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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

#311

Post by soylentnewsorg »

creato wrote: post #257
soylentnewsorg wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If the cause is the military, why is southwest so disproportionately affected, and being affected in so many cities? > “The problems weren’t concentrated in just one particular region. The cancelations affected the entire Southwest network. People living in cities where Southwest has a big operation, like Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and where I am in the San Francisco Bay Area, saw cancelations in the do…

an airport is a hub for an airline, but not for other airlines. if southwest has 50 planes at an airport, and delta has 10 southwest is going to be impacted. when your plane takeoffs are cancelled at your hub, every single flight that was going to use that plane later in the day, or the following day, is now missing a plane.

if Chicago O'hare is shut down, United is done for the day in half the country, because half its planes are stuck at O'hare. if Chicago Midway is shut down, only Southwest is screwed. if Atlanta shuts down, only Delta is screwed.

Yes, I'm sure there are other cities that also had planes. Like Phoenix. Except the plane that was supposed to land in Phoenix is stuck in Florida. Or the pilot piloting the plane already in Phoenix is stuck in Florida.

Planes go from one city to another. If you introduce a blockage along the way, you've now taken that plane, or a crew out of commission.

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

#312

Post by KozmoNau7 »

baumy wrote: post #302
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

You're willing to sacrifice people that you consider "expendable", because you think vaccination and masks are more dangerous than a highly infectious disease with long-lasting detrimental health consequences even for survivors.

Such a severe lack of empathy is disturbing.

> the vast majority of the dead will be the very old, and people who took extraordinarily poor care of their health.

This is incorrect, the Delta variant is hitting young people hard, including children.

https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/how-covid-19-d...

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/young-people-make-up-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/young-unvaccinate...

The ego-driven vaccine denial and lack of respect for distancing and mask requirements is killing people.

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

#314

Post by cronix »

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?

According to this substack[1], it was a pilot walkout/"sickout" due to vaccine mandates. It's actually happening in more companies/industries than widely reported. I imagine it's also picked up steam since last weeks revelation from leaked internal Pfizer emails[2] that they used cells from aborted fetuses while testing the RDNA vaccine (testing - it's not in the vaccine), but have publicly stated otherwise. It was also pretty clear that they did not want the public to know from the text. And a lot of "religious exemptions" are being turned down. This would be a bit like taking a staunch vegan and forcing them to eat something (via threatening career) that was tested on animals while they said otherwise.

> The pilot emailed following the first Southwest post today (and provided his SWA ID to prove his identity). He asked that I paraphrase the email.

> Essentially, the union cannot organize or even acknowledge the sickout, because doing so would make it an illegal job action. Years ago, Southwest and its pilots had a rough negotiation, and the union would not even let the pilots internally discuss the possibility of working-to-rule (which would have slowed Southwest to a crawl).

> But at the moment the pilots don’t even have to talk to each other about what they’re doing. The anger internally - not just among pilots but other Southwest workers - is enormous. The tough prior negotiations notwithstanding, Southwest has a history of decent labor relations, and workers believe the company should stand up for them against the mandate. Telling pilots in particular to comply or face termination has backfired.

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

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUXGB5FzhPc

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

#315

Post by alanbernstein »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #227
alanbernstein wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a group of apes led by (political) the strongest one (military)?

Groups of chimpanzees are often led by the strongest one. They are also often not led by the strongest one - you can take over the group by forming a coalition to depose the current leader. Then you fight him.

That's interesting - still seems like a "military action".

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

#316

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

Operating a business is a lot like flying an airline in one respect: It's not your average hight above the zero point that matters so much as never, ever going below it.

Failure to maintain altitude above ground level and failure to maintain solvency are in many ways equivalent.

Both domains involve taking risks, but with severe consequences when either risks are miscalculated or ground truths change. Financial bets can be hedged in ways flight profiles often cannot be, and Southwest are credited for doing this (with fuel purchase futures notably), but there's a sense in which businesses are arbitraging latent risks for present profits in ways which can prove catastrophic. (Venture start-ups are particularly prone to this IMO.)

Southwest's single-airframe fleet affords efficiencies, but also risks should faults arise with that airframe or subsystems of it (as with the 737 MAX scenario).

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

#317

Post by listenallyall »

dotancohen wrote: post #261
baggy_trough wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a nation becomes dysfunctional enough, it’s no longer possible to tell the truth.

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.

Cool! FYI some French dude named Voltaire appears to have stolen that line from you and claims he wrote it.

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

#318

Post by dwaite »

tdeck wrote: post #46
harlanlewis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t a widespread coordinated protest be extremely easy to verify? To the contrary, the southwest pilots union (SWAPA) is explicitly saying these delays are not caused by vaccine protests, despite their continued opposition to the mandate. https://www.forbes.com/sites/graisondangor/2021/10/10/southw...

Doesn't a strike need an authorization vote? Perhaps they couldn't get one. United Airlines has over 90% vaccinated employees. If the numbers are similar at Southwest, it might mean there isn't enough will to oppose the mandate through a formal action. That puts union leadership in an awkward position - they could say "some employees have gone rogue and taken sick time to protest the mandate", but that's kinda throwi…

> they could say "some employees have gone rogue and taken sick time to protest the mandate", but that's kinda throwing some of their members under the bus.

I suspect it would be a far better alternative than what happens if it turns out the union was used to organize a walk-out, although I don't know what the ramifications of breaking those laws are (criminal charges? union disbandment?)

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

#319

Post by dsign »

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…

Competition is the way capitalism works :-) . And I've seeing absolute monopolies doing far worse. Examples: the Cuban communications monopoly[^1] and their national airlines.

That said, airlines are between the sword and a hard place, and I expect it's going to get much, much worse as climate regulation kicks in the next few months. If you want to fly to some remote country for tourism, do it as soon as possible.

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETECSA#Controversies

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

#320

Post by namdnay »

dustintrex wrote: post #140
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, duct-taped architecture is endemic across the airline industry though, and AFAIK Southwest isn't even particularly bad on this front. American Airlines's original reservation system Sabre, still a major GDS player today, was first put together in the 1950s and is by some reckonings the oldest commercial (as in, non-government/military/research) computer system out there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sab…

Southwest are better than most NA carriers in this regard, they switched to Amadeus a few years ago. Which is "only" 10-30 years old (depending on the components).
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