comment: >
  
  They'll probably get a slap on the wrist in the form of a bailout.
context: They need to stop pretending it was weather related. They have straight up canceled 100% of flights til 1/2 at some airports. >
  
  They seem to be admitting it, at least to employees. From a company memo from the CEO:
  "And, so when we finished with the winter storm, for the most part, then we found ourselves with Crew at a place where we’re not able to re-Crew the network. So, we had People that were legal. We had aircraft that were available, but the process of matching up those Crew Members with the aircraft could not be handled by our technology. In our desired state, we have a solver that would be able to do that very quickly and very accurately. Our system today cannot do that.
  As a result, we had to ask our Crew Schedulers to do this manually, and it’s extraordinarily difficult. They must verify that you are legal. They can’t just have the next person up, so to speak. They have to look through everyone’s board and reassign. So that is a tedious, long process. And every day we try to repair the Crew network. They would make great progress, and then some other disruption would happen, and it would unravel their work. So, we spent multiple days where we kind of got close to finishing the problem, and then it had to be reset." >
  
  The winter storm is the proximate cause.  The operational concept SW uses is the ultimate cause.  Once their ops are sufficiently disrupted, by weather or whatever, there is so little slack in the system that they're in the weeds for days or weeks. >
  
  In other words greed and capitalism and LEAN bullshit. 
  You can call out all three cancers for the dangers they are. >
  
  Yeah, those all play a role, for sure.  They massively underinvested in personnel management systems, for one, and it's absolutely LEAN bullshit where they assume everything is going to work perfectly and iterate from there. 
  But it's not like there's no advantage to Southwest's approach - I used to live in San Antonio, and there were direct flights to visit family in San Diego and Denver, which was awesome.  Nobody else directly connects those cities. >
  
  What's the advantage of running lean staffing and outdated scheduling software? I get that doing point to point makes them more succeptible to issues. >
  
  That's the failure point.  The point to point approach has advantages but absolutely demands that they build in some slack and have the back end systems to get back on track, and that's where they shit the bed and rolled around. >
  
  God the comments on that article...
  "Where's useless Buttigieg?" - They're saying about an article where the headline flatout says his department is opening an investigation into it. >
  
  The funny thing about that is before he was appointed, no one would ever even mention the secretary of transportation. Now that their gay and liberal all they can do is critique over nothing >
  
  Fun fact, Trump now calls the previous Sec of Transport, whom Trump himself appointed, Coco Chow. Yup, she’s Asian. >
  
  And is Mitch McConnell's wife. >
  
  Yup. And what did either Mitch or for that matter his wife say at this racist comment? >
  
  Please sir, may I have some more? >
  
  I’m guessing this will turn out to be a tech/system issue. >
  
  Workers have confirmed this from comments on the southwest sub.  Their aging system couldn't handle the volume of delays and gave up entirely. >
  
  Hopefully all make it home safe >
  
  I saw an article that said Southwest is getting them bus tickets... >
  
  Can you link it? Have family stuck places unfortunately still >
  
  Anyone have real insider info on the airline? Lots of speculations here. Seems like the reason southwest is cheaper is because they run on limited inventory compared to the big guns. So if a storm impacts a large portion of the country it would snowball. >
  
  Yes, there are articles and news stories about this, blaming IT issues and poor processes (like staff needing to call into a call center to be reassigned to new jobs if something changes).  They have planes and people but couldn't coordinate them fast enough to keep things moving so it all collapsed on itself.
  A lot of companies try to get by with the bare minimum and "just in time" processes that are so fragile that a disruption in one area can cause cascade failures across the org.  It's OK for like a fast food restaurant where the stakes are low, but not OK for transportation companies that will create massive ripple effects and economic losses in unrelated industries as people miss work/appointments/etc. >
  
  Just in time is fine if you have top notch processes in place and the software to handle those processes when things don’t go well. A company like Amazon who dominates supply chain has all of that down to a science, but it’s because they have top software engineers, supply chain experts to develop and perfect those systems, as well as top technology that those systems run on. So they can afford to live on the edge with minimum amount of vans or delivery drivers to still meet an expected timeline. But the entire chain is maximizing efficiency so in the event of a disruption, they can pivot with minimal timeline interference. There are thousands of other companies that do this well
  Southwest has none of that so their “just in time” philosophy takes a massive shit when something gets disrupted. 
  What it really comes down to is these airlines aren’t scared of losing business. A company like Amazon operates with the mentality that any day someone like Walmart or Target could begin competing with them and stealing that market share very quickly. Southwest looks at it as “we don’t care if we fucked up and pissed all these people off because we have another 10,000 customers waiting to book “