>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 endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures. Our Pilots are tired and frustrated because our operation is running on empty due to a lack of support from the Company.
> 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?
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 disputes under these circumstances. SWAPA has not authorized, and will not condone, any job action.
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 stuck in airports all over the country right now.
It just seems like something is going on, and that everybody is lying about it. Can't say I've ever really seen anything like this, and it genuinely freaks me out.
If it's a strike then it 9 times out of 10 means the airline will have to payout for delayed and cancelled flights. I would imagine they are trying to spin this every which way possible to eliminate the inevitable bill that will need to be paid. Financials are probably out of whack too since covid so this situation could really cripple/break them.
The most likely explanation is here [1]. Pilots (and apparently some air traffic controllers) are doing a sickout to protest vaccine mandates, presumably to make the powers that be understand just how difficult they can make things for the country if they proceed with intended mass firings. But the sickout is technically illegal, so nobody will acknowledge it. That is why you won't see a clear explanation of this incident - probably ever. You've never seen anything like it because we have never been in a situation where a significant percentage of the population is being threatened with the loss of their livelihood unless they take something that many consider to be quite dangerous.
> The nationwide cancellations came as the airline announced Monday that the company will now require employees to get the COVID-19 vaccinated by Dec. 8.
> Some customers said they were told the cancellations are a direct result of the vaccine mandate.
> “I asked them specifically 'is this about weather' – because if it’s about weather, they can deny compensation. They said 'no, it’s not about weather.' I said 'is this about maintenance?' They said 'no, it’s not about maintenance.' I said then 'what is the problem?'" passenger Ron Frank said. “They said this is all because of the vaccine mandate. They said we had a massive walkout. They also said that air traffic control had a massive walkout because of the vaccine mandate. But to couch 1,000 cancelations because of a thunderstorm somewhere is not believable.”
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.
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 contracting firms are cutting back on providing COBOL resources because there's a lot more money in supplying java/.net/etc. devs. The work culture there sounds so unsustainable and yet they're one of the largest payment processors in the country. If they were have widespread stability issues like this, things could get interesting.
Right... they can't train someone on COBOL? I call b.s. on that. It's an HR issue, you need blah blah degrees and yadi yadi yada experience. Big corps don't adopt to job economy changes over time like this unless their core business is built to adopt to economic changes. Inability to make exemptions and place the right first line managers over teams is what kills big companies, or forces them into an endless loop of unoriginal aquisitions and failures imo.
Decades-old does not mean duct-taped. It means every edge case has been hit, it's rock solid, and it works. There are many patches on top of patches, and the system is hard to comprehend for someone new. But it's a heck of a lot more stable that something redesigned.
The real issue here, is during bad weather and understaffed ATC, for some reason the airforce decided to do some training in airspace used by commercial flights. This military training part in the article is mentioned quickly, then completely ignored.
This was the US Military causing delays, cancellations, and people getting stuck overnight at airports. This was the US Military causing huge operational and financial issues for one of the most customer-friendly airlines out there. And the did this while eating up millions of dollars that are taken out of our paychecks - that they used to screw us. Time for congress to remove the funds that allowed them to conduct this training at a time when it caused problems for the general population paying their salaries.
Decades-old, duct-taped architecture is endemic across the airline industry though, and AFAIK Southwest isn't even particularly bad on this front. American Airlines's original reservation system Sabre, still a major GDS player today, was first put together in the 1950s and is by some reckonings the oldest commercial (as in, non-government/military/research) computer system out there.
It is maddening. Even if the stated goal is to “get off the mainframe” everybody deep down knows it isn’t going anywhere for 10 years. We recently had a discussion about porting from one mainframe “module” to another due to cost. I asked why we don’t just continue paying for the current module since the goal is to sunset mainframe. Everybody on the call laughed.
So we will go ahead and “invest” several man years and god knows how much money into a platform everybody agrees we should get off of.
The way the survivorship bias works out, this is generally a strength, not a weakness.
