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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

#291

Post by hef19898 »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #207
thrdbndndn wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In my experience, efficiency usually results in an increased level of resilience. You can easily sacrifice both, jeopardizing profits. Every time I saw that happen, it turned out some department-specific KPI (it doesn't matter which department, finance, production, sales, logistics,..) looked really good while that happened. All other sucked, but nobody cared. IMHO, this over emphasis on one silo, at the expense of all the others, puts so much stress on those other functions that they only can crack if something external puts even more stress on them. I guess that is what Covid and all the resulting disruptions is doing. Some orgs crack earlier than others, every one does have its cracking point so. The question is if an organization can adapt before it reaches its breaking point.

Southwest it seems reached it before others.

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

#292

Post by dgb23 »

kortilla wrote: post #222
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?

This is only “a failure” if the loss from this is worse than all of the money they have saved over the years by running so lean. This type of event is the obvious possible downside that is well known when you structure a company this way. It’s not that events like this aren’t expected, it’s that prepping for them costs more than the loss from not being able to absorb them.

I‘m sure you‘re just describing what is, but...

The human element doesn’t matter at all? Their workers are fed up.

This tunnel visioning on financial metrics is so superficial and narrow that it makes me angry. A company is a community of interacting, real people, not a video game.

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

#293

Post by smsm42 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #263
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?

Southwest is literally the poster child of low cost carriers. They started the whole business model, which consists of a few things: * they operate literally one type of aircraft, and therefore only have to train their crew once, keep the specific set of parts, etc. * they optimize the hell out of making sure their planes are in use carrying paying passengers for the maximum amount of time * they fly a vast network o…

How operating one type of plane makes recovering from disruption harder? I'd expect it to make it easier - you can replace any crew with any other crew, and any plane with any other plane. Same with secondary airports - I am not sure how it makes recovery harder. Distributed systems are usually more robust against disruption that centralized ones - if you can't fly in an out of the hub, then all your flights in that hub's vicinity are grounded, but if you just lost one secondary airport, there might be another close by. So I'm not sure I am convinced those particular qualities are detrimental to robustness, at least without a convincing argument.

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

#295

Post by AndrewBissell »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #98
AndrewBissell wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

They haven't mandated flu shots yet. Once they see how easy it was to manipulate public opinion, wouldn't be surprised to have mandated flu shots in the near future in addition to whatever other gain-of-function research virus they accidentally release next: https://theintercept.com/2021/09/09/covid-origins-gain-of-fu...

Yes, actually USC has already started doing this for students and staff.

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

#296

Post by speedybird »

ashtonkem wrote: post #120
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 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. No, they could not, not without a wholesale reworking of the entire FAA. Pilots are trained and certified on individual airplanes; even highly experienced pilots need retraining in order to safely fly a new aircraft. Shoving a bun…

I mean, how many P-8 pilots does the navy have? A P-8 is a 737NG.

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

#297

Post by listenallyall »

valray wrote: post #217
killerdhmo wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your statement shows lack of understanding of how the modern corporation works. The COO may have been there 30 years, and may lack an MBA, but increasingly it is this type of CxO that has been reyling upon MBAs and other consultants (operations research) to restructure the organization into an optimized-but-fragile state. It is the rare old-hand that can standup to younguns talking tech and math, subjects he does not…

Are you suggesting that old people uncomfortable with math and tech are the best people to be leading major corporations? Even Herb Kelleher was only 40 when he started Southwest.

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

#298

Post by Ma8ee »

soylentnewsorg wrote: post #219
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…

Decades-old does not mean duct-taped. It means every edge case has been hit, it's rock solid, and it works. There are many patches on top of patches, and the system is hard to comprehend for someone new. But it's a heck of a lot more stable that something redesigned. The real issue here, is during bad weather and understaffed ATC, for some reason the airforce decided to do some training in airspace used by commercial…

Decades old might definitely mean duct taped and unstable. In about 1995 I witnessed the beginning of the end of at the time very successful company that just had tripled their whole organisation. But the code base was 5 million lines of a lot of copy pasted literal spaghetti code. And only a handful of ageing coders that had been with the company almost from the start could get anything done. And then, one day, those damn customers demanded a Windows application, instead of the classy DOS application.

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

#299

Post by dotancohen »

craftinator wrote: post #240
kortilla wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only “a failure” if the loss from this is worse than all of the money they have saved over the years by running so lean. This type of event is the obvious possible downside that is well known when you structure a company this way. It’s not that events like this aren’t expected, it’s that prepping for them costs more than the loss from not being able to absorb them.

> This is only “a failure” if the loss from this is worse than all of the money they have saved over the years by running so lean. Don't forget all of the future losses by losing the trust of both the customers and the employees. > it’s that prepping for them costs more than the loss from not being able to absorb them This assumes that they can absorb these losses.

  > Don't forget all of the future losses by losing the trust of both the customers and the employees.
Who's going to remember this? Even a large percentage of the stranded passengers are likely to fly Southwest again to save $36 on a flight.

  > This assumes that they can absorb these losses.
If they couldn't, then they could very very likely receive a bailout or other assistance. It is the existence of these safetynets that allows these businesses to operate so lean. The cynical might say that bailouts encourage the practice.

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

#300

Post by tdeck »

valray wrote: post #217
killerdhmo wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your statement shows lack of understanding of how the modern corporation works. The COO may have been there 30 years, and may lack an MBA, but increasingly it is this type of CxO that has been reyling upon MBAs and other consultants (operations research) to restructure the organization into an optimized-but-fragile state. It is the rare old-hand that can standup to younguns talking tech and math, subjects he does not…

Not disagreeing, but also I don't think it's even necessary for any MBAs to be involved (although such a corporate structure would be very unlikely). All that's needed is a set of incentives that reward a certain style of business to the detriment of others. Based on our total set of economic policies, the US has those incentives in many (most?) sectors of the economy.
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