Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed | Hacker News Reader

Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

thepointsguy.com

448 pointswalterbell567 comments

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 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/

> 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?

It is large due to corporations taking on lean-business models from MBAs over the last decade+. When a business runs lean, it becomes more fragile to disruptions. Unfortunately due to our economic system, there is a semi-regular boon-bust cycle, so if it wasn't COVID, it would have been something else that kicks the stool out from under the legs of these corporations.

In the past this wasn't as big as an issue because the risk was spread out amongst a multitude of small to medium size corporations. But again, over the last few decades corporations have become mega-conglomerates through buyouts and mergers/etc... Too big to fail. All the eggs in fewer baskets. Again, in an attempt to keep growing, because in our current economic system and the culture promoted in it (partially by MBA's) is the idea that if your company isn't growing it's dying. And even if it's growing, if it's not growing by a large enough amount it is failing...

So you could have a 1,000 person corporations stabley making 100 million in revenue. Providing good benefits and salaries to all. But if its not growing, then it is viewed as failing ... It's truly an absurd mindset and culture.

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 national or global economy.

Mathematically, flat, non-cycle economic systems are IMPOSSIBLE. You can never achieve it WITHOUT introducing systemic instability because you are eliminating ALL the information REQUIRED to maintain feedback control and you are removing agility of the system. Once the error signal goes to zero, the system is 100% out of control! It's open loop. Then any "environmental" change can tip the entire system over where that could be a competitor, other nation or "act of God" disruption.

And this is what happens when you profit maximize/cost minimize to its ultimate limit. And on the way to that extreme, you are increasingly make the system more brittle and the probabilities of failure increase.

Re having all people being "productive", the reality of things like Price's Law also make reliability worse as an organization (corporation, government, etc.) grows.

Price's Law says that the number of people who actually do most of the work is proportional to the square root of the organization size. In the case of supply chains, most of the people who are "assuring system reliability" actually aren't and generally are incapable of doing so anyway. It's a reality due to network effects (adverse ones but the same dynamic as the good ones - you can't control or differentiate the two).

Note you can take it to the other extreme: not worrying about profits is just as bad if not worse. Socialism/Collectivism doesn't work either for similar reasons actually.

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 overnight/redeyes. LUV has consistently, for 40+ years, optimized its culture over profits.

But isn't this the exact point of operation, controlling and finance in any large corporation wants to find? Extract from bottom to the top until it breaks and then hope to steer back a tiny little bit and keep operating in that state?

Finance never did produce, it's whole purpose is to extract.

Run a gasoline engine to lean and it will start to heat and stutter...

As for the growth, in a peaceful society you can grow as much as the amount of people you supply, so without war there will probably no other way than saying goodbye to growth.

No company wants it to break to the point of "meltdown". From a practical view, it loses too much money. From a (maybe, maybe not) cynical sense, it makes it too obvious how much they're extracting from the bottom and invites action from the government or workers.

I don't know about that, with P/E ratios as high as they are I think investors assume companies will have an infinite lifespan.

Naive finance works that way. Sophisticated finance prices-in downside risk.

> But if its not growing, then it is viewed as failing

I’ve only seen this in wealth generation instruments. Outside of those, I haven’t seen much of the “culture“ you’re referring to. In that framing, I think it makes sense and is anything but absurd.

The company is dual purpose at this point: part original mission (airline) part communal investment. Being a great airline that is comfortable with its current market definition isn’t sufficient for its second purpose. The commune’s investment expects growth in the abstract sense. They aren’t interested in Airlines, they’re interested in purchasing a piece of future growth.

Your Vanguard mutual fund’s performance depends on exponential growth - healthy retirement strategies live primarily off of growth, not principal, during the retirement phase. Maintaining value (~+2% on paper growth) doesn’t earn your company a place in society’s communal pool of assets.

Take a look at earnings reports...a company that doesn't grow from last quarter is considered a failure. A company that grows but doesn't hit goals from last quarter is considered a failure.

"Lean" is an idea that worked so well at first that it transitioned from being a brilliant insight into finding "stale" capital hiding in in-process inventory and parts to being a management fad, applied to things that do not actually benefit from the approach. It's not the only thing that went that way.

"Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle For the Soul of American Business"[1] by Bob Lutz tells this story really well, from Lutz' vantage point trying to salvage General Motors from the clutches of an army of MBAs.

There's a decent summary of the book (and the general problem) in the 2012 Time article "Driven off the Road by MBAs"[2] as well.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Car-Guys-vs-Bean-Counters-ebook/dp/B0...

[2] - http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2081930...

Your opening statement impresses me as a rather gross generalization. Kind of pro-union, anti-big business.

Nothing wrong with making an effort to lean out an organization, which is simply meant to make it more efficient and more competitive. It's not specifically just cutting staff, it's a lot of things. The trick is to not confuse leaning out with cannibalization. Like Musk says, if you aren't having to add stuff back in, then you aren't deleting enough.

The airline industry is under insane pressure given the environment, and this stuff is bound to happen. Safety may even be unintentionally sacrificed. This space is far from thermodynamically sound right now. If somebody has an easy answer for it, that would be some fat consulting stacks for the BTC fund.

I'll counter your generalization with my own: F250's are hammered with middle-management baggage. MM makes shitty decisions, and still causes tons of wait states. Having consulted for five F500's now, my observation so far is that the 250-500 range are much more incentivized to do what it takes to become more competitive. OTOH, the F20's I've consulted for severely need some waves of boomer (my gen) retirements.

BTW, the general reason M&A activity increases is because the associated market space has contraction pressure on it. What else are you supposed to do? The beginning of the end for markets, governments, empires. That's just the way us humans do things.

Your hate of MBAs is unfounded and unproven. Their COO has worked there since 1993, and doesn’t have an MBA: https://www.swamedia.com/pages/michael-van-de-ven

MBA here. Does not sound like hate but statement of fact. In my experience the US MBA and general management management teaching is very dollar-based in stark contrast to, say European management education. This will lead to extreme efficiencies and the M&A boom of the past few decades is probably linked to it as well. And it does not have to be the CEO: most practical daily decisions cutting all buffers for maximum efficiency are made by mid to upper management.

It's not really MBAs, more like "business rules cult". MBAs are just the primary vehicle through which these viral rules of operation have spread. For example, when I worked in semiconductor manufacturing in the 90s you'd constantly hear at management training seminars "reduce inventory because it costs money". Also "offshore because it's cheaper" and "outsource activities that aren't core to the business". Every single one of these things has a downside, often not visible until "bad stuff happens".

These trite rules get repeated so often they become like The Mandalorian "This is the way".

I think every industry is full of this kind of nonsense. Some closer to home examples : everything needs to be in the cloud; immutability is good; use 3rd party SaaS services for everything; code comments are bad; ...

Your statement shows lack of understanding of how the modern corporation works.

The COO may have been there 30 years, and may lack an MBA, but increasingly it is this type of CxO that has been reyling upon MBAs and other consultants (operations research) to restructure the organization into an optimized-but-fragile state.

It is the rare old-hand that can standup to younguns talking tech and math, subjects he does not feel comfortable with.

Southwest is literally the poster child of low cost carriers. They started the whole business model, which consists of a few things:

* they operate literally one type of aircraft, and therefore only have to train their crew once, keep the specific set of parts, etc.

* they optimize the hell out of making sure their planes are in use carrying paying passengers for the maximum amount of time

* they fly a vast network of point to point using secondary airports, as opposed to coordinating at massive hubs

These are all things that would make recovering from a massive widespread disruption very hard, and Southwest has been doing it better and longer than anybody else.