You want to get good money, you learn how stuff works under the hood and get familiar with your predecessor architectures, emulate them if you need to.
Some financial facts that help explain the situation: over the past 10 years US airlines have spent about 95% of their free cash flows on stock buybacks. This is the money they could have used to have a buffer to deal with these situations or to improve their systems. Why do they care so much about their stock price over long term sustainability? In 2020, Southwest lost 3.1 billion dollars and took 6 billions of government money, but executives increased their own compensation by 5% to 14% and the CEO paid himself 9 millions dollars, of which 7 millions were in stock.
> This is the money they could have used to have a buffer to deal with these situations or to improve their systems.
Matt Levine covered this last year [1]. The basic gist of it was that the CEO is focused on the shareholders, and the best use of the money was on stock buybacks. Spending money on improving customer or labor relationships wouldn't have helped during the start of the pandemic when all the airlines were stuck in the same boat unable to fly planes, and the cash used by e.g. American Airlines for buybacks in the past 7 years to increase the stock value 113% would have only bought them 4 months of operating expenses. The most long-term value for shareholders was created through the buybacks, and the government being willing to prop the businesses up during downturns reduces the risk exposure from this strategy.
The explanation of "weather and an FAA shutdown" doesn't make sense given that, according to the article, other airlines aren't experiencing this at all.
Oh, and for folks talking about a pilot protest against vaccine mandates, that theory is discussed at length toward the end of the article.
I imagine this kind of thing cascades quite badly if it goes wrong, so it's not unimaginable that they just got unlucky regarding where machines are/where crews that are rested are and it collapsed from there, whereas other airlines got lucky/predicted the consequences better/had more resilient planning.
(EDIT: which would match the union statement /u/hnburnsy quotes: 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 endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures.)
Southwest runs 3 to 4K commercial flights per day, which is about 1 in 7 commercial flights overall in the US. They depend on aircraft doing many short hops over the course of a single day: 7 or 8 is not uncommon. When things go bad it tends to disrupt the system very badly.
These numbers come from the US DOT ontime database. You can access the data in ClickHouse at https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443 (user=demo, password=demo). This is a public instance running on Altinity.Cloud.
Southwest is lucky we don't have the same consumer protection laws in the U.S. as E.U. citizens have. If we did, they'd be paying out to passengers big time this weekend. (Or, more realistically, they would have taken better precautions to prevent an event like this from happening in the first place.)
According to an analyst that CBS talked to https://www.cbsnews.com/news/southwest-flight-cancellations-... Southwest was hit harder because of they way they organize their routes. Not having "hubs" means they can't create alternate routes quickly. So the delays in Florida cascaded back, stranding planes and crews as well as passengers. He also says they'd already scheduled more flights than they can handle, but I don't know exactly what that means.
>Online speculation that Southwest’s new vaccine mandate has led pilots to stage a sickout is being denied by the union representing Southwest pilots.
>That follows reporting on social media that some of the issues the airline is suffering could be related to that issue. A spokesperson for the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) told the Arizona Republic it was not aware of any work stoppage and wouldn’t condone it anyway.
>SWAPA, however, has authorized its members to demonstrate against the mandate.
sounds like there is a vaccine mandate-related sickout going on, and the union is unofficially encouraging it but doesn't want to be seen as doing so. I don't know why that would be the case; there's no law against airline employees doing an industrial action. Maybe the union doesn't want to be denounced for being allegedly "anti-science"?
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.
There's a cutthroat competition between the airlines so how can we be surprised that they have to "optimise" everything until fuckups like this start to happen?
Consumers who are looking for someone to blame for this, should look in the mirror: those people who pick the cheapest picket at Expedia just by "sort by cheapest first", are the main culprits. Airline industry is in the pathetic state it is due to irrational, irresponsible penny-pinching by consumers.
There are no ways to fix it unless you roll back deregulation and mandate fixed ticket prices as they used to be, which is of course impossible. Airlines who don't save on everything not leaving any buffers for anything, will simply go bust.
