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Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

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

#141

Post by mandatethis »

I work in a fortune 100 company.

I publicly spoke up at work about mandates being illegal, immoral and an affront to decent society. Especially, when there are alternatives we can provide (such as testing daily).

I made a post and shared it across multiple locations in the company.

As a people manager, I knew the risks.

My post was up only 10 min before being taken down.

Eventually, internal HR contacted me and told me they'd "take appropriate action" if I kept talking about it.

What they didn't expect is someone screenshot it and sent it around the company. I received hundreds of messages of support and I know many sent in messages on the side. Myself and many of the top people in the company wrote letters to their people leaders, CEO, board, HR, etc.

A week later they finally surveyed the company on their thoughts about the vaccines, A week after that the mandates were put on hold.

The majority of people don't believe others should lose their jobs over vaccine mandates. That likely is much higher (or lower) depending on industry or region.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/sixty-five-percent-o...

At the end of the day, this is expected. Polling indicated "70 percent of unvaccinated Americans would quit their job over exemption-less vaccine mandate"

https://theweek.com/vaccines/1004545/poll-70-percent-of-peop...

If this push continues, we may well all starve.

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

#142

Post by rsj_hn »

ctdonath wrote: post #103
_8j50 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For enough money they will find someone willing to learn COBOL.

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

#144

Post by listenallyall »

coliveira wrote: post #109
_8j50 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please define "buggy software." Can you point to a single confirmed case in the US of a person's bank account balance disappearing, or even a deposit not appearing, due to a software bug? I doubt it. Banks' core software is rock solid or they would be out of business very, very quickly.

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

#145

Post by mrunkel »

ashtonkem wrote: post #128
bryan0 wrote: post #127

Instead of bizarre excuses, why wouldn’t SWA just say that employees called in sick in large enough numbers to disrupt operations? What is their reasoning for covering this up if it’s true?

Because it's illegal. Under the Railway Labor Act they have to exhaust all their other set options before they can initiate a strike or walkout, and even then only if it's considered a "major" disagreement. Minor disagreements cannot be striked over, full stop.

That would be the motivation for the union, but the question was about the company.

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

#146

Post by mhh__ »

Decabytes wrote: post #139

How difficult is Cobol to learn compared to other languages? I admit I had a bias against it when I was watching Dave Plummer’s software drag race between it, C++, and Fortran[1] but I was absolutely blown away at it being faster than the Fortran implementation, and about 50% slower than the C++ one. For something so verbose, I wasn’t expecting it to compile to such efficient machine code. [1] https://youtu.be/yYcHWG…

50% slower than C++ is pretty terrible.

Verbosity is almost more helpful for optimization in a way, in the sense that C code ends up being fast because it's simpler than C is harder to optimize.

As for COBOL, isn't one of the issues that it's super complicated and not specified properly until recently?

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

#147

Post by lettergram »

InInteraction wrote: post #18

Robert Barnes and Viva discussed exactly this issue (sick-outs) on today's stream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuN9YhIhQ7Q&t=1285s

Actually waited to comment on this until I saw their analysis tonight. Figured they'd know about the lawsuits, which apparently they filed one friday.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.35...

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

#148

Post by lettergram »

zenlikethat wrote: post #2

[flagged]

A lawsuit was filed friday -- https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.35...

It's also illegal to do a walkout, so they did a "sick out"

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

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

#149

Post by sh-run »

sandworm101 wrote: post #121
lettergram wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

20%? That would mean they have 20% extra pilots on standby ready to take over for the sick. I think it is far lower than that, more like 5% or less. I suspect it might be closer to 2%, that there are no real backups. I bet that when someone is stick someone else is called in on their weekend. That would be the labor action: pilots refusing to work overtime/weekends when called to cover for someone.

My dad is a commercial pilot for a different carrier. The tl;dr is there are typically a subset of pilots on-call at any given time. Pilots who aren't on-call won't be asked to give up their weekends to cover flights.

Pilots either "sit reserve" or "hold a line" based on seniority/airframe and to a lesser degree rank (ie a pilot may choose to sit reserve as a captain when they could be a line holder as an FO). Line holders have a set schedule that they bid on (again based on seniority). If someone calls in sick, misses a flight, or if a flight goes unscheduled, scheduling contacts a pilot that is sitting reserve who then fills in the missing position.

When sitting reserve they get paid to hang out near the airport. Pilots are typically based out of some airport, reserve pilots need to be able to get to their airport within a set amount of time after being called (iirc 2 hours).

It's not that there aren't real reserve pilots, it's that there are exactly the number of backups that there needs to be under normal circumstances. Airlines don't like paying people to sit around and they've got scheduling down to a science. I think I was in high school the last time my dad sat reserve. It felt like he had to fly almost every time (but not every time!) he was on reserve.

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

#150

Post by hodgesrm »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #14

The explanation of "weather and an FAA shutdown" doesn't make sense given that, according to the article, other airlines aren't experiencing this at all. Oh, and for folks talking about a pilot protest against vaccine mandates, that theory is discussed at length toward the end of the article.

Southwest runs 3 to 4K commercial flights per day, which is about 1 in 7 commercial flights overall in the US. They depend on aircraft doing many short hops over the course of a single day: 7 or 8 is not uncommon. When things go bad it tends to disrupt the system very badly.

These numbers come from the US DOT ontime database. You can access the data in ClickHouse at https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443 (user=demo, password=demo). This is a public instance running on Altinity.Cloud.

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