How operating one type of plane makes recovering from disruption harder? I'd expect it to make it easier - you can replace any crew with any other crew, and any plane with any other plane. Same with secondary airports - I am not sure how it makes recovery harder. Distributed systems are usually more robust against disruption that centralized ones - if you can't fly in an out of the hub, then all your flights in that hub's vicinity are grounded, but if you just lost one secondary airport, there might be another close by. So I'm not sure I am convinced those particular qualities are detrimental to robustness, at least without a convincing argument.

well, as an example, when the 737MAX was grounded, many airlines had already started taking delivery of them and were operating them. Southwest was the largest recipient at that time.

Southwest had plenty of older 737s as well, but the new MAX planes both fly farther and have more seats, so while the grounding was in effect Southwest was essentially paying to keep the things on the ground while scrambling to reconfigure their flight network, and it affected them the most.

> Distributed systems are usually more robust against disruption that centralized ones

Distributed systems can also be more complex to re-converge after a major disruption.

I'd imagine it's non-trivial to re-plan a network, given equipment and crew limitations.

And as context, we're talking about 24 hours later, now?

Maybe it's the same effect as happens with monoculture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture#Risks): more efficient, but more fragile/risky?

They used to be a low-cost carrier but they're pretty average now in terms of cost. They've been replaced at the lower-end by Spirit.

They're no longer low cost because of service erosion at the main carriers (squeezing more seats in, getting rid of baggage allowances, etc.). As a result of that erosion and southwest's holding the line, they are now one of the higher quality carriers (and some would say one of the best!). An interesting course of events to get us here...

Spirit & Frontier (and Ryanair in Europe among others) are actually classed as ULCC's (ultra low cost), where everything is nickel and dimed.

At the higher end, it certainly isn't necessarily the best any more, but I do think that's mostly because Southwest has kept to its two free checked bags, whereas the major carriers now make significant revenues from checked bag fees.

It took one trip for Spirit to go onto my personal No Fly list.

While Southwest remains my favorite airline.

And Frontier. They're the first one that comes to mind when I think "cheap".

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.

I‘m sure you‘re just describing what is, but...

The human element doesn’t matter at all? Their workers are fed up.

This tunnel visioning on financial metrics is so superficial and narrow that it makes me angry. A company is a community of interacting, real people, not a video game.

Going out of business doesn't help the workers, either.

Southwest is one of the better carriers in terms of customer satisfaction and not racing to the lowest fare.

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.

The thing is, a company isn't a person. In fact, LTDs were effectively invented in order to dissociate company lifecycles from human ones.

So, from a purely rational perspective, if the company makes $100m profit over 10 years then gets "sick", well, job done - you just start another one and carry on. Money doesn't care for future consequences; if anything, inflation puts pressure on disposing of profits quickly while postponing losses (and risk), even if doing so will eventually kill the company.

Extreme "financialization" of our ways of production has given us great rates of efficiency and innovation, at the expense of long-term stability.

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.

Operating a business is a lot like flying an airline in one respect: It's not your average hight above the zero point that matters so much as never, ever going below it.

Failure to maintain altitude above ground level and failure to maintain solvency are in many ways equivalent.

Both domains involve taking risks, but with severe consequences when either risks are miscalculated or ground truths change. Financial bets can be hedged in ways flight profiles often cannot be, and Southwest are credited for doing this (with fuel purchase futures notably), but there's a sense in which businesses are arbitraging latent risks for present profits in ways which can prove catastrophic. (Venture start-ups are particularly prone to this IMO.)

Southwest's single-airframe fleet affords efficiencies, but also risks should faults arise with that airframe or subsystems of it (as with the 737 MAX scenario).

Wouldn't the relevant analogy be operating income?

It's usually not a problem for a business to incur a short term operating loss.

> 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.

Don't forget all of the future losses by losing the trust of both the customers and the employees.

> it’s that prepping for them costs more than the loss from not being able to absorb them

This assumes that they can absorb these losses.

  > 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 that allows these businesses to operate so lean. The cynical might say that bailouts encourage the practice.

Optimisation culture. Cut x cost by y%? Promotion! Everything collapses a few years later because there’s no buffers for anything? Who cares, those managers are already at their next job so it’s someone else’s fault!

That's also "I want it cheap and I don't want to consider complexity" culture; if an airline were consistently more expensive but claimed "hey you know that once a decade issue that happened to Southwest last year? it will never happen to us", maybe some businesses with particularly critical flights would go for it, but not only would most people go for the cheaper flight given the option... I bet almost no one would be able to tell you what the benefit of the more expensive airline was as they probably just don't care enough to learn or research (which is different from then deciding the difference didn't matter).

this is the price we pay for rewarding "efficiencies" up and down the entire chain, leaving no slack whatsoever. with large companies or operations these efficiencies can be over really minor things as well because it means bonus for someone. the root cause of all of this is "short-termism". everyone is only worried about the next quarter, not the next 5 let alone 20-40 years.

The US commercial air transport industry is an absolute marvel. Millions of people moved thousands of miles every single day, mostly at extremely affordable fares. And tons of cargo moved as well. All with an excellent safety record, especially in the past decade.

If "the price we pay" is a day or two of one airline (not any of the others) grounding most of its fleet, most likely due to a controversial internal HR policy, it's an exceptionally low price.

You make it sound as if it was impossible to have such a marvelous industry without this deep degree of over-optimization. I disagree. The way I see it, with a bit more buffering here and there, it would be mostly the same - perhaps with less bullshit flights that could've been just as well taken by trains (which would be in a better condition, having more business flowing through them), and less middle-men everywhere sucking up the savings from all that optimization.

This is the thing with markets: whatever optimization you make, you won't reap the fruits of it for long. Someone - either competitors or adjacent third parties - will show up to suck out your margin, leaving you mostly as you were, but locking that optimization in as a permanent fixture in the industry. This means that when companies over-optimize, shoot past the optimum "value to profits" ratio and aim for higher margins still, they make the industry permanently (well, until next collapse) worse for everyone.

>The US commercial air transport industry is an absolute marvel. Millions of people moved thousands of miles every single day, mostly at extremely affordable fares. And tons of cargo moved as well

As opposed to...? tons of cargo and millions of people are being moved around everywhere, welcome to the modern world. The US commercial flight industry sucks in the grand scheme of things mostly due to a lack of competition. Flying in the US is expensive compared to Europe/Asia.

if you remove all checks and balances, all forms of redundancy and run the system at 99% capacity.. even a simple unforeseen event can disrupt everything and grind it to halt.

Just imagine that most businesses are equivalent to running your whole stack on a single, self hosted at home, RPI. Including the git repository, and no backups.

According to this substack[1], it was a pilot walkout/"sickout" due to vaccine mandates. It's actually happening in more companies/industries than widely reported. I imagine it's also picked up steam since last weeks revelation from leaked internal Pfizer emails[2] that they used cells from aborted fetuses while testing the RDNA vaccine (testing - it's not in the vaccine), but have publicly stated otherwise. It was also pretty clear that they did not want the public to know from the text. And a lot of "religious exemptions" are being turned down. This would be a bit like taking a staunch vegan and forcing them to eat something (via threatening career) that was tested on animals while they said otherwise.

> The pilot emailed following the first Southwest post today (and provided his SWA ID to prove his identity). He asked that I paraphrase the email.

> Essentially, the union cannot organize or even acknowledge the sickout, because doing so would make it an illegal job action. Years ago, Southwest and its pilots had a rough negotiation, and the union would not even let the pilots internally discuss the possibility of working-to-rule (which would have slowed Southwest to a crawl).

