convince a CxO to do anything that benefits the company but not me.

My attitude is like, here's my advice and reasoning. Listen to me or don't. I'm not going to participate in some budgetary cage match just because the CxO likes drama.

I wonder if this shows my age :)

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

#46

Post by ethbr0 »

jen20 wrote: post #41
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. For me they had brand prominence because of various customer friendly things like bags fly free, sit where you want, etc. It will take a mountain of good reports from other people over a significant period of time for me to want to fly with them.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen the plane-boarding hunger games of sit-where-you-like referred to as a customer-friendly thing.

People either love it or hate it.

Personally, having flown with them for business for 5 or so years, I generally preferred it to assigned seating.

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

#47

Post by foobarian »

shagie wrote: post #3

A key point is how they do routing - https://www.ajot.com/news/southwest-air-faces-gridlock-with-... > Unlike competitors that use a so-called hub-and-spoke system to funnel passengers to large airports, Southwest is focused on point-to-point service, flying the same aircraft — Boeing Co. 737s — on trips that may hopscotch around the US. With a hub and spoke system, all the planes go from A to HUB and then from the H…

I found the hub-and-spoke explanation misleading. Even if you don't have a star arrangement you could still have a network of point-to-point flights that just constantly bounce back and forth between the same two cities. This is like a max flow network then and you can lose a flight or two and still be fine.

What I think is happening with SW is their planes are like pilots in Elite Dangerous, flying around the country to random destinations as the opportunity arises. This is not what point-to-point means to me, this is more like... sky Uber?

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

#48

Post by kgermino »

mitchell_h wrote: post #38
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 & p…

Are you on one of the coasts?

In the Midwest I know a ton of business travelers (>1 trip/month) who default to Southwest. The weekly travelers tend to prefer the legacy carriers if they're available (so I'm sure there's something to your point even here) but IME Southwest rules the monthly/short notice flyers around me.

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

#49

Post by persona_reuse »

pavlov wrote: post #27
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this age of more or less fully network connected devices, this kind of a setup seems archaic in the extreme, probably likely to be some hangover from the 70s or 80s.

Airline systems are some of the oldest computing architectures in use. The Sabre reservation system was created by IBM for American Airlines in the 1950s — when a computer filled an entire building floor and was built out of vacuum tubes — and remains actively used today by multiple airlines. The programming language has been switched several times over the past 60+ years, but essential compatibility remains.

I can't remember where I read this and I can't find a cite right away, but I bet someone can confirm-or-correct me: the 6-letter reservation code for your flight? That used to be an explicit pointer of memory in oldold Sabre.

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

#50

Post by kjellsbells »

In HN terms: imagine your assets are encoded in an array or list. Movement is represented by shifting elements right or left.

Most airlines are hub and spoke. Elements shift right (planes leave the hub) then shift left (return). Sometimes they shift two places right. If something disrupts this, like, a plane is stuck in [1] when it needs to be in [0], its generally recoverable when the event clears, or, you can use one of those 2 step moves in another flight to pick up stranded passengers on your way back to the starting position [0].

Southwest operate a point to point model. Assets start at [0] and have to traverse every point on the list through to [N] to succeed. N can be 3, 4 or higher. You can imagine what happens if a disruption happens in the middle of this list. Everybody upstream of the break is left planeless, everybody downstream who wants to go up cant make it further than the airport before the break, and everybody at the breakpoint is miserable.

So Southwest then fallback to a new scheduling model for which their system was not designed. Its like having a graph traversal system and trying to get it to solve matrix equations. Yeah, there are some similarities, but its not really the same.

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