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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

#201

Post by killerdhmo »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #187
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?

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 becaus…

Your hate of MBAs is unfounded and unproven. Their COO has worked there since 1993, and doesn’t have an MBA: https://www.swamedia.com/pages/michael-van-de-ven

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

#202

Post by TMWNN »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #53
AndrewBissell wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume the current administration could direct the Dept of Defense to make military pilots available to Southwest Yeah just have them switch to a completely different type of aircraft without getting trained or checked out at all, this will definitely fix the problem in short order.

I understand you have an axe to grind, as many of your recent posts are anti vaccination in nature. Regardless, public support is robust for the measures being taken to bring the pandemic public health crisis to a conclusion, and with regards to vaccine mandates and terminating those who refuse, so far those actions have been adjudicated as lawful. So, the current administration has to get creative when you have coho…

>So, the current administration has to get creative when you have cohorts purposely attempting to subvert public health measures (for whatever benefit they believe there is).

You didn't address AndrewBissell's point. As others have pointed out, there just aren't enough military pilots who are rated today to fly even a small fraction of Southwest's fleet. Further, assigning a large number of active-duty aviators to gain certification to fly 737s would massively disrupt the US's military posture. This is fact, no matter how "creative" the Biden administration may try to be. (And don't even try to bring up federalizing ANG/Reserve pilots. Most of them are already pilots at other airlines!)

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

#203

Post by chefandy »

listenallyall wrote: post #144
coliveira wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You've cited two comparatively minor failures confined to a very small subset of what banks do. There's a whole lot of critical software systems in banks that don't touch personal bank accounts. If you've ever worked on bank systems before, it was certainly in a very limited capacity.

I did code-level support for a large internal data management system for the federal reserve bank in the mid aughts. I'm not really interested in disclosing the specific bland but critically important data we moved/managed. It involved a giant amalgam of legacy commercial AIX and HP-UX software with some newer Java stuff in a Websphere environment. It was all duct-tape-and-bubble-gummed together with huge ksh88 scripts that were in constant development by devs and support people like me who'd just ssh into production systems to make changes. None of the internal software had dev/test systems, there was definitely no code review, and there was no version control. Yep. The system on a whole required constant monitoring and intervention to keep it plodding along. We did periodically see data loss that was unrecoverable from a technological standpoint but recovered with physical media kept around from their necessarily belt-and-suspenders business practices and tons of available staff for data entry. I reckon tens-of-thousands of folks outside the bank would have been affected per incident.

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

#204

Post by KingMachiavelli »

mrunkel wrote: post #145
ashtonkem wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be a major accusation to say that there is an illegal strike occurring. Keeping that card unplayed gives SW more negotiating power

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

#205

Post by dntrkv »

itronitron wrote: post #160
JohnBooty wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, or maybe not. Suppose you accept 1.5x or 2x or even 3x your annual salary to take a COBOL job. Nice... for now. What happens in 2, 5, or 10 years when this COBOL gig ends? Now your skills have withered or disappeared and you're 2, 5, or 10 years behind when it comes to "modern" technologies where 99.9% of the job opportunities are. In a sense, that COBOL job is a gamble. You are gambling that you can ride that…

I'd rather learn COBOL and get paid 2x salary for the next 5 years than learn some BS JS framework that I'll have to forget in the same timeframe.

React has been around for 8 years and isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

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

#206

Post by jshmrsn »

anovikov wrote: post #200

There's a cutthroat competition between the airlines so how can we be surprised that they have to "optimise" everything until fuckups like this start to happen? Consumers who are looking for someone to blame for this, should look in the mirror: those people who pick the cheapest picket at Expedia just by "sort by cheapest first", are the main culprits. Airline industry is in the pathetic state it is due to irrational…

Between the major airlines, it’s hard for me to know if one is better than the other. They’ve all had some mess up or another make the news. So why not just pick the cheapest? Perhaps the real problem is the lack of consumer reviews attached to those prices.

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

#207

Post by NegativeLatency »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #114
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…

Maybe there is something between the lines, but it really does not say much other than the obvious "our operations are worse than other carriers".

Maybe a symptom of trading efficiency for resiliency?

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

#208

Post by michaelmrose »

babyshake wrote: post #112
toomuchtodo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is the result of a sickout, I assume the current administration could direct the Dept of Defense to make military pilots available to Southwest in the event of an extended availability issue with their union pilots. Not as brutal as Reagan breaking the ATC union, but supporting a common carrier in a time of crisis. I don’t believe a federal case has been heard yet where the vaccine mandate or terminating thos…

I don't think vaccine mandates should be unlawful from private companies, but IMO it would be better if they gave a choice between a vaccine and having a recent test. If you need a vaccine or a negative test administered in the last 72 hours to attend work, it's very inconvenient to choose the test route but at least employees wouldn't be able to make the argument that they are being "forced" to get the vaccine.

The rapid test isn't very accurate especially in the absence of a full blown infection. The annual cost of doing a PCR test twice a week to ensure you always have an actually accurate test within 72 hours of working would be around $15,600. This is about 43% of the gross individual median income.

For practical purposes employers can't afford to pay near 50% more for the least reasonable employees, the government isn't incentivized to do so to make it easier not to vaccinate when this is really a poor substitute insofar as public health, and only the minority of employees can afford this.

In effect the end result of a practical testing alternative is to pretend we are giving them a choice while in fact giving them little choice.

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

#209

Post by stickfigure »

jcims wrote: post #178
coliveira wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean by 'useful' here? Facebook goes down for half a day and everybody laughs. Take 'banks' down for the same amount of time and see what happens.

It's pretty standard for banks to "go down" outside the hours of 9am-5pm. Nearly everything meaningful that a bank does is processed in batch, often with days-long delays.

Operationally, Facebook is a vastly harder problem.

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

#210

Post by wara23arish »

rmah wrote: post #117
fareesh wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it true that 35-40% of US residents are obese?

That would mean that 60% to 65% of those that died were not obese! Just FYI, the CDC says that about 42% of American adults are classified as "obese".

the people dying/hospitalized from covid are overwhelmingly obese. a quick google search will prove this easily.

covid mortalities are not a 1:1 mapping with obese/not obese.

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