> But at the moment the pilots don’t even have to talk to each other about what they’re doing. The anger internally - not just among pilots but other Southwest workers - is enormous. The tough prior negotiations notwithstanding, Southwest has a history of decent labor relations, and workers believe the company should stand up for them against the mandate. Telling pilots in particular to comply or face termination has backfired.

[1] https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-a-southwest-airli...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUXGB5FzhPc

> And a lot of "religious exemptions" are being turned down. This would be a bit like taking a staunch vegan and forcing them to eat something (via threatening career) that was tested on animals while they said otherwise.

Considering all of the other household items that are also commonly tested using fetal cell lines (including acetaminophen, aspirin, ibuprofen, albuterol, pseudoephidrine), the analogy doesn't apply.

Heh, incidentally, there was a hospital that (reportedly) said, "okay sure, if you're swearing off all those other things you can claim a vaccine exemption":

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/hospital-staff-must-...

Just to clarify this YouTube link: HEK293 cells are used in TONS of research, yes they are derived from fetal cell lines in the 70s. When I say tons, I mean if you say "HEK cells" to someone who does any cell culture they know what you're talking about. It is completely noncontroversial, and cancer/bioenergetic research utilizes them.

I don't appreciate this YouTube channel doing what they are doing, it is pouring fuel on a giant nothingburger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEK_293_cells

> I don't appreciate this YouTube channel doing what they are doing, it is pouring fuel on a giant nothingburger.

That's their MO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas

> I imagine it's also picked up steam since last weeks revelation from leaked internal Pfizer emails[2] that they used cells from aborted fetuses while testing the RDNA vaccine (testing - it's not in the vaccine), but have publicly stated otherwise.

The fact that fetal cells are used in testing has been public for a long time.

This article dates back to last December, for example: https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/you-asked-we-answered-do-t... (and here's me citing it two months ago, in case you want to claim a ninja-edit "last week": https://www.reddit.com/r/bestoflegaladvice/comments/p6f6yl/l...)

The “it’s the vaccine mandates!” argument has to figure out a way to explain why all the other airlines weren’t similarly affected when they instituted theirs.

Alex Berenson is… not a reputable source. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...

TBH, neither is The Atlantic.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/07/atlantic-editor-concede...

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/16/im-at-a-loss-for-words-...

https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/02/washington-post-atlantic-...

https://web.archive.org/web/20190911050141/https://www.daily...

https://archive.ph/MWN6K/again?url=https://www.theatlantic.c...

And many other examples.

OTOH, Derek Thompson predicted in 2017 that Bitcoin is overpriced at $16K, so maybe he knows something we don't?

It is a good thing that employers are rejecting made-up religious objections that have no basis in consistent and longstanding practice. If they don't, it will come back to bite them over and over and result in endless litigation.

It's telling that this is downvoted, even though it presents actual evidence from an actual SWA employee vs the random speculation found elsewhere in the thread. The cause isn't leanness or MBAs, its pilots protesting against vaccine mandates, by the testimony of an actual pilot who works there.

That is because it goes agaist the narrative that the only people that oppose mandates are backwater rednecks that have no education.

It can not be that high skilled professionals oppose having their body autonomy revoked... it can not be that "my body my choice" should extend to more medical choices than 1...

no no. this can not be allowed

The root cause is because "anti price gouging" laws are being enforced.

Previously, if there was a shortage of say plane brake discs, the wholesaler would jack the price up 10x for the last 3 sets. That would lead to one of the 4 customers who wanted to buy them to say "nah, it's too expensive, we don't need it that badly".

The person who wouldn't get a set was probably the guy restocking the spare parts shelf, while the people who really really needed those parts right now so a plane can takeoff got them.

In todays world, it's illegal to jack the price, one customer buys all the cheap stock (one to use, 2 as spares cos they heard about a shortage), and now 2 planes can't take off.

The same happens for thousands of other products all across the world. The end result is the people who really need goods can't get them, while others sit on piles of stock 'lucky we bought some just before they ran out!'. Endgame: The economy grinds to a halt over tiny shortages everywhere.

The proper solution is to allow and encourage price gouging again, and have a PR campaign to explain to the public how changing this law really is in their interests, even if it appears on the surface that paying $100 for a flashlight in an emergency can't be good for anyone.

Careful: you're letting ideology get in the way of the facts.

Price gouging laws are exclusively a local and state matter, and only apply at the retail level. Although there have been proposals for price-gouging laws at the federal level, none have been enacted. State laws don't generally apply to B2B interactions.

I'm not sure it matters...

Any goods wholesaler I know of goes straight from "in stock, the price is X" to "out of stock, even if you offer a million $ you can't have any". Nobody auto-increases prices as stock runs low.

Perhaps it isn't illegal to do so, but nobody does it, probably because businesses believe it's illegal to do so.

Think about how difficult systems engineering is. Then realize that everything is systems engineering. But, very few people making decisions are systems engineers.

Ad-hoc heuristic decision making + political in-fighting can get you off the ground, but it can't keep you reliably airborne.

The global economy is just one enormous JIT system now. Great for efficiency not so good for stability.

Over the last decades, capitalism was not regulated very much and, as a result, companies cut costs - and one of the easiest ways to do so is to cut resiliency measures like having a standby plane and crew at every major airport to cover for delays, technical problems or staff calling in sick.

Nowadays, no one runs with any sort of buffer if that isn't explicitly demanded by government or other regulations... and when the shit hits the proverbial fan, it hits hard as a result.

> Is it just covid or something bigger?

Vaccine mandates. All the staff have walked off the job rather than be jabbed.

Maybe there is something between the lines, but it really does not say much other than the obvious "our operations are worse than other carriers".

Im skeptical of a statement from the Union in this case. They may have ulterior motives to releasing a statement like this.

Maybe a symptom of trading efficiency for resiliency?

In my experience, efficiency usually results in an increased level of resilience. You can easily sacrifice both, jeopardizing profits. Every time I saw that happen, it turned out some department-specific KPI (it doesn't matter which department, finance, production, sales, logistics,..) looked really good while that happened. All other sucked, but nobody cared. IMHO, this over emphasis on one silo, at the expense of all the others, puts so much stress on those other functions that they only can crack if something external puts even more stress on them. I guess that is what Covid and all the resulting disruptions is doing. Some orgs crack earlier than others, every one does have its cracking point so. The question is if an organization can adapt before it reaches its breaking point.

Southwest it seems reached it before others.

I have never seen a KPI that is sophisticated enough to not get gamed and not create perverse incentives.

What more should leadership (or investors) need to hear?

I'm saying it doesn't add much to the news.

It adds the lack of another reason, i.e. there is no mention of for instance a pilot shortage or vaccination restrictions.

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.

I think that's because it's technically illegal to do a walkout...

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-a-southwest-airli...

In reality, a lot of pilots can just message each other on the side and say "f-it". Idk how many it takes to take down the system, but I suspect even 20% out sick could cause a cascading failure.

20%? That would mean they have 20% extra pilots on standby ready to take over for the sick. I think it is far lower than that, more like 5% or less. I suspect it might be closer to 2%, that there are no real backups. I bet that when someone is stick someone else is called in on their weekend. That would be the labor action: pilots refusing to work overtime/weekends when called to cover for someone.

My dad is a commercial pilot for a different carrier. The tl;dr is there are typically a subset of pilots on-call at any given time. Pilots who aren't on-call won't be asked to give up their weekends to cover flights.

