Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by Barrin92 » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 12:48 PM UTC

listenallyall wrote: post #308

hawk_ wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

>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

As opposed to...? tons of cargo and millions of people are being moved around everywhere, welcome to the modern world. The US commercial flight industry sucks in the grand scheme of things mostly due to a lack of competition. Flying in the US is expensive compared to Europe/Asia.

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

#402

Post by brandmeyer » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 12:52 PM UTC

unionemployee wrote: post #359

himinlomax wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find pilots refusing vaccines in significant numbers plausible in the slightest. Airline pilots have to comply with plenty of regulations and they're continuously trained to comply with safety regulations. Thus you don't become a pilot or don't remain one for long if you're allergic to safety regulations. If there's one occupation where expert recommendations are respected, it's aviation, and for good reasons…

Pilots in the US are an extremely conservative bunch. On my pilot group's FB page, the number of times I've read "Let's go Brandon!" in response to this supposed sickout are numerous. Every trip I hear the far-right Breitbart, Newsmax media narrative, and links from similar pseudo news blog sites are posted all the time. It's impossible to fly to SFO or LAX without a comment on homelessness, taxes, liberals, etc. Onc…

> On my pilot group's FB page

Social media has optimized the process of finding groups of people that think just exactly like you do. The fact that you are listening to one specific echo chamber that feels this way does not tell you that the entire industry feels this way.

Consider the following counter-example: United Airlines also has a vaccine mandate, and got well over 99% compliance.

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

#403

Post by theodorethomas » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 12:56 PM UTC

Decabytes wrote: post #139

How difficult is Cobol to learn compared to other languages? I admit I had a bias against it when I was watching Dave Plummer’s software drag race between it, C++, and Fortran[1] but I was absolutely blown away at it being faster than the Fortran implementation, and about 50% slower than the C++ one. For something so verbose, I wasn’t expecting it to compile to such efficient machine code. [1] https://youtu.be/yYcHWG…

The "race" was between compilers, GNU compilers in fact, not languages.

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

#404

Post by dboreham » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 12:58 PM UTC

killerdhmo wrote: post #201

doctorwho42 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not really MBAs, more like "business rules cult". MBAs are just the primary vehicle through which these viral rules of operation have spread. For example, when I worked in semiconductor manufacturing in the 90s you'd constantly hear at management training seminars "reduce inventory because it costs money". Also "offshore because it's cheaper" and "outsource activities that aren't core to the business". Every single one of these things has a downside, often not visible until "bad stuff happens".

These trite rules get repeated so often they become like The Mandalorian "This is the way".

I think every industry is full of this kind of nonsense. Some closer to home examples : everything needs to be in the cloud; immutability is good; use 3rd party SaaS services for everything; code comments are bad; ...

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

#405

Post by TechBro8615 » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 1:03 PM UTC

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…

They used to be a low-cost carrier but they're pretty average now in terms of cost. They've been replaced at the lower-end by Spirit.

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

#406

Post by dgb23 » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 1:10 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #357

dgb23 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Going out of business doesn't help the workers, either.

My point is: "If you only look at financial statements, you lose the big picture" and not "don't look at financial statements".

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

#407

Post by unpolloloco » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 1:11 PM UTC

TechBro8615 wrote: post #405

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…

They used to be a low-cost carrier but they're pretty average now in terms of cost. They've been replaced at the lower-end by Spirit.

They're no longer low cost because of service erosion at the main carriers (squeezing more seats in, getting rid of baggage allowances, etc.). As a result of that erosion and southwest's holding the line, they are now one of the higher quality carriers (and some would say one of the best!). An interesting course of events to get us here...

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

#408

Post by giantg2 » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 1:12 PM UTC

TechBro8615 wrote: post #405

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…

They used to be a low-cost carrier but they're pretty average now in terms of cost. They've been replaced at the lower-end by Spirit.

And Frontier. They're the first one that comes to mind when I think "cheap".

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

#409

Post by bluedino » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 1:12 PM UTC

silisili wrote: post #171

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…

This COBOL shortage myth has been around since I was a kid. It wasn't true then, and isn't now. The entire problem is that they don't pay well for what is supposedly a rare resource. And nobody wants to learn a dead language for peanuts. Offer 500k/yr, and me and about 100 million other people will be learning COBOL starting tomorrow.

500? Try 250. Heck, 150 if we can work from home

The problem is now you have a bunch of D-level cobol coders without any experience, domain knowledge, etc

Which is where we are with most Java dev shops.

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

#410

Post by dfxm12 » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

jeffreygoesto wrote: post #256

doctorwho42 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But isn't this the exact point of operation, controlling and finance in any large corporation wants to find? Extract from bottom to the top until it breaks and then hope to steer back a tiny little bit and keep operating in that state? Finance never did produce, it's whole purpose is to extract. Run a gasoline engine to lean and it will start to heat and stutter... As for the growth, in a peaceful society you can gro…

No company wants it to break to the point of "meltdown". From a practical view, it loses too much money. From a (maybe, maybe not) cynical sense, it makes it too obvious how much they're extracting from the bottom and invites action from the government or workers.