comment: >
  
  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.
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  What's the advantage of running lean staffing and outdated scheduling software?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.