Pilots either "sit reserve" or "hold a line" based on seniority/airframe and to a lesser degree rank (ie a pilot may choose to sit reserve as a captain when they could be a line holder as an FO). Line holders have a set schedule that they bid on (again based on seniority). If someone calls in sick, misses a flight, or if a flight goes unscheduled, scheduling contacts a pilot that is sitting reserve who then fills in the missing position.

When sitting reserve they get paid to hang out near the airport. Pilots are typically based out of some airport, reserve pilots need to be able to get to their airport within a set amount of time after being called (iirc 2 hours).

It's not that there aren't real reserve pilots, it's that there are exactly the number of backups that there needs to be under normal circumstances. Airlines don't like paying people to sit around and they've got scheduling down to a science. I think I was in high school the last time my dad sat reserve. It felt like he had to fly almost every time (but not every time!) he was on reserve.

Oh I agree, doesn't require a large number -- maybe 5% of pilots. To shut down all flights is likely still slightly higher.

What I suspect is actually happening is much larger.

alexberenson may have his own biases. But the situation is strange. From the opposite corner of the country, the ferry system in Puget Sound is already cancelling tens of crossing a day because of sick calls leading to "lack of Coast Guard documented crew". A vaccine mandate is looming for Oct 18 with 250 ferry employees still unvaccinated. "It wouldn't take much to cripple the system," said retired ferry Capt. Ken Burtness.

> Employee exodus could 'cripple' Washington ferry system as dozens of sailings canceled again Friday

> 'The new norm': Washington ferry workers call out sick in protest of COVID-19 vaccine mandate

https://www.king5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/washin...

Doesn’t that just mean the union itself isn’t organizing a sickout?

Or at least not publicly admiting to it - which if the statement is to believed would be illegal, which sounds like a good motive to deny any knowledge.

>Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes under these circumstances

They couldn't admit it if that's what they're doing. They'd have to deny it either way. Even an "unofficial" unorganized sick out.

On the other hand- if a pilot knew he was getting fired in two weeks for not getting vaccinated, and he happened to have two weeks sick pay, well then the company policy did all the "organizing" that needed to be done.

Even if an employee is fired for cause the employer is required to pay out accrued vacation time.

Where I am, they pay out vacation time, but not sick time (unless it's a combined pool, in which case vacation takes precedence.) I don't know how common that situation is, but it certainly incentivizes getting "sick" right before you leave a job.

That depends on what state you are in. Not every state requires it. But I’m guessing the pilots union agreement includes it.

Being required to do a thing and actually doing a thing are two completely different things. Having the money to turn around and sue somebody for not disbursing your accrued vacation time is a third thing altogether.

No idea why parent is downvoted. The quote posted is on the official statement on union website linked.

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

Would it be in their interest to state this even if it wasn’t true?

Yes, in fact they would be required to make this statement.

>...our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes under these circumstances...

It would be worth checking that a third party can confirm this, given that other comments are pointing out that the given excuses don't add up.

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.

[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.

> unless they take something that many consider to be quite dangerous.

Of course, zero pushback on this nonsense idea

It's such a nonsense idea that Finland and Sweden recently halted Moderna vaccination for under-30s males due to, in the views of their health authorities, the risks outweighing the benefits? https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finland-pauses-use-mode...

> recently halted Moderna vaccination

In favor of Pfizer for that age group. Not in favor of "don't get the vaccine".

For a healthy person under 35, the odds of dying or having to be hospitalized shortly after receiving the vaccine are slightly higher than the odds of dying from COVID [1]. While the odds of any of these events, including dying from COVID, are low, there are certainly risks. We are faced with only bad choices in this pandemic - take a vaccine that has a high death/hospitalization rate relative to other vaccines, or roll the dice with COVID.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28829574

I'm sorry, but you just can't rely on VAERS data for a comparison like this. Literally anyone can submit a report to VAERS.

Is it nonsense that the vaccines may be dangerous or that many consider the vaccines to be dangerous?

The former. But saying it this way is just like the GOP saying that "many people are concerned about election integrity" after they spent months lying to the public that it was a giant fraud.

Agree. Have family members in the pilot's union and in the air traffic control union.

The White House thinks they can force unilateral changes to the union contracts.

If the unions admitted to what was going on, the White House would have more legal authority to intervene more directly with the unions.

> The White House thinks they can force unilateral changes to the union contracts.

Well, yes. Contracts can't override Federal regulation. "Sign this contract exempting you from OHSA protections" won't (generally) fly, right?

What federal regulation gives the federal government the magical ability to mandate a medical procedure without consent?

The parent comment above is being downvoted in favor of the top comment - which is a baseless pro-union comment.

It's so strange. Do people really prefer to push an agenda here rather than understand the nuance and truth of what is going on?

I don't find pilots refusing vaccines in significant numbers plausible in the slightest. Airline pilots have to comply with plenty of regulations and they're continuously trained to comply with safety regulations. Thus you don't become a pilot or don't remain one for long if you're allergic to safety regulations. If there's one occupation where expert recommendations are respected, it's aviation, and for good reasons -- the safety record of the industry speaks for itself.

Pilots in the US are an extremely conservative bunch. On my pilot group's FB page, the number of times I've read "Let's go Brandon!" in response to this supposed sickout are numerous. Every trip I hear the far-right Breitbart, Newsmax media narrative, and links from similar pseudo news blog sites are posted all the time. It's impossible to fly to SFO or LAX without a comment on homelessness, taxes, liberals, etc. Once, when I happened to be alone on my way to the hotel, a van driver in Trinidad asked my why the pilots are always talking about guns. Many US airline pilots are full-on anti-vax and claim that they'll be fired before being forced to get the vaccine.

> On my pilot group's FB page

Social media has optimized the process of finding groups of people that think just exactly like you do. The fact that you are listening to one specific echo chamber that feels this way does not tell you that the entire industry feels this way.

Consider the following counter-example: United Airlines also has a vaccine mandate, and got well over 99% compliance.

Not only that, but pilots must go through extensive medical examination in order to get their medical certificates, and for Airline Transport Pilots (ATP) they need to get them renewed every 6 or 12 months, depending on their age. They are entirely used to their medical status gating their employment!

Just make COVID-19 vaccination a requirement to pass your medical, and be done with all this hand-wringing.

The tweet you linked is an account that's linked to at least one disinformation farm.

Think about it for two seconds, if that really happened, there would be hundreds of witnesses, everybody would be talking about the flight number, there would be cell phone videos and corporate social media responses. None of those things exist, so either everybody on the plane, the airport, and all their friends and relatives are in on the conspiracy except this one bot account, or they're making shit up to stir up conservatives, which is what they've done all day every day since joining the site in January 2017.

I just looked at the account...you are correct, it does seem to be a very right-leaning account, so I deleted the link. The tweet seemed credible, but given the mass-downvoting in this thread, I'll err on the side of caution. Regardless, the tweet was an afterthought, not the main point of the comment.

Seems like it’s a “wildcat strike” where some employees organize and strike silently without the consent or direction of their union.

This kind of subverts union leadership though. How can the union leadership negotiate in good faith when there's no evidence that they are in a position to control or act on behalf of members?

Then again, I think it's technically illegal for members of the airline industry to actively strike. So maybe this is how it's done for plausible deniability sake.

The rumors are that it's due to the employee covid vaccine mandate.

I think that's the reason for the wildcat strike - the union won't abide by it so a group of pilots who don't want the vaccine are not working to make their point to management. It's all hearsay though.

They blame the weather or ATAC because then they do not have to issue refunds or pay for hotels

if its internal mismanagement then they do, as always follow the money.....

Southwest Airlines, passengers claim different causes for cancellations https://www.khou.com/article/news/national/southwest-airline...

> 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.”

