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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

#301

Post by bobthepanda »

smsm42 wrote: post #293
bobthepanda wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

well, as an example, when the 737MAX was grounded, many airlines had already started taking delivery of them and were operating them. Southwest was the largest recipient at that time.

Southwest had plenty of older 737s as well, but the new MAX planes both fly farther and have more seats, so while the grounding was in effect Southwest was essentially paying to keep the things on the ground while scrambling to reconfigure their flight network, and it affected them the most.

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

#302

Post by baumy »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #282
twofornone wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downvotes on this site have gotten insane. This is a perfectly rational comment. Whether you agree with them or not, just burying your hand and refusing to acknowledge that a nontrivial percentage of workers oppose mandates is just asinine. Boneheaded authoritarianism. If you ever wondered how horrors like the soviet union and nazi germany are possible, take a look at the religious groupthink that has seemingly c…

> "99% survival rate" 1% dead means around 3.5 million dead, in the US alone. Do you consider that acceptable?

If the choice is between 3.5 million dead, and the rise of authoritarianism and censorship, then yes the former is much less tragic than the latter and therefore the more acceptable option. And that's before taking into account that the survival rate is quite a bit higher than 99%, so it won't be 3.5 million dead. And also before taking into account that the vast majority of the dead will be the very old, and people who took extraordinarily poor care of their health.

Of course the choice isn't that simple or binary in the real world, but there's elements of that choice at play and I stand by the point I'm making.

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

#303

Post by TrispusAttucks »

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?

The global economy is just one enormous JIT system now. Great for efficiency not so good for stability.

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

#304

Post by shapefrog »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #268
mandatethis wrote: post #141

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…

Let me guess, and next somebody started slow-clapping and people started joining in until there was a thunderous ovation? Anything else you want to add to your fanfic?

In the cafeteria later that day, the elusive hottie Karen from accounting, that only dated the jocks, walked past the table and said "Hi Mandatethis we should go out some time" while handing over a pice of paper with her snapchat and a big lipstick kiss next to it.

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

#305

Post by smt88 »

roenxi wrote: post #276
dotancohen wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My /. sig for years: > It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. That said, I don't think that the government is wrong here.

Well, the specific question that the government is answering is "should these people be employed if they make choices I disagree with". It is more borderline than it might appear at first blush. I'm not sure I can think of a precedent for being so willing to eject that many people from the workforce in such a way.

> should these people be employed if they make choices I disagree with

This is a disingenuous way to frame it.

The current govt is anti-Nazi, but it's never tried to mandate that all employees found to be Nazis must be fired.

The reason vaccines are an issue of employment (only at larger employers, by the way) is that unvaccinated people endanger their coworkers.

People have a right to be unvaccinated, and the rest of us have a right to protect ourselves from them.

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

#306

Post by listenallyall »

tdeck wrote: post #300
valray wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> a set of incentives

money, responsibility, prestige

> that reward a certain style of business

profitable, growing, innovative

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

#307

Post by chopin »

JohnBooty wrote: post #251
haroldp wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens in 2, 5, or 10 years when this COBOL ends? What happens in 1 or 2 years when the current hottest new full-stack, mvc, reactive 3.0 whatever is old and tired and you have to learn the new thing? You learn the new thing.

Sorry, I forgot a word there. Post now edited. I meant, "when this COBOL gig ends", not "when this COBOL ends" which is what I initially typed. I agree that COBOL will outlive a lot of these modern flash-in-the-pan frameworks. However, the number of COBOL jobs will dwindle over time, and if I took a theoretical COBOL job today it's not clear to me that I would be particularly employable if/when that job ended. Partic…

>OK, but how employable are you at that point?

>It's going to take some significant effort to catch back up.

You got 2x (or whatever) the salary until then. That should give you plenty of time to catch up. Currently anybody is employed anyways if one knows how to use a keyboard. I don't think that is ending anytime soon.

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

#308

Post by listenallyall »

hawk_ wrote: post #184
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 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.

The US commercial air transport industry is an absolute marvel. Millions of people moved thousands of miles every single day, mostly at extremely affordable fares. And tons of cargo moved as well. All with an excellent safety record, especially in the past decade.

If "the price we pay" is a day or two of one airline (not any of the others) grounding most of its fleet, most likely due to a controversial internal HR policy, it's an exceptionally low price.

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

#309

Post by davedx »

rsanek wrote: post #294
davedx wrote: post #283

Please can we clean up the disinformation in this post?

Do you have any specific examples? What do you mean by 'clean up' exactly?

This comment tree for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28825105

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

#310

Post by dwaite »

Talanes wrote: post #137
nradov wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Where I am, they pay out vacation time, but not sick time (unless it's a combined pool, in which case vacation takes precedence.) I don't know how common that situation is, but it certainly incentivizes getting "sick" right before you leave a job.

As a result, there are many companies (at least in the US) which will refuse to honor sick time taken through your final day without legal pressure - they'll take it out of your vacation time, and if not there your salary.
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