Instead of bizarre excuses, why wouldn’t SWA just say that employees called in sick in large enough numbers to disrupt operations? What is their reasoning for covering this up if it’s true?
Boarding an SWA flight at DAL now. It’s on time. Airport feels a little busy for a Monday morning, but no pandemonium, no huge lines anywhere. I’m in no way denying the issue, but this isn’t what I expected.
I also changed to this flight yesterday at 3 pm. Had to check several times over a few hours before I could find a suitable flight.
It's spectacular to see LUV devolving from one of the best managed and employee oriented airline company to this. It's not an outstanding incident though, the company was on the downward trajectory from, I would say, end of 2017. Sooner or later every US airline company declares bankruptcy, LUV so far has escaped it. But one would bet it will happen this year (unlikely) or next year.
I publicly spoke up at work about mandates being illegal, immoral and an affront to decent society. Especially, when there are alternatives we can provide (such as testing daily).
I made a post and shared it across multiple locations in the company.
As a people manager, I knew the risks.
My post was up only 10 min before being taken down.
Eventually, internal HR contacted me and told me they'd "take appropriate action" if I kept talking about it.
What they didn't expect is someone screenshot it and sent it around the company. I received hundreds of messages of support and I know many sent in messages on the side. Myself and many of the top people in the company wrote letters to their people leaders, CEO, board, HR, etc.
A week later they finally surveyed the company on their thoughts about the vaccines, A week after that the mandates were put on hold.
The majority of people don't believe others should lose their jobs over vaccine mandates. That likely is much higher (or lower) depending on industry or region.
At the end of the day, this is expected. Polling indicated "70 percent of unvaccinated Americans would quit their job over exemption-less vaccine mandate"
I wonder if ATC rerouting flights on routes that use more fuel, due to ATC staff shortages and military training on Friday, may have caused SW to elect to cancel more flights than other airlines. They’re on a very tight margin compared to less budget targeted carriers.
Just some interesting points I found after Googling:
Saying "737" is actually 12 generations of the same aircraft.
Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737) says: 737-100 -> 737-900, plus 737-MAX 7/8/9. Note: All have actually flown with commercial airlines and paying customers. (MAX 10: Not yet.)
Further, from the Wiki page for Southwest Airlines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_fleet), first sentence in section after intro/summary: <<Southwest Airlines began revenue flights on June 18, 1971 using three Boeing 737-200 aircraft...>>
Deeper: <<On August 29, 2017, Southwest Airlines took delivery of its first Boeing 737 MAX 8, the first airline in North America to do so. The airline was also the first in North America to operate the aircraft on a scheduled revenue passenger flight on October 1, 2017.>>
Assuming both of these Wiki sources are correct, that means over 50 years, Southwest Airlines has flown 11 different generations of the 737.
Current fleet on Wiki says: 737-800, -900, MAX 7 & 8.
Even in a location with a high vaccination rate, I know that a lot of local stores are having issues not just finding staffing but 'COVID' cases are apparently very high.
There seems to be a lot of reluctance to get the vaccine among the young, at-will employed despite the downside of being out of work if they test positive.
The media has reported for a year and a half that the old (65+) are at high risk and the young are at lowest risk for severe COVID-19. Young people have absorbed that message. That’s also on top of younger people being less responsive to health messaging in general and taking more risks.
[+] [-] hnburnsy|4 years ago|reply
>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 endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures. Our Pilots are tired and frustrated because our operation is running on empty due to a lack of support from the Company.
https://www.swapa.org/news/2021/swa-in-the-news/
[+] [-] smsm42|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] thrdbndndn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thr0wawayf00|4 years ago|reply
> 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 disputes under these circumstances. SWAPA has not authorized, and will not condone, any job action.
[+] [-] thepasswordis|4 years ago|reply
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 stuck in airports all over the country right now.
