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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

#181

Post by cehrlich »

smsm42 wrote: post #168
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…

> our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure I somehow notice a lot of this lately, in many different areas. I wonder if there isn't a common cause behind those. Is it just covid or something bigger?

Optimisation culture. Cut x cost by y%? Promotion! Everything collapses a few years later because there’s no buffers for anything? Who cares, those managers are already at their next job so it’s someone else’s fault!

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

#182

Post by dkarl »

Daneel_ wrote: post #135
riffic wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> decades-old, duct-taped architecture The way the survivorship bias works out, this is generally a strength, not a weakness. You want to get good money, you learn how stuff works under the hood and get familiar with your predecessor architectures, emulate them if you need to.

I have to disagree. These systems aren't "survivors" - they're held together with a fragile weave of scripts, hacks, unsupported hardware and outdated knowledge. Often treated as a black box, they become an object that people have to hand-nurse through issues that would never trouble modern systems. The amount of effort and money that's expended to maintain these systems is typically far more than the upfront cost wo…

> These systems aren't "survivors" - they're held together with a fragile weave of scripts, hacks, unsupported hardware and outdated knowledge.

It can be, depending on the system and who's complaining about it. Sometimes a fragile, buggy, mess of a legacy system is actually fragile and buggy, with failures causing downtime or lost business, and creaky processes slowing new development to a crawl. Sometimes it's just a system that has an unfamiliar or slightly less ergonomic developer experience, that uses older technologies that some developers don't want to learn. You have to look past the complaints and judge for yourself.

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

#183

Post by mmaunder »

I wonder if ATC rerouting flights on routes that use more fuel, due to ATC staff shortages and military training on Friday, may have caused SW to elect to cancel more flights than other airlines. They’re on a very tight margin compared to less budget targeted carriers.

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

#184

Post by hawk_ »

smsm42 wrote: post #168
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…

> our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure I somehow notice a lot of this lately, in many different areas. I wonder if there isn't a common cause behind those. Is it just covid or something bigger?

this is the price we pay for rewarding "efficiencies" up and down the entire chain, leaving no slack whatsoever. with large companies or operations these efficiencies can be over really minor things as well because it means bonus for someone. the root cause of all of this is "short-termism". everyone is only worried about the next quarter, not the next 5 let alone 20-40 years.

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

#185

Post by saurik »

cehrlich wrote: post #181
smsm42 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure I somehow notice a lot of this lately, in many different areas. I wonder if there isn't a common cause behind those. Is it just covid or something bigger?

Optimisation culture. Cut x cost by y%? Promotion! Everything collapses a few years later because there’s no buffers for anything? Who cares, those managers are already at their next job so it’s someone else’s fault!

That's also "I want it cheap and I don't want to consider complexity" culture; if an airline were consistently more expensive but claimed "hey you know that once a decade issue that happened to Southwest last year? it will never happen to us", maybe some businesses with particularly critical flights would go for it, but not only would most people go for the cheaper flight given the option... I bet almost no one would be able to tell you what the benefit of the more expensive airline was as they probably just don't care enough to learn or research (which is different from then deciding the difference didn't matter).

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

#186

Post by sandworm101 »

sh-run wrote: post #149
sandworm101 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

>> there are exactly the number of backups that there needs to be under normal circumstances.

So, as I said, no redundancy for abnormal circumstances. If they are sitting on a reserve roster, but nearly always fly, then those aren't really a reserve pool. One or two extra people calling in sick and there won't be backups available.

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

#187

Post by doctorwho42 »

smsm42 wrote: post #168
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…

> our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure I somehow notice a lot of this lately, in many different areas. I wonder if there isn't a common cause behind those. Is it just covid or something bigger?

It is large due to corporations taking on lean-business models from MBAs over the last decade+. When a business runs lean, it becomes more fragile to disruptions. Unfortunately due to our economic system, there is a semi-regular boon-bust cycle, so if it wasn't COVID, it would have been something else that kicks the stool out from under the legs of these corporations.

In the past this wasn't as big as an issue because the risk was spread out amongst a multitude of small to medium size corporations. But again, over the last few decades corporations have become mega-conglomerates through buyouts and mergers/etc... Too big to fail. All the eggs in fewer baskets. Again, in an attempt to keep growing, because in our current economic system and the culture promoted in it (partially by MBA's) is the idea that if your company isn't growing it's dying. And even if it's growing, if it's not growing by a large enough amount it is failing...

So you could have a 1,000 person corporations stabley making 100 million in revenue. Providing good benefits and salaries to all. But if its not growing, then it is viewed as failing ... It's truly an absurd mindset and culture.

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

#188

Post by rgj »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #169
atatatat wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What more should leadership (or investors) need to hear?

I'm saying it doesn't add much to the news.

It adds the lack of another reason, i.e. there is no mention of for instance a pilot shortage or vaccination restrictions.

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

#189

Post by logicchains »

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]

Surprising how many people downvote blindly without even making an attempt to argue against the data and conclusions of those studies. It's like an anti-critical-thinking cult.

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

#190

Post by logicchains »

jhugo wrote: post #104
logicchains wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 ca…

>It's a non-peer-reviewed discussion of some graphs from Our World In Data.

A discussion published in the European Journal of Epidemiology. It doesn't just look at those two countries; its statistical analysis covers 68 countries and 2947 US counties. You don't think that if the vaccine were effective at preventing spread, there should be at least some evidence of this effect when comparing vaccination rate and spread across different regions?

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