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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

#581

Post by kortilla »

smsm42 wrote: post #290
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.

The money they earned in the past are already spent and forgotten. The failure is now. So for the people who got the bonuses in the past it may be worth it (that's probably why they did it), but for the company as an ongoing concern it certainly isn't. It's like eating a lot of unhealthy foods and later getting sick - maybe some people consider it worth it, but most people kinda regret it when they get sick.

A company around for 100 years that returns 2% per year is worse than one that returns 100% per year for 5 years and then folds.

Companies shouldn’t exist for the sake of longevity.

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

#582

Post by kortilla »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #332
dotancohen wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. You can see how this is a problem, right? This essentially means the market is not working as it should - instead of improving quality of service, it makes people absorb the bad experience, ad infinitum. The market is not able to deliver feedback to the companies, who instead r…

“I don’t like what people prefer” is not “the market has failed”.

If people want cheap flights, they will keep flying southwest and deal with the occasional problems that come with dancing on a razors edge.

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

#583

Post by virgilp »

listenallyall wrote: post #216
chefandy wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

Money disappearing from a bank account is a "comparatively minor failure"? Sorry, I stopped reading at that point.

Has that really not happened to you or someone you know? It is (typically) eventually recovered, yes; and you can often understand how/why it happened. But it definitely happens, and requires manual human intervention for fixing. Here's 2 incidents that happened to me or friends in the last month:

- took a trip to the neighboring country, my friend tried to take out money from an ATM; first two transactions failed, third succeeded (at the atm). In the bank though, all "succeeded", and money were gone (first 2 eventually were reversed with manual intervention).

- I sold a house (in a remote mountain village), buyer sent 8100EUR from Germany, 78xy.z EUR made it to my personal bank account. Apparently due to multiple currency exchanges, but this is a SEPA transfer between two accounts both denominated in EUR, this was absolutely not supposed to happen and nobody was able to articulate exactly "why it happened" (or even exactly what happened). For this one the buyer decided to just eat the loss and sent me an additional 300EUR.

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

#584

Post by vmception »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #55
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…

They also explicitly deny that a sickout is occuring: > There are false claims of job actions by Southwest Pilots currently gaining traction on social media and making their way into mainstream news. I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise. Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor dis…

That doesn’t match what I want to read, but I’m fine with that

Since there is still skepticism from the other commenters too, if the union was lying could someone explain their motives?

Like what benefit does would the union have to provide confidence to the nature of the disruption? Or to cover for their pilots/employees?

Otherwise their statement being the truth is cool too

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

#585

Post by unethical_ban »

thowaway976351 wrote: post #552
unethical_ban wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccine mandates aren't new. You weren't protesting them 3 years ago, but now you are willing to take the side of 3.5 million members of the community slowly dying so you don't have to get a shot. Your persecution complex is out of control. The absurdity of peoples' accusations of world-ending authoritarianism and censorship is baffling.

lets mandate a dubiously efficacious product for a problem we created...

You had to use a throwaway to spread your disinformation.

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

#586

Post by ethanbond »

WalterBright wrote: post #537
ethanbond wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is wondering anything. Advantages are obvious. They were wondering why you’d prioritize that over the aircraft’s ability to stay in the air.

I've followed many 737MAX threads on HN, and they sure did dismiss this issue. It was always "why didn't they design a whole new airplane from the ground up". > why you’d prioritize that over the aircraft’s ability to stay in the air. This is an egregious misunderstanding. There was nothing wrong with the purpose of the the MCAS system nor the concept of it. What went wrong was its failure to follow the dual path des…

IIRC a few 737MAXs fell out of the sky. Clearly there being nothing wrong with the purpose nor concept of MCAS wasn't sufficient to keep the airplane from crashing.

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

#588

Post by EricE »

listenallyall wrote: post #522
xyzzy21 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an MBA with BSEE/MSEE, this is exactly correct. Too many take the degree and training as a blindly followed cookbook rather than just "ideas to think about and think of trying". It SHOULD BE the latter!! The "religion" of profit maximization and cost minimization has a price - it's NOT GLOBALLY OPTIMAL OVER TIME for the survival of the organization (profits, anti-fragility, etc.) nor for the larger system of a nat…

Your anti-MBA, anti-profit-maximization rant misses one thing: Southwest is the only major US airline with zero bag fees (for the first 2), no business or first-class cabin, no seat upgrade charges, and until recently, the only one with no change fees (other airlines backed off change fees during the current pandemic). It doesn't chase major international routes, partner with 3rd party booking engines, or fly overnig…

>LUV has consistently, for 40+ years, optimized its culture over profits

Something has changed in the last 10 years - the last five in particular. I obtained my frequent flyer number from them in 1985 and have flown them hundreds, if not thousands of time so yeah, I have a LOT of experience to draw from.

A great overview of how they have optimized to the extreme to their detriment is by Juan Browne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO39nIcuPhQ

If HK were still alive I sincerely doubt they would be operating the way they are today :(

Luckily I'm getting ready to move back to the west coast and shouldn't have to fly regularly again - thank god!

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

#589

Post by EricE »

thepasswordis wrote: post #232

There is currently a major outage at a major part of the infrastructure of our nation, and nobody believes anybody about why. The airline is saying it's something to do with weather, but somehow they're the only airline effected. Everybody online seems to the think it's some sort of labor strike, but the union denies this and nobody can find anywhere where people are planning this. And yet thousands of people are stu…

It's a cluster of factors - the primary one being a lack of a bench of backup pilots - compounded by layoffs during COVID and now an inability to ramp up training to get pilots re-certified and re-hired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO39nIcuPhQ

COVID vaccine shenanigans with a large chunk of the workforce near retirement age and just saying "fuck your mandate, I'll retire early" is just the cherry on top.

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

#590

Post by EricE »

Zigurd wrote: post #564
commandlinefan wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pro-vax people, like myself, who are strongly anti-mandate I’m vaccinated, but very uncomfortable with the government ordering me to be.

The government is not mandating you get vaccinated. Other than in health care, the government is mandating that large enterprises where people work closely with the public or with each other require either vaccination or frequent testing. The same goes for crowded indoor venues: Show proof of vaccination or a recent test. This is a very lax "mandate." Nobody is going to require vaccination to drive a long-haul truck.

>The government is not mandating you get vaccinated.

So they are conscripting others to mandate you get vaccinated on their behalf. Gee, that sounds an awful lot like they are conscripting companies to be state actors on their behalf. Good luck with any company trying to hide behind that. It hasn't yet sunk into corporate America the liability plank they are about to walk off of but they better wake up fast or it's going to get expensive very quickly.

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