Why downvote a link to a local news outlet?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHOU

Bullet, meet messenger.

I was, at first, very skeptical that so many people would walk out of the their jobs in a seemingly organized way, until I heard about the PTO angle of the story.

I work at a company with “unlimited PTO” (because business leaders learned that they pay less with “unlimited” than they do with accrued). But in previous jobs, it was very common to accrue PTO (up to 2 to 3 weeks worth). Most employees would find it hard to get coverage or approval for taking time off, so their PTO would accrue until it maxed out. Anytime I was going to leave a job where I had banked PTO, I would take my time off, and then resign when I came back because if you leave with accrued PTO, they would pay it out, taxed as supplemental income, which is at a higher rate.

3 weeks is a common max accrual for folks that have worked somewhere longer than a year or two, and looking at the calendar, we’re almost exactly 3 weeks from November.

These workers are getting (PTO) paid to strike, plus they’re not breaking any rules, or committing to resigning (or being terminated due to COVID policy), yet. Three weeks to take a much needed break, speak their values, and not miss a check? Now that sounds more like human behavior.

PTO usage generally needs to be approved, I can't imagine Southwest approving enough time off to shut down their operations.

If employees are using PTO by claiming they're sick (assuming there's no separate "sick days" they would normally use), Southwest might have recourse to deny paying PTO but whether or not they will is another question.

> They also said that air traffic control had a massive walkout because of the vaccine mandate

This doesn't make any sense at all. If a vaccine-mandate induced ATC walkout was the cause, all air carriers would be disrupted, not just Southwest.

I suspect this is someone pitching his own views about a situation he doesn't know the true cause of.

Not necessarily, because it depends which city your hub is in. Other airlines might have issues connecting to that city, but if their hub is in a city that doesn't have heavy anti-vax presence, then they are only slightly impacted.

Jacksonville FL, for example is a major SW hub, and was completely shut down. Similar issues exist in two other major SW hubs - Houston and Phoenix.

Also, not all other airlines have mandated vaccinations. ...and those that have aren't in heavily anti-vax cities.

There's also public statements from the JAX ATC saying that their absentee rate was normal and that most of the employees that were out that day were out because of mandatory time off for _getting the vaccine_.

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.

media blackout.

This is the most objective summary I have read on this situation. Bravo.

When a nation becomes dysfunctional enough, it’s no longer possible to tell the truth.

My /. sig for years:

  > It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

That said, I don't think that the government is wrong here.

Well, the specific question that the government is answering is "should these people be employed if they make choices I disagree with". It is more borderline than it might appear at first blush.

I'm not sure I can think of a precedent for being so willing to eject that many people from the workforce in such a way.

The actual question is "should these people be employed if they make choices that cause customers to die?"

> should these people be employed if they make choices I disagree with

This is a disingenuous way to frame it.

The current govt is anti-Nazi, but it's never tried to mandate that all employees found to be Nazis must be fired.

The reason vaccines are an issue of employment (only at larger employers, by the way) is that unvaccinated people endanger their coworkers.

People have a right to be unvaccinated, and the rest of us have a right to protect ourselves from them.

When a nation's media becomes convoluted enough, one might add

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.

This COBOL shortage myth has been around since I was a kid. It wasn't true then, and isn't now.

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.

Right. COBOL is not some mythical ancient knowledge that can't be learned today. I'm pretty sure anyone who can learn Haskell can learn COBOL too, it's just a question of making them want to.

500? Try 250. Heck, 150 if we can work from home

The problem is now you have a bunch of D-level cobol coders without any experience, domain knowledge, etc

Which is where we are with most Java dev shops.

> The problem is now you have a bunch of D-level cobol coders without any experience, domain knowledge, etc

Right? So don’t wait too long because all of those who can pass this knowledge will be gone!

Also there are a ton of working programers that have some experience in cobol from school.

But everyone knows it’s a dead end. So yeah they need to pay very well to get the fixed they need.

Sounds like it isn't a myth - you yourself admit there aren't people who know it, just that would OFFER to learn it given the appropriate compensation.

By that logic, there isn't a shortage of anything if you have enough money.

The 'myth' since the early 90s is that you should definitely study COBOL because you'll be set for life because of the big shortage.

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.

Banks are genetically incapable of doing anything useful in terms of technology. Their mainframe architecture was outdated 40 years ago! They will forever maintain their hacks and buggy software.

Please define "buggy software." Can you point to a single confirmed case in the US of a person's bank account balance disappearing, or even a deposit not appearing, due to a software bug? I doubt it. Banks' core software is rock solid or they would be out of business very, very quickly.

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 interested in disclosing the specific bland but critically important data we moved/managed. It involved a giant amalgam of legacy commercial AIX and HP-UX software with some newer Java stuff in a Websphere environment. It was all duct-tape-and-bubble-gummed together with huge ksh88 scripts that were in constant development by devs and support people like me who'd just ssh into production systems to make changes. None of the internal software had dev/test systems, there was definitely no code review, and there was no version control. Yep. The system on a whole required constant monitoring and intervention to keep it plodding along. We did periodically see data loss that was unrecoverable from a technological standpoint but recovered with physical media kept around from their necessarily belt-and-suspenders business practices and tons of available staff for data entry. I reckon tens-of-thousands of folks outside the bank would have been affected per incident.

Not the US, but in the UK which I think is comparable:

* https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/28/many-hsbc-cust... (I believe this one was caused by firing greybeards who understood a certain very complicated batch processing system and offshoring to undertrained staff in India who then make a mistake and basically brough the entire system down as a knock-on effect)

* https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/19/tsb-it-melt... (Insufficiently tested software upgrade although to be fair this was a major upgrade)

* https://scottishfinancialnews.com/article/rbs-it-failure-pre... (Not sure on root cause. Other interesting stats at the bottom of the article regarding failure counts)

Now, in all these cases I believe the outages lasted a few days at least where people had limited or no access to bank accounts, salaries not paid on time, incorrectly charged overdraft fees, automated payments not happening etc.

It can probably be argued what is "core" here and as far as I know no money actually disappeared into the ether but, in the UK at least, I am not sure I would be so confident in my declaration of Rock Solid software.

What do you mean by 'useful' here? Facebook goes down for half a day and everybody laughs. Take 'banks' down for the same amount of time and see what happens.

Not if they can’t find anyone willing to learn COBOL.

There’s huge demand for developers on modern systems. Seriously, how much are you going to pay a developer to do mainframe COBOL - and is that developer going to produce commensurate value, really able to hold together a crumbling antique infrastructure?

Plenty of people working helpdesk that know a bit of python who can learn COBOL if they knew a job offer was on the other end of the investment in learning the language. There are hoards of people learning python and powershell just so they can make more money, trust me when I say they (the people I see learning python for career prospects) have no sentimental attachment to the language.

Fwiw, one of the highest paid coders I ever knew worked for a big stuffy bank. He was unfireable because he was the only one that knew the internal systems as well as he did. Learning COBOL may be a huge long term competitive advantage in the workforce, especially if the current dotcom-esque funny money dries up.

For enough money they will find someone willing to learn COBOL.

>> crumbling antique infrastructure

Are you talking about the hardware or software? It's worth considering that Lindy's Law [1] might apply here.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

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.

If the cause is the military, why is southwest so disproportionately affected, and being affected in so many cities?

