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Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?

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

#81

Post by twobitshifter »

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…

I’m not sure that’s the case although we heard that third hand from Reddit.

https://blog.geaerospace.com/technology/big-wins-in-flight-e...

Skysolver is a GE Flight Services trademark - there’s a video here showing how it works and SW planes in the video. Contrary to the reddit claim, it does appear to use a predictive algorithm.

Highlight quote from the video: “It is humanly impossible when there’s a major disruption for somebody to figure out what the optimal approach is to get them back on schedule”

Edit: I could see tracking off-duty crew being difficult and done by phone - employees don’t carry beacons and would you want that surveillance from your company? In this situation many crew could be home for the holidays and far from their last known location, and stranded due to problems with other airlines, trains, or roads.

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

#82

Post by enjoylife »

FesterCluck wrote: post #66

Everyone here is at least a little misinformed regarding their software and it's simulation abilities. They have control systems with the data they need, and this data is fed into the flight scheduling & monitoring UI. Their tech works, it just gets bashed on because it's different than a lot of other airlines. Used properly it can account for these things. What causes things like this is overbooking. Overbooking hap…

> A human made the decision to widen the guardrails. There aren't a ton of people allowed to do that…

Assuming this is the case, where folks can override during an incident like this, it sounds like the simulation tooling doesn’t have a human loop interface to demonstrate potential effects post override.

Does that type of simulation interface exist in the industry? And would it have helped?

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

#83

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

cowmoo728 wrote: post #75
ethbr0 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure it's as cut and dry as "CFO becomes CEO and overly focuses on financials" in Southwest's case. In 2021, Gary Kelly (former CFO/CEO) announced his retirement and picked Bob Jordan (CS trained, having previously worked on the AirTran integration) to take over as CEO, which seems a realization that Southwest has some serious technical debt to address. All businesses have highest priorities at a given point in t…

But the Southwest pilot's union is accusing the former CEO, Gary Kelly, of running the company at full speed into operational suicide. I don't see that as picking the right CEO for the moment, even if the stock price did well.

Classic Jack Welch move. Get out before the shit you created hits the fan and leave the next guy to deal with it.

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

#84

Post by iudqnolq »

punkrex wrote: post #36

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…

A few days ago they declared a "state of emergency" in a few airports, which they're pretty transparently using to squeeze staff.

I don't see any non-bogus reason to, for example, stop accepting doctor's letters from telehealth visits only in cities where they're particularly short staffed.

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

#85

Post by iudqnolq »

mythhouse wrote: post #62
mitchell_h wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "Southwest is the greyhound of the sky" is a well known phrase. This had to be before spirit and frontier came onto the scene.

In various parts of the US there are sketchy bus companies with unpredictable and unreliable service that are cheaper than Greyhound. One example is the busses between New York and nearby large cities. They tend to accumulate accident records, close, and re-open under a new name. Boarding involves standing in a scrum they vaguely measure.

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

#86

Post by jeffwask »

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.

They were also among the cheapest flights available now they are among the most expensive and their little extra's don't cover the difference.

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

#87

Post by jeffwask »

logosmonkey wrote: post #44
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.

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.

I knew someone who was working on this, my understanding was technology infrastructure was a huge blocker to their plans for international flights. The scheduling system required many hours of downtime every night to process. It effectively ran from the moment the last airport on the west coast closed to start of operations next day east coast and it was just getting longer.

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

#88

Post by markus_zhang »

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.

Maybe it evens runs on some mainframe systems since the 80s.

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

#89

Post by markus_zhang »

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…

Onr big problem of this kind of upgrades is few in the trench would be able to provide feedback or recommendation. It would be lucky if some managers in trench gets consulted.

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

#90

Post by jaxn »

kgermino wrote: post #48
mitchell_h wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Weekly travelers prefer legacy carriers because they get upgraded to fist class, have special phone numbers for customer service and rebooking, board first, etc.
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