Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 115 posts

Re: Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded

#81

Post by elygre »

deaddodo wrote: post #64
Semaphor wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s downright illegal according to Colorado labor laws. Interesting, that's the first time I hear of a US law being better for employee protection than here in Germany. Do they have limited sick days? That could explain it, as they are obviously unlimited here, but doctor's notes are commonly required after 0-1 days.

It's not a US law, it's a state law. And there are plenty of laws throughout the union that are "better" (more favorable to the employee) than in various places in the EU. California, for instance, has pretty strict employee/tenant protections; along with Oregon, New York, etc. There are also others that are substantially worse (Mississippi, Alabama, etc). You can't compare US Federal law to German Federal law (in th…

I read “us law” to mean “a law somewhere in the us”, not specifically a federal law.

Kinda like I think of apple being a US company, even as it’s probably Californian, and even private.

Re: Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded

#82

Post by hacym »

Semaphor wrote: post #77
deaddodo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no doubt to the literality of your statement. I was simply highlighting your misplaced assumptions and how they can be addressed/corrected in the future.

There was no misplaced assumption.

Sounds like you assume Germany will be better for employee protections in all ways compared to America.

Re: Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded

#83

Post by hacym »

ivraatiems wrote: post #78
cjekel wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope your damages are minimal. What would it take for southwest to remedy the station for you? I know it's hard to say. You may never get your bags. I'm basically valuing any future southwest credit as $0. All of my air miles at $0 too :(

It's a fair question. I think I'd want the following: All my property restored as it was (whether physically or through paying for replacement costs). Full reimbursement for replacement flights, clothes, rental cars, gas, food, and other expenses incurred due to their negligence. Some kind of additional multiplier on top of that as an apology for the stress inflicted. On my American flight tonight I added up just the…

Good luck.

Re: Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded

#84

Post by Semaphor »

hacym wrote: post #82
Semaphor wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no misplaced assumption.

Sounds like you assume Germany will be better for employee protections in all ways compared to America.

No, again, I simply hadn't heard of an example. I knew there was the chance, after all some states have legal abortion which Germany still does not (it's almost defacto legal, but only almost) to take another example.

Re: Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded

#85

Post by amluto »

m348e912 wrote: post #7

There's an unsubstantiated rumor that 120 Southwest ramp agents walked off the job at Denver International Airport after the VP of operations out of Dallas sent a demanding (and possibly unreasonable) memo to the Denver staff banning sick time without a doctors note and requiring mandatory overtime. https://twitter.com/AtSouthwest/status/1606543397996855296 If true, it could account for a majority of SW's cancellatio…

Oof. At the very least, any employer requiring a doctor’s note should pay for it. Getting in to see a doctor on short notice can be difficult and expensive.

Re: Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded

#86

Post by atdrummond »

logifail wrote: post #56
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is good advice, let me extrapolate to a simpler heuristic. When landing at an airport when you know several connections are lost due to local issue with your airline, always get on the phone as soon as you get out of the aircraft. certainly call before heading to the kiosk and lining up for the lone agent to support you Because, by the time the sole agent gets to listen to your issue, the next flight will be ful…

Bear in mind that many airlines allow ticketing staff at the airport (that is if they didn't get rid of them all, yes, I'm looking at you, British Airways at LHR) much more leeway in terms of rerouting, particularly on other routes or indeed carriers. We had this on 25 December, our flight to London was cancelled. Automatically rebooked to our destination later that day, but our party (2 adults, 3 kids) was split up…

The problem is WN doesn’t interline with other carriers. They can only rebook on other WN flights.

Re: Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded

#87

Post by atdrummond »

rapjr9 wrote: post #79
imroot wrote: post #61

I don't work for Southwest, but, I have friends that do. The situation is kind of amplified by the fact that they are now doing crew scheduling by hand -- their crew scheduling system went offline at some point during this fiasco -- and because they aren't a hub and spoke style of airline, they don't have flight attendants at their hubs...so, what's happening is that flight attendants are scheduled for a "leg" of a t…

This does not sound unique to Southwest, I imagine all airlines have to do this to get people staged in the right places. Which means our air travel system is basically a just-in-time system and as we've learned JIT systems break quickly when there are shortages. Software problems and a lack of schedulers may be contributing to this event, but it seems like it could happen to any airline and is something of an infras…

It’s much easier to reflow assets where you need them in a hub and spoke system.

Since WN operates a linear modal across the US, they have to essentially reset the entire network state to get flights back to normal. Hence cancelling 2/3 of flights for the remainder of the week.

Re: Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded

#88

Post by atdrummond »

markus92 wrote: post #76
ipython wrote: post #14

Found this interesting reading as to a possible reason why their flight system seems so much more fragile than the legacy carriers: https://www.inc.com/kelly-main/southwest-becomes-one-of-amer...

Ryanair in Europe pretty much operates the same with many small hubs and point-to-point flights, but for some reason they are also run objectively a very reliable operation. Wonder why that is.

RyanAir does a lot of point to point but they don’t do it the way WN does. RyanAir will have a plane make multiple runs on say, London to Rome. WN will work a plane from Oakland to Denver to Dallas to Florida (I’m just picking WN concentration cities, that’s not a real route). In fact, something crazy like 30% of WN planes will hit Florida daily.

Re: Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded

#90

Post by hotpotamus »

amluto wrote: post #85
m348e912 wrote: post #7

There's an unsubstantiated rumor that 120 Southwest ramp agents walked off the job at Denver International Airport after the VP of operations out of Dallas sent a demanding (and possibly unreasonable) memo to the Denver staff banning sick time without a doctors note and requiring mandatory overtime. https://twitter.com/AtSouthwest/status/1606543397996855296 If true, it could account for a majority of SW's cancellatio…

Oof. At the very least, any employer requiring a doctor’s note should pay for it. Getting in to see a doctor on short notice can be difficult and expensive.

I have a friend who's worked a series of crappy jobs that don't have health insurance and asks for doctor's notes when he's sick. So he provides doctor's notes by just printing them out himself.
Post reply on HN