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

Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

thepointsguy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 627 posts

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#101

Post by briffle »

nradov wrote: post #85
beerandt wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes under these circumstances They couldn't admit it if that's what they're doing. They'd have to deny it either way. Even an "unofficial" unorganized sick out. On the other hand- if a pilot knew he was getting fired in two weeks for not getting vaccinated, and he happened to have two weeks sick pay, well then the company policy did a…

Even if an employee is fired for cause the employer is required to pay out accrued vacation time.

That depends on what state you are in. Not every state requires it. But I’m guessing the pilots union agreement includes it.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#102

Post by trixie_ »

tdeck wrote: post #40
mberning wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is maddening. Even if the stated goal is to “get off the mainframe” everybody deep down knows it isn’t going anywhere for 10 years. We recently had a discussion about porting from one mainframe “module” to another due to cost. I asked why we don’t just continue paying for the current module since the goal is to sunset mainframe. Everybody on the call laughed. So we will go ahead and “invest” several man years and…

I've been on the other side of this and seen too many teams neglect to fix even the simplest and most frustrating bugs in a system because they're going to rewrite it "in the next six months". Usually the rewrite is still going years later, and the actual code used in production is left to rot, holding back other teams as well.

It happens when you have a lot of new people who refuse to work with legacy code (which is anything over 2 years old), trivialize the complexity of the existing system (because they don’t understand a tenth of what it does), go create a sub par replacement with tons of people and years of work (that ends up coupled to the legacy system anyways), and now the company has two systems to maintain requiring double the resources as before. When everyone gets fed up and leaves, the cycle will start again. Our system is about four levels deep now. It’s the f’ing matrix.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#103

Post by ctdonath »

_8j50 wrote: post #38
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #19

Seeing stories like this makes me wonder if we'll ever see a company actually go bust based purely on the instability of its decades-old, duct-taped architecture. I have a relative who works for a large credit card processor running on mainframe systems and I hear over and over again that they're all retiring and unable to fill the newly opened roles. This problem is compounded by the fact that their offshore contrac…

Right... they can't train someone on COBOL? I call b.s. on that. It's an HR issue, you need blah blah degrees and yadi yadi yada experience. Big corps don't adopt to job economy changes over time like this unless their core business is built to adopt to economic changes. Inability to make exemptions and place the right first line managers over teams is what kills big companies, or forces them into an endless loop of…

Not if they can’t find anyone willing to learn COBOL.

There’s huge demand for developers on modern systems. Seriously, how much are you going to pay a developer to do mainframe COBOL - and is that developer going to produce commensurate value, really able to hold together a crumbling antique infrastructure?

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#104

Post by jhugo »

logicchains wrote: post #91
toomuchtodo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain employers and schools who previously had vaccine mandates (hepatitis and measles are examples I’ve seen for schools and healthcare workers) and what makes this vaccine different? If the argument is “mandates are wrong”, we’ve had them for over 150 years. If the argument is it’s not safe, its FDA approved and has been administered over a billion times. https://www.healthline.com/health-news/vaccine-man…

[flagged]

That first link doesn't really back up "zero effect on reducing the spread of covid". It's a non-peer-reviewed discussion of some graphs from Our World In Data.

Their analysis is incredibly shallow, for example comparing Portugal or Iceland (high vaccination rate, mostly open, lots of COVID cases) to Vietnam (low vaccination rate, completely locked down at the time the analysis was done, not many COVID cases). You can't make any inference about the vaccine / caseload relationship when you ignore the fact that one country is completely open and the other had such a strict lockdown that people were struggling to get food.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#105

Post by vxNsr »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #83
cryptoanon25490 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Military pilots for commercial airlines. Military personnel in hospitals. When do we get military teachers and military politicians?

We have always had military politicians. Military politicians are older than humankind itself.

> Military politicians are older than humankind itself.

Just curious, is this just hyperbole or do you have an actual example?

ETA: I mean the "older than humankind itself" part. Like what does that mean in this context?

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#106

Post by walterbell »

Florida reporter tweet about Friday's delays, https://twitter.com/benbeckeranjax/status/144703647319525785...

> Source tells me “some controllers getting vaccinated and the mandatory (48) rest period required after controllers get the vaccine” led to staffing shortage at Jax ATC in Hilliard that resulted in mass flight delays/cancellations in Florida on Friday night.

> ... The Federal Air Surgeon determined that FAA medical certificate holders may not act as pilot in command, or in any other capacity as a required flightcrew member, for 48 hours after each dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. The Federal Air Surgeon made this determination after evaluation of available medical information about these COVID-19 vaccines and potential side effects, https://www.faa.gov/coronavirus/guidance_resources/vaccine_f...

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#107

Post by lettergram »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #55
hnburnsy wrote: post #36

Comment from the Southwest Pilots Union... >SWA has claimed that the immediate causes of this weekend’s meltdown were staffing at Jacksonville Center and weather in the southeast U.S., but what was a minor temporary event for other carriers devastated Southwest Airlines because our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure. Our operation and our frontline employees have…

They also explicitly deny that a sickout is occuring: > There are false claims of job actions by Southwest Pilots currently gaining traction on social media and making their way into mainstream news. I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise. Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor dis…

I think that's because it's technically illegal to do a walkout...

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-a-southwest-airli...

In reality, a lot of pilots can just message each other on the side and say "f-it". Idk how many it takes to take down the system, but I suspect even 20% out sick could cause a cascading failure.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#109

Post by coliveira »

_8j50 wrote: post #38
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #19

Seeing stories like this makes me wonder if we'll ever see a company actually go bust based purely on the instability of its decades-old, duct-taped architecture. I have a relative who works for a large credit card processor running on mainframe systems and I hear over and over again that they're all retiring and unable to fill the newly opened roles. This problem is compounded by the fact that their offshore contrac…

Right... they can't train someone on COBOL? I call b.s. on that. It's an HR issue, you need blah blah degrees and yadi yadi yada experience. Big corps don't adopt to job economy changes over time like this unless their core business is built to adopt to economic changes. Inability to make exemptions and place the right first line managers over teams is what kills big companies, or forces them into an endless loop of…

Banks are genetically incapable of doing anything useful in terms of technology. Their mainframe architecture was outdated 40 years ago! They will forever maintain their hacks and buggy software.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#110

Post by ironmagma »

evgeniysharapov wrote: post #65

It's spectacular to see LUV devolving from one of the best managed and employee oriented airline company to this. It's not an outstanding incident though, the company was on the downward trajectory from, I would say, end of 2017. Sooner or later every US airline company declares bankruptcy, LUV so far has escaped it. But one would bet it will happen this year (unlikely) or next year.

What has been the problem(s)?
Post reply on HN