It just seems like something is going on, and that everybody is lying about it. Can't say I've ever really seen anything like this, and it genuinely freaks me out.
[+] [-] melomal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downandout|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28824370
Edit: deleted link to tweet, comment below points out that it was from a suspect Twitter account.
[+] [-] nemo44x|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syshum|4 years ago|reply
if its internal mismanagement then they do, as always follow the money.....
[+] [-] miles|4 years ago|reply
> The nationwide cancellations came as the airline announced Monday that the company will now require employees to get the COVID-19 vaccinated by Dec. 8.
> Some customers said they were told the cancellations are a direct result of the vaccine mandate.
> “I asked them specifically 'is this about weather' – because if it’s about weather, they can deny compensation. They said 'no, it’s not about weather.' I said 'is this about maintenance?' They said 'no, it’s not about maintenance.' I said then 'what is the problem?'" passenger Ron Frank said. “They said this is all because of the vaccine mandate. They said we had a massive walkout. They also said that air traffic control had a massive walkout because of the vaccine mandate. But to couch 1,000 cancelations because of a thunderstorm somewhere is not believable.”
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] EricE|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] satokema|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lettergram|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] donw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baggy_trough|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thr0wawayf00|4 years ago|reply
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 contracting firms are cutting back on providing COBOL resources because there's a lot more money in supplying java/.net/etc. devs. The work culture there sounds so unsustainable and yet they're one of the largest payment processors in the country. If they were have widespread stability issues like this, things could get interesting.
[+] [-] silisili|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] badrabbit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soylentnewsorg|4 years ago|reply
The real issue here, is during bad weather and understaffed ATC, for some reason the airforce decided to do some training in airspace used by commercial flights. This military training part in the article is mentioned quickly, then completely ignored.
This was the US Military causing delays, cancellations, and people getting stuck overnight at airports. This was the US Military causing huge operational and financial issues for one of the most customer-friendly airlines out there. And the did this while eating up millions of dollars that are taken out of our paychecks - that they used to screw us. Time for congress to remove the funds that allowed them to conduct this training at a time when it caused problems for the general population paying their salaries.
[+] [-] dustintrex|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)
[+] [-] dilyevsky|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mberning|4 years ago|reply
So we will go ahead and “invest” several man years and god knows how much money into a platform everybody agrees we should get off of.
[+] [-] riffic|4 years ago|reply
The way the survivorship bias works out, this is generally a strength, not a weakness.
You want to get good money, you learn how stuff works under the hood and get familiar with your predecessor architectures, emulate them if you need to.
[+] [-] sushid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 41209|4 years ago|reply
I wouldn't mind taking a 250$ an hour position with on the job training.
Odds are they're getting outbid by easier jobs. If I can write Javascript for 130k or COBOL for 130, I'm doing JS.
[+] [-] tawayffee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erostrate|4 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/06/bailout-c...
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2021/04/09/pay-...
[+] [-] stavrus|4 years ago|reply
Matt Levine covered this last year [1]. The basic gist of it was that the CEO is focused on the shareholders, and the best use of the money was on stock buybacks. Spending money on improving customer or labor relationships wouldn't have helped during the start of the pandemic when all the airlines were stuck in the same boat unable to fly planes, and the cash used by e.g. American Airlines for buybacks in the past 7 years to increase the stock value 113% would have only bought them 4 months of operating expenses. The most long-term value for shareholders was created through the buybacks, and the government being willing to prop the businesses up during downturns reduces the risk exposure from this strategy.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-17/the-go...
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago|reply
Oh, and for folks talking about a pilot protest against vaccine mandates, that theory is discussed at length toward the end of the article.
[+] [-] detaro|4 years ago|reply
(EDIT: which would match the union statement /u/hnburnsy quotes: 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 endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures.)
[+] [-] hodgesrm|4 years ago|reply
These numbers come from the US DOT ontime database. You can access the data in ClickHouse at https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443 (user=demo, password=demo). This is a public instance running on Altinity.Cloud.