> “The problems weren’t concentrated in just one particular region. The cancelations affected the entire Southwest network. People living in cities where Southwest has a big operation, like Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and where I am in the San Francisco Bay Area, saw cancelations in the double-digits.”

an airport is a hub for an airline, but not for other airlines. if southwest has 50 planes at an airport, and delta has 10 southwest is going to be impacted. when your plane takeoffs are cancelled at your hub, every single flight that was going to use that plane later in the day, or the following day, is now missing a plane.

if Chicago O'hare is shut down, United is done for the day in half the country, because half its planes are stuck at O'hare. if Chicago Midway is shut down, only Southwest is screwed. if Atlanta shuts down, only Delta is screwed.

Yes, I'm sure there are other cities that also had planes. Like Phoenix. Except the plane that was supposed to land in Phoenix is stuck in Florida. Or the pilot piloting the plane already in Phoenix is stuck in Florida.

Planes go from one city to another. If you introduce a blockage along the way, you've now taken that plane, or a crew out of commission.

Decades old might definitely mean duct taped and unstable. In about 1995 I witnessed the beginning of the end of at the time very successful company that just had tripled their whole organisation. But the code base was 5 million lines of a lot of copy pasted literal spaghetti code. And only a handful of ageing coders that had been with the company almost from the start could get anything done. And then, one day, those damn customers demanded a Windows application, instead of the classy DOS application.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)

Southwest are better than most NA carriers in this regard, they switched to Amadeus a few years ago. Which is "only" 10-30 years old (depending on the components).

Not exactly but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group

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.

I've been on the other side of this and seen too many teams neglect to fix even the simplest and most frustrating bugs in a system because they're going to rewrite it "in the next six months". Usually the rewrite is still going years later, and the actual code used in production is left to rot, holding back other teams as well.

It happens when you have a lot of new people who refuse to work with legacy code (which is anything over 2 years old), trivialize the complexity of the existing system (because they don’t understand a tenth of what it does), go create a sub par replacement with tons of people and years of work (that ends up coupled to the legacy system anyways), and now the company has two systems to maintain requiring double the resources as before. When everyone gets fed up and leaves, the cycle will start again. Our system is about four levels deep now. It’s the f’ing matrix.

Most of the new development I've worked on has been terrible, I attribute it to agile and the two week sprints churning out non stop MVP code that's technical debt from day one.

Can you blame them? These are the same teams who typically refuse to adopt practices that would allow them to create tests and we'll encapsulated designs. So inevitably the team is once bitten twice shy about breaking production. Why be the poor bastard who introduced anything but the tiniest bugfix?

I definitely agree it's a matter of incentives. Even in an environment with a now healthier quality culture, fixing bugs to bring an old system from 70% functionality to 100% is typically a career dead end.

It's much better to leave it broken and build a new system with 105% functionality so you can take credit for the whole 105%.

And typically, optimists that we are, it seems like completely reimplementing the original functionality will be "trivial" compared to merely trying to understand how the existing solution works.

> decades-old, duct-taped architecture

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.

I have to disagree. These systems aren't "survivors" - they're held together with a fragile weave of scripts, hacks, unsupported hardware and outdated knowledge. Often treated as a black box, they become an object that people have to hand-nurse through issues that would never trouble modern systems. The amount of effort and money that's expended to maintain these systems is typically far more than the upfront cost would be to replace them every decade with a more modern one, but that would look bad in the short term financials, so we keep babysitting the tower of glass and praying it doesn't fall.

I spent multiple years of my life working on a (at the time I started) decade+ project to retire such a system (i.e. a duct-taped hodgepodge of poorly documented COBOL and mainframe assembler that was understood and maintained by staff who was entering retirement age at an astounding rate), at a "midsize" financial company (i.e. between 3k and 4k employees, all told). While the cost of maintaining the old system was certainly high, it worked astonishingly well (provided you didn't need to add new features, such as a "graphical interface"), and the cost and difficulty in replacing it was truly enormous. I think you're drastically underselling the difficulty of re-implementing a company's entire suite of LOB software, complete with migrations and training, and likely with very little in the way of flexibility to change the core business rules/logic.

Furthermore,

> they're held together with a fragile weave of scripts, hacks, unsupported hardware and outdated knowledge

Swapping out COBOL for typescript and mainframes for linux boxes and a pile of YAML is not going to change any of that. People can and will build garbage with any set of tools you give them. Not ever software problem is like use-after-free where you can fix it forever with a sufficiently clever piece of tech.

> These systems aren't "survivors" - they're held together with a fragile weave of scripts, hacks, unsupported hardware and outdated knowledge.

It can be, depending on the system and who's complaining about it. Sometimes a fragile, buggy, mess of a legacy system is actually fragile and buggy, with failures causing downtime or lost business, and creaky processes slowing new development to a crawl. Sometimes it's just a system that has an unfamiliar or slightly less ergonomic developer experience, that uses older technologies that some developers don't want to learn. You have to look past the complaints and judge for yourself.

And yet the flip side where companies set piles of cash on fire trying to replace that legacy stuff is also common.

e.g. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252446965/Lidl-dumps-500...

A reply to myself since I can't edit: Survivorship bias may not completely describe what I'm talking about here but another commenter posted about Lindy Effect, which is 100% on the nose:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

These systems are in place and will continue to be maintained simply because they've stood the test of time.

This problem isn't occurring due to software issues.

If they want to pay they'll find someone.

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.

You're falling for misdirection. This isn't IT related.

Your comment is being downvoted not because people disagree with you, but because it is not bringing anything constructive to the discussion. Perhaps if you bothered to write about what you think the meltdown really is related to, your commend would have some value.

The original comment from the union only mentioned IT issues from June.

"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."

That's what makes it misdirection, mentioning an issue from June, and very specifically not talking about a current IT issue. If there were a current issue, they would have called it out. The union has also been pretty clear in other statements that operational issues over the past few months were due to staffing shortages, not IT.

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.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/06/bailout-c...

https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2021/04/09/pay-...

> 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.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-17/the-go...

Thanks, I like Levine and remember reading that. He basically argues that airlines financial strategy was optimal for shareholders, given covid and guaranteed government support. But firstly, he only considers the two uses of money proposed in the NYT, improving customer service or reducing the debt burden. Secondly, his whole argument is predicated on airlines being bailed out by government - which is true, but I believe shouldn't. I personally believe a lot of value is being destroyed by lack of long term investment and short term incentives, leading to problems such as these ones. And finally, even Levine admits that buybacks might be suboptimal for other stakeholders (eg employees, clients).

Airlines with government backing end up with the only rational choice being to take more risk.

I'm reading a book right now called "The Power of Nothing to Lose" which explores the primary and second order effects of individuals and companies being put into situations where they literally have nothing to lose. It's been an interesting read so far - recommended.

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 also operates a flight network that relies on flights making multiple stops along the way, whereas many other airlines may have more direct flights that aren’t impacted as much by distant flights being delayed.

Here’s an article from the AP that mentions the “point-to-point route network” as a contributing factor in terms of a cascading failure: https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-business-travel-8abd4e0...

To counteract this Southwest does not do red eye flights which theoretically should allow them to reset operations overnight. This does not seem to be working for some reason.

The union explicitly denies that a sickout is occurring in that same statement you've quoted:

The union explicitly has to deny this, even if it’s true, due to airline union regulations. Airline unions are restricted in what they can do.

Was anyone claiming that it was?

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.

>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.

All I get is a white screen with the word "Ok"

My apologies. Here is the correct URL. It's the ClickHouse web UI.

https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443/play?user=demo

For instructions on use, check out the following blog article.

https://altinity.com/blog/connecting-to-altinity-cloud-with-...

This seems like a strategy designed to kill airframes via sheer number of pressurization cycles?

Nope, it's how short-haul single-aisle aircraft are operated. They make money only when operating a flight, and the more you can squeeze in a day, the more money it will make.

