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Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?

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

#91

Post by ethbr0 »

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.

The pilot's union doesn't have a monopoly on truth. They would always like to be paid more and work less, as would I!

Are they accurate or inaccurate? I can't say.

Were they unionized, I'm sure the Twitter employee's union would be crying bloody murder right now. But it's fair to say that organizationally Twitter had a lot of headcount for their product. And when you tighten a financial belt, employees are going to be unhappy.

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

#92

Post by shagie »

foobarian wrote: post #47
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 countr…

Not quite that - they've only got one plane body (the 737). Additionally, they've got the plan for what the routes should be. If you buy a flight from Albuquerque to Chicago ( https://www.southwest.com/routes/flights-from-albuquerque-to... - https://www.southwest.com/route-map/ - https://www.southwest.com/air/low-fare-calendar/select-dates... ) there is going to be a plane flying that leg.

What they don't have is a crew that does MDW - ABQ - MDW - ABQ - MDW - ... but rather a crew that hypothetically does MDW - ABQ - HOU - BWI - MDW . The exact route is based on what capacity people have purchased on different legs and may change from loop to loop based on demand.

However, this means that if there's a something that disrupts part of that (a storm cancels all the flights in MDW and HOU for a day) and there's an odd demand pattern, the plane that needs to do the BWI to MDW route is currently in ABQ. And while there is a plane in BWI that could pick up the leg of BWI to MDW, that crew is currently on a mandatory rest period... but you could use the crew that is scheduled to be deadheaded in from AUS to DCA (and then send them by ground to BWI)... but that plane is delayed.

At some point they say/said "stop, cancel everything - demand is now 0, for all planes, reposition the planes so that we can start flights on Dec 29 according to the purchased demand."

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

#93

Post by mgkimsal »

mastercheif wrote: post #53
thomasjudge wrote: post #42

Fun fact I found in an NYT article and LinkedIn: The current CEO Bob Jordan started at Southwest in 1988 as a computer programmer. From 2006-2008 he was EVP of Strategy and Technology

FWIW, a SouthWest pilot with 35 YOE at the company placed most of the blame on the previous CEO's lack of investment in operations in chase of shareholder profits. The pilot gave the current CEO Bob Jordan (who started in early 2022) a vote of confidence and stated that he has strongly signaled his intention to improve the state of SW's systems, but obviously was unable to do so before this meltdown. Source: https://…

Someone in charge of an org that large, less than 10 months in, getting the blame for over a decade of skipped maintenance.... pretty unfair.

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

#94

Post by SoftTalker »

joezydeco wrote: post #71
Tempest1981 wrote: post #65

So how do other airlines track where their planes are? Radio? ADS-B? How about their crews? In-house mobile-phone app? The Southwest telephone-based system sounds super low-tech. AirTags might work better.

Everyone knows where the planes are. It's the pilots and crews that are dead heading around the country to get into position that got lost.

This is going to add fuel to the fire of demand for autonomous/remotely piloted aircraft.

Airlines would like nothing more than to be able to fly passengers in drones and fire all their flight crew.

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

#95

Post by srmarm »

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…

> even though everyone "knows" that the long-term benefits of the third-party solution far outweigh the financial savings of keeping the in-house solution, whether those benefits might be avoiding a national week-long service outage

Although it's also a regular occurrence that the replacement of an old 'just works' system brings about a week of downtime, mass disruption and still basic features missing.

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

#96

Post by rjh29 »

ctoth wrote: post #63
rjh29 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so simple, why didn't this entire company full of experienced specialists just do the random idea I just came up with without thinking about it at all?

It's almost as simple as crapping on an idea without saying why the idea is a bad one, which I personally find to be a much worse failure and an indicator of someone who likes to tear down without making suggestions.

I don't have enough information to make suggestions. Sometimes it's okay to not have an opinion on something, especially when you have no relationship with the company and have no idea what the reality of the situation is.

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

#97

Post by readthenotes1 »

esaym wrote: post #64
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.

I have a relative that worked in the IT department at SW. Can't remember the details but he said some main parts of their scheduling software were written in the 60's (or maybe even 50's). And it is still running. Edit: Ok reading comments jogged my memory. It was something to do with the 'Sabre' system which was from the 1950's.

This is true but also true for AA and several other airlines, for reservations and more but not crew scheduling. Sabre is old, huge, and complicated, but is not at fault here.

They run on a specialized version of Sabre that doesn't work the same as the other airlines on Sabre (AA, etc.) which is one reason you don't get SWA flights in Orbitz, etc.

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

#98

Post by HDThoreaun »

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.

The airline industry is one of the most competitive in the country. You succeed by ruthlessly cutting costs and offering tickets for $5 less than your competitors. And that’s how we end up with software from the 80s

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

#99

Post by HDThoreaun »

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.

People fly spirit and frontier all the time. The only thing that matters to many, many flyers is price. The airlines realize that so they all provide shit service, then people come to expect shit service and the race to lowest price continues.

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

#100

Post by mikewarot »

Terretta wrote: post #31
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?

According to Wikipedia, Southwest has 779 planes in service.[1]

Also, there are 11 hubs if I count correctly[2], so an average of 71 planes/hub.

Surely a team of a people could manage that amount of information in each hub on a temporary basis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_fleet

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines

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