[+] [-] InInteraction|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BHSPitMonkey|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Compensation_Regulation
[+] [-] iJohnDoe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TMWNN|4 years ago|reply
>Online speculation that Southwest’s new vaccine mandate has led pilots to stage a sickout is being denied by the union representing Southwest pilots.
>That follows reporting on social media that some of the issues the airline is suffering could be related to that issue. A spokesperson for the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) told the Arizona Republic it was not aware of any work stoppage and wouldn’t condone it anyway.
>SWAPA, however, has authorized its members to demonstrate against the mandate.
sounds like there is a vaccine mandate-related sickout going on, and the union is unofficially encouraging it but doesn't want to be seen as doing so. I don't know why that would be the case; there's no law against airline employees doing an industrial action. Maybe the union doesn't want to be denounced for being allegedly "anti-science"?
[+] [-] Decabytes|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://youtu.be/yYcHWGxtRQo
[+] [-] anovikov|4 years ago|reply
Consumers who are looking for someone to blame for this, should look in the mirror: those people who pick the cheapest picket at Expedia just by "sort by cheapest first", are the main culprits. Airline industry is in the pathetic state it is due to irrational, irresponsible penny-pinching by consumers.
There are no ways to fix it unless you roll back deregulation and mandate fixed ticket prices as they used to be, which is of course impossible. Airlines who don't save on everything not leaving any buffers for anything, will simply go bust.
[+] [-] bryan0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AuthorizedCust|4 years ago|reply
I also changed to this flight yesterday at 3 pm. Had to check several times over a few hours before I could find a suitable flight.
This flight is full.
[+] [-] evgeniysharapov|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mandatethis|4 years ago|reply
I publicly spoke up at work about mandates being illegal, immoral and an affront to decent society. Especially, when there are alternatives we can provide (such as testing daily).
I made a post and shared it across multiple locations in the company.
As a people manager, I knew the risks.
My post was up only 10 min before being taken down.
Eventually, internal HR contacted me and told me they'd "take appropriate action" if I kept talking about it.
What they didn't expect is someone screenshot it and sent it around the company. I received hundreds of messages of support and I know many sent in messages on the side. Myself and many of the top people in the company wrote letters to their people leaders, CEO, board, HR, etc.
A week later they finally surveyed the company on their thoughts about the vaccines, A week after that the mandates were put on hold.
The majority of people don't believe others should lose their jobs over vaccine mandates. That likely is much higher (or lower) depending on industry or region.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/sixty-five-percent-o...
At the end of the day, this is expected. Polling indicated "70 percent of unvaccinated Americans would quit their job over exemption-less vaccine mandate"
https://theweek.com/vaccines/1004545/poll-70-percent-of-peop...
If this push continues, we may well all starve.
[+] [-] mmaunder|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2037|4 years ago|reply
Saying "737" is actually 12 generations of the same aircraft.
Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737) says: 737-100 -> 737-900, plus 737-MAX 7/8/9. Note: All have actually flown with commercial airlines and paying customers. (MAX 10: Not yet.)
Further, from the Wiki page for Southwest Airlines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_fleet), first sentence in section after intro/summary: <<Southwest Airlines began revenue flights on June 18, 1971 using three Boeing 737-200 aircraft...>>
Deeper: <<On August 29, 2017, Southwest Airlines took delivery of its first Boeing 737 MAX 8, the first airline in North America to do so. The airline was also the first in North America to operate the aircraft on a scheduled revenue passenger flight on October 1, 2017.>>
Assuming both of these Wiki sources are correct, that means over 50 years, Southwest Airlines has flown 11 different generations of the 737.
Current fleet on Wiki says: 737-800, -900, MAX 7 & 8.
[+] [-] polartx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KingMachiavelli|4 years ago|reply
There seems to be a lot of reluctance to get the vaccine among the young, at-will employed despite the downside of being out of work if they test positive.
[+] [-] supertrope|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EricE|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]