That's why their life in years is usually significantly lower than medium/long-haul multi-aisle aircraft, which often get converted to freighters after retirement, since the main thing that matters is number of pressurisation cycles ( and fuel efficiency, but it's whole different story).

It certainly wears them out. Hawiian Air has the highest number of pressurization cycles of any US commercial airline (at least as far as I can tell--ontime data shows up to 18). So far they seem to have managed it without issues.

Another airline in the region, Aloha Air, did suffer an inflight fatality in 1988 when the fuselage ruptured. The cause was apparently poor maintenance. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243

> This seems like a strategy designed to kill airframes via sheer number of pressurization cycles?

That's what planes are for - to use them. They are not museum pieces to be preserved.

Robert Barnes and Viva discussed exactly this issue (sick-outs) on today's stream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuN9YhIhQ7Q&t=1285s

Actually waited to comment on this until I saw their analysis tonight. Figured they'd know about the lawsuits, which apparently they filed one friday.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.35...

Wow, very cool to see viva and barnes plugged here. A very interesting podcast to say the least.

I really enjoy their analysis. Cudos for plugging them.

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.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Compensation_Regulation

Interestingly, there might be something similar for the US:

> If your flight is cancelled and you choose to cancel your trip as a result, you are entitled to a refund for the unused transportation – even for non-refundable tickets. You are also entitled to a refund for any bag fee that you paid, and any extras you may have purchased, such as a seat assignment.

From https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer....

Though compensation for delays, not so much.

Doesn’t add up. Severe weather and military training in the same airspace? Other airlines not affected? Odd to say the least.

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.

This has always been the case with Southwest not anything new. Without late night flights they should be able to reset. Something else is going on.

Additionally with many similar aircraft and oy one class of service, substituting equipment is much easier for Southwest than traditional carriers.

> more flights than they can handle

More flights than pilots.

Like when your PM brings in work from the previous sprint, to the current, fully loaded sprint.

PM = Past Master?

And, tbf, i got it as i hit the 'equals' sign.

To me,

>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"?

If this is the result of a sickout, I assume the current administration could direct the Dept of Defense to make military pilots available to Southwest in the event of an extended availability issue with their union pilots.

Not as brutal as Reagan breaking the ATC union, but supporting a common carrier in a time of crisis. I don’t believe a federal case has been heard yet where the vaccine mandate or terminating those refusing it has been found unlawful.

> I assume the current administration could direct the Dept of Defense to make military pilots available to Southwest in the event of an extended availability issue with their union pilots.

No, they could not, not without a wholesale reworking of the entire FAA. Pilots are trained and certified on individual airplanes; even highly experienced pilots need retraining in order to safely fly a new aircraft. Shoving a bunch of military pilots into 737s is both highly illegal, and would probably result in some plane crashes.

I mean, how many P-8 pilots does the navy have? A P-8 is a 737NG.

How many military pilots do you think have a current type rating on the 737? The C-40 pilots could probably transition quickly but there's only 28 C-40s in the US fleet so probably not enough pilots to make a realistic difference.

This isn't just a case of paperwork, either. A pilot can't safely operate a completely different type without training. Even if you expedite it, it's likely that resolving the industrial action will take less time.

Military pilots for commercial airlines. Military personnel in hospitals. When do we get military teachers and military politicians?

We've had them forever: they wear silver eagles or stars for their rank insignia.

There already was National Guard diving school buses too.

We have always had military politicians. Military politicians are older than humankind itself.

> I assume the current administration could direct the Dept of Defense to make military pilots available to Southwest

Yeah just have them switch to a completely different type of aircraft without getting trained or checked out at all, this will definitely fix the problem in short order.

I understand you have an axe to grind, as many of your recent posts are anti vaccination in nature. Regardless, public support is robust for the measures being taken to bring the pandemic public health crisis to a conclusion, and with regards to vaccine mandates and terminating those who refuse, so far those actions have been adjudicated as lawful. So, the current administration has to get creative when you have cohorts purposely attempting to subvert public health measures (for whatever benefit they believe there is).

I don’t disagree it’s your right to decline a vaccine, but it’s also your employer’s right to mandate it and terminate you if you decline it. I’m unsure why these are controversial points or are heated conversations; this is the natural conclusion of everyone exercising their rights. This isn’t even novel; vaccine requirements have been standard for some time (hepatitis, measles, etc) in schools and workplaces.

I ask because I am genuinely curious as someone willingly vaccinated.

> Yeah just have them switch to a completely different type of aircraft without getting trained or checked out at all

Southwest’s fleet is all 737s; is this really a different type from the C-40?

I don't think vaccine mandates should be unlawful from private companies, but IMO it would be better if they gave a choice between a vaccine and having a recent test. If you need a vaccine or a negative test administered in the last 72 hours to attend work, it's very inconvenient to choose the test route but at least employees wouldn't be able to make the argument that they are being "forced" to get the vaccine.

The rapid test isn't very accurate especially in the absence of a full blown infection. The annual cost of doing a PCR test twice a week to ensure you always have an actually accurate test within 72 hours of working would be around $15,600. This is about 43% of the gross individual median income.

For practical purposes employers can't afford to pay near 50% more for the least reasonable employees, the government isn't incentivized to do so to make it easier not to vaccinate when this is really a poor substitute insofar as public health, and only the minority of employees can afford this.

In effect the end result of a practical testing alternative is to pretend we are giving them a choice while in fact giving them little choice.

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.

[1] https://youtu.be/yYcHWGxtRQo

50% slower than C++ is pretty terrible.

Verbosity is almost more helpful for optimization in a way, in the sense that C code ends up being fast because it's simpler than C is harder to optimize.

As for COBOL, isn't one of the issues that it's super complicated and not specified properly until recently?

Back in the day it was mostly very verbose but extremely fast. Cobol was designed for batch processing on use cases like accounting systems. We used it on signal processing apps, which had a lot of data, mostly on tape. It could rip through data stored on high-density mag tape--it was able to process data at the speed of the device.

(I did COBOL apps in the early 1980s.)

I love stories like this. It's so much harder to push our hardware to "the speed of the device" anymore, and hearing stories about others doing that is cool.

The "race" was between compilers, GNU compilers in fact, not languages.

SWA don't run COBOL anymore (at least, their core systems don't). It's mainly C++

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.

Between the major airlines, it’s hard for me to know if one is better than the other. They’ve all had some mess up or another make the news. So why not just pick the cheapest? Perhaps the real problem is the lack of consumer reviews attached to those prices.

This is how race to the bottom looks like. Expedia works since when, 1995? 25 years was enough for this vicious cycle to wreck quality and reliability for all of them.

Southwest has famously never exposed their APIs to third party travel agencies of any kind. You cannot book SWA on Expedia or any other OTA — only on southwest.com

Competition is the way capitalism works :-) . And I've seeing absolute monopolies doing far worse. Examples: the Cuban communications monopoly[^1] and their national airlines.

That said, airlines are between the sword and a hard place, and I expect it's going to get much, much worse as climate regulation kicks in the next few months. If you want to fly to some remote country for tourism, do it as soon as possible.

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETECSA#Controversies

Competition is alright, problem is that with the airlines, literally all competition in the last 2+ decades was entirely in price.

Given how cheap tickets today are, there so much that could be improved for the small and really non-decisive increases in prices (compared to the rest of average trip costs say hotel, taxi to/from airport, etc)! It's not that expensive to turn the modern day economy class experience - which is a truly an insult to human dignity - into something quite pleasant - in the structure of overall trip price it will be barely noticeable. But that won't happen because people pick entirely by PRICE alone. This is irrational and sad.

Compare with restaurants for example. There's also a ton of competition there, they go bust very frequently and have also very thin margins. But they don't try to compete ONLY in price, there is a great variety and customer experience is on average quite acceptable. Even closer point of comparison is hotels. There's nothing wrong going on with the hotels, while they are also a terribly competitive industry.

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?

Because it's illegal. Under the Railway Labor Act they have to exhaust all their other set options before they can initiate a strike or walkout, and even then only if it's considered a "major" disagreement. Minor disagreements cannot be striked over, full stop.

That would be the motivation for the union, but the question was about the company.

I know from experience that they don't compensate you for weather related delays or cancellations.

It would be a major accusation to say that there is an illegal strike occurring. Keeping that card unplayed gives SW more negotiating power

There’s a difference between “called in sick” and “illegal strike” though. SWA can state the first one as a fact if it’s true.

Ah, I misread. My bad.

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.

This flight is full.

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.

What has been the problem(s)?

Overall, it's operational fragility. Back in 2017 or 2018 there was engine failure, that started inspection of all planes, that triggered massive flights cancellation, revenue drops and calls for reconsidering their seating policy and baggage fees. Who would forget that SW had to park their fleet after that Boeing catastrophe and investigation. Gary Kelly spending too much time lobbying instead of improving company efficiency. 2020 was almost a catastrophe for the company has it not been for billions in cash injections, subsidies and loans from federal government. Another one is, SW used to be quite unusually employee oriented for an airline company. This has changed in last 3-4 years based on their negotiations with pilots and flight attendants unions, which does reflect on company's performance.

I work in a fortune 100 company.

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.

May decency prevail.

I stumbled recently on an interesting chart. Have not doublecheck the math, but comes from FinancialTimes, so I expect it to be credible. Bottom line, you need to vaccinate between 800 (60+yo) and 25,000 (<18yo) people to save 1 hospitalization over a 4 week period, given that we take current numbers for vaccine efficacy against infection at face value, and assume there will be no further declines as time passes.

https://www.ft.com/content/3439145a-80a4-47ad-9ceb-54a0cb707...

Yes, when seeking medical advice I also generally turn to the Financial Times for cogent analysis.

As a manager, you represent the org and it policies. If you want to speak against it, give a notice (or ask to be demoted to non-managerial role) and then do so.

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.

Not hundreds of flights, thousands (~2000)

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.

It is just a weird hill to die on. I know people who could get a small reward (+$100) for getting vaccinated and also would be unable to work for two weeks (-$1000) if they test positive. Yet they still don't get the vaccine. I can only guess that somehow they would still get payed a portion of the time they would be unable to work? Not sure :/

You can lead a horse to water but can’t make it drink.

Juan Browne (a commercial airline pilot) of the blancolirio Youtube channel has a great overview of what has led us here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO39nIcuPhQ

Southwest's pilot union sued the company over its Covid-19 vaccine mandate a few days ago[1], this is clearly related. The media isn't reporting this because the media owners don't want the masses hearing about others beginning to revolt against the draconian and illogical vaccine mandates (i.e. Why wouldn't a naturally derived antibody test be allowed in place of a vaccine, considering that's the whole point of getting a vaccine?).

The pilots saw what happened to healthcare workers who didn't immediately push back on mandates, so they are playing it differently. And if you don't support employees demanding medical freedom because they see through the corruption taking place, you don't need to fly on airplanes.

[1]: https://news.yahoo.com/southwest-airlines-cancels-1-800-2326...

Stop crying and get vaccinated, or find a way to make money without endangering other people.

compelling argument

I don't see why an argument needs to be made for it? Being anti-vaccine is anti-public safety and an active attempt to undermine the stability of the country and society. It should be viewed as terroristic.

You and I are free to speculate as are lower quality publications less concerned with their reputation but the timing is insufficiently persuasive by itself and what we ought to want from journalism is sound investigation and factual reporting even if this necessarily lags speculation.

It might come to pass that the speculation turns out to be correct and people shall be free to call out the news for not calling it like it is but if it turns out wrong the same folks would be quick to call out the "fake news" I'd rather they be careful and I'd rather you interpreted such care charitably.

> if you don't support employees demanding medical freedom because they see through the corruption taking place, you don't need to fly on airplanes.

In place of arguing on the internet or at least in addition to I would suggest that I simply lobby my government to take away their medical freedom in service of protecting my life and my families lives. A minority of individuals may disagree but if the alternative is poverty almost all of them will ultimately take the measures that will ultimately protect them, their families, and mine.

We will win but ultimately so will they because they wont be in a hospital room suffocating on a ventilator. Seems like the definition of a win win.

Spirit Airlines had to cancel a couple thousand flights in August.

Juan Browne, a commercial pilot and prolific YouTuber, says there is understaffing all through the organization: https://youtu.be/kO39nIcuPhQ

He says even low wage workers are in short supply and are working lots of overtime. He also says previously laid off pilots are backlogged in training to bring them back into working.

He also says the vaccine mandate is a problem. Browne is fully vaccinated and has no objections. He thinks no rational pilot will give up their salary over this. But, his analysis is that the vaccine mandate is an extra irritant in a fragile situation.

This is a nuanced and detailed analysis, but I'm not sure that is a entirely correct. Other airlines with similar pilot issues are not failing this way. Why just Southwest?

Please can we clean up the disinformation in this post?

Do you have any specific examples? What do you mean by 'clean up' exactly?

This comment tree for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28825105

What's false in that tree?

Florida reporter tweet about Friday's delays, https://twitter.com/benbeckeranjax/status/144703647319525785...

> Source tells me “some controllers getting vaccinated and the mandatory (48) rest period required after controllers get the vaccine” led to staffing shortage at Jax ATC in Hilliard that resulted in mass flight delays/cancellations in Florida on Friday night.

> ... The Federal Air Surgeon determined that FAA medical certificate holders may not act as pilot in command, or in any other capacity as a required flightcrew member, for 48 hours after each dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. The Federal Air Surgeon made this determination after evaluation of available medical information about these COVID-19 vaccines and potential side effects, https://www.faa.gov/coronavirus/guidance_resources/vaccine_f...

Again?!

Was this in the news?

It's in the politically incorrect, non-mainstream news/social media boards. But going to those is... a choice in itself, a choice that should not be taken wisely. It's the choice to begin to pull back the curtain-- to pull back the wool.

Obligatory mercury retrograde comment

Slightly better analysis here https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/10/did-labor-action-ove...

Thanks, also some scenarios in the comments.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/10/did-labor-action-ove...

> Not official evidence but just asked a close friend who used to work at SW for over 20 years. They texted their former SW union rep (non-pilot union) and they responded that they have >600 flight attendants without hotel rooms tonight due to the unexpected cancellations. They say the story/reasons they are given for the cancellations are constantly changing but they personally think it is a pilot sick out. They may be wrong but non-pilot SW employees think that’s what’s going on.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/10/did-labor-action-ove...

> As to why this airline and why now, an RT article mentions that-‘SouthWest Airlines became one of the last major US air carriers to introduce a vaccine mandate for its employees last Monday after the company was reportedly pressured by White House coronavirus adviser Jeffrey Zients to comply with President Joe Biden’s vaccination order. Some 56,000 SouthWest employees have until December 8 to get vaccinated if they want to keep their jobs.’

Im avoiding travel until the airlines shake off the cobwebs from being mostly shut down during covid.

Got back from a weeklong trip to an EU nation and airline troubles are overblown. Only the mediocre airlines are having troubles adapting.

Take this with a grain of salt and form your own opinion as you choose: https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-a-southwest-airli...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com