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Comment by vyrotek | Hacker News Reader

These were the bits I found the most interesting which led to issues.

> “Flight delays and cancellations occurred for a few hours Friday afternoon due to widespread severe weather, military training, and limited staffing in one area of the Jacksonville Air Route Traffic Control Center,”

> “The big issue is that Florida is roughly 15% of our trips, but on any given day, upwards of 50% of our aircraft lines flow through Florida,” Jordan told TPG. “You’ve got all those lines that just stopped in Florida, so you’ve got a lot of aircraft caught up in that,”

> “We’re not hub and spoke, and we do very little out-and-back,” Jordan said. “So when you stop a line, you’re stopping a line where the aircraft is attempting to flow across the country.”

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There's another forum where a Jacksonville ARTCC controller echoed they had 15 people call out (not due to some anti vax movement) and had weather looming on top of the military who takes over half their airspace and doesn't give it back promptly (or the FAA gets the word but doesn't pass it along). Combined with constant understaffing and the fact that JAX can't stop departures from places like Atlanta (but other centers can) doesn't help.

I routinely get flights delayed on Southwest like no other airline, even the budget ones. Now I understand why.

Well that plus they have very little slack in their schedule. They have a goal of 20 minute turnarounds. That leaves no room for error. Most airlines won't turnaround a plane in less than an hour.

Setting all the recent issues aside, I remember a time when I would always check Southwest Airlines for flight options before any other airline and they’d often win my business. For the last ~5 years I don’t even bother. Their prices are at best the same as all the other major airlines (just as likely to be more expensive) and their flight schedules are just okay. I don’t understand how Southwest is maintaining market share (perhaps it’s not).

They win (won) my business chiefly because of checked bag policy. Even with 2 free checked bags, their prices are competitive. I do hope they recover from this mess.

For me, they happen to have direct flights to my preferred airports and their cancellation policy provides a great peace of mind having the option of canceling a flight 10 minutes prior to departure and just rescheduling for later.

It's the stroller airline. If you have kids it's a good deal.

They have an incredible loyal customer base despite some of the recent bad publicity. Also seems like if the price and schedule are the same, generally Southwest provides a better experience.

Not quite true anymore. The average scheduled turn is closer to 35 minutes on 700 aircraft and 40+ on 800s. Still much shorter than legacy carriers

> I routinely get flights delayed on Southwest like no other airline, even the budget ones. Now I understand why.

Sure, but Southwest has always been the kind of airline that rewards people who play the game.

Let’s say you are flying from Chicago to Boston. Southwest has a flight every hour, sometimes even more frequently. You can pretty easily find out where your plane is coming from, and where the planes on the next few flights are coming from. You can pretty easily find out if those planes are taking off on time. If they do, they’re going to land in Chicago on time and turn around to Boston on time. If not, just walk over to the desk and ask to be moved to the one that is going to get you to Boston soonest. If there is a seat available, it’s yours. You’ll have your new boarding pass in 2 minutes or less and they wont charge you a dime.

This sounds like they should consider having pre-prepared backup plans that allows bypassing various parts of the country.

There really isn’t a way to do that — airline operations are based around renting “slots” from airports that give takeoff and landing rights at specified times. Slots are expensive, so you build your operations and maintenance plans around them. You just don’t have an option to build unused backstop routes and the logistics around them, so either you’re bumping folks onto other carriers or having them wait for your congestion issues to ease.

That's ridiculous. Yes, airlines have slots, but schedule changes, weather delays, mechanical delays, happen all the time. It's not like if you miss a slot you're just SOL. If you're flying from A to B to C to D to E to F and there's a bottleneck at B, you can deadhead the plane from A to C (or even take the pax who were going from A to C anyway) and pick up all the downstream connections.

There are weather delays all the time. There are ATC problems all the time. But having either one of those turn into this kind of a mess is unprecedented, so there has to be something else in play here, and that "something else" is almost certainly SW screwing something up.

> But having either one of those turn into this kind of a mess is unprecedented...

It really isn't. Just earlier this year:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/business/spirit-american-...

"Spirit Airlines and American Airlines canceled hundreds of flights on Tuesday after several days of disruptions, frustrating passengers across the country."

"By midafternoon, Spirit had scrapped more than half its scheduled flights for the day, according to FlightAware, an aviation data firm. The airline canceled more than 40 percent of its flights on Monday and 19 percent on Sunday. Spirit attributed those disruptions to “a series of weather and operational challenges.”"

"American had canceled about 300 flights by the middle of the afternoon on Tuesday, about a tenth of Tuesday’s scheduled trips. The airline canceled about 18 percent of its flights on Monday and 9 percent the day before. American pinned the blame on a weekend storm that hit Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, its large hub airport."

Yes, a one-day disruption is not uncommon when bad weather hits a hub, even occasionally extending into a second day. But 1) Southwest has been cancelling flights for four days, 2) Southwest specifically said that it doesn't do hub-and-spoke (they blamed the problem in part on that) and 3) the weather in Florida has not been abnormal in the past few days. The Miani area had half an inch of rain on Friday according to weather.gov. That's nothing.

I cited a three-day disruption, just a few months ago.

The article indicates "upwards of 50% of our aircraft lines flow through Florida".

There's more to Florida than just Miami, and the FAA backs up the weather claim.

Meanwhile, none of the other airlines who also instituted mandates saw delays.

https://slate.com/business/2021/10/southwest-airlines-cancel...

"This appears not to be an aviation problem so much as a Southwest problem; other airlines were able to carry on with minimal cancellations after Friday’s disruptions."

That matches up with all my points. The other airlines mostly don’t have half of their flights transit Florida like Southwest does. That’s unique to SW.

Well, yeah, obviously it's not just Southwest's incompetence at play here, otherwise they'd be cancelling flights all the time. The weather contributed, but it was just a trigger. The house of cards had been built by SW management long before the weather rolled in.

"Southwest has generally struggled with coordinating its operations as of late; it had the highest percentage of cancellations and worst on-time performance among the country’s four major airlines in June and July. The Southwest pilots union further blamed the company’s technical systems and processes for reassigning pilots when disruptions occur, claiming that these are long-standing problems that executives have failed to fix for years. The airline has struggled with rerouting pilots partly because it uses a “point-to-point” system, which focuses on flying passengers directly to their destinations. This is opposed to the “hub-and-spoke” model that American Airlines uses, in which passengers are often first routed to a main base of operations before departing for their final destination. While the point-to-point system has the advantage of reducing travel times and the number of connecting flights, it can be difficult to adapt to unexpected situations. Southwest’s point-to-point network also covers an unusually large geographic area, which makes reassigning pilots even more complicated."

Ah, that I can agree to; that a relatively normal disruption revealed a fragile system that's already strained to the edge in normal ops.

Do they fuel the craft to skip B?

Or do they top-up at B in order to reach C?

Diversions mid-flight are pretty rare, usually they will choose to skip B before taking off. That said there are some interesting instances where airlines can "tanker" fuel by fueling up more than they need to in a city where prices are cheaper

I believe only two US airports are slot-restricted.

> There really isn’t a way to do that

There is always a way to do anything, you just have to be willing to pay for it. They decided this wasn't a failure mode to prepare for (read: spend money against) so they now deal with the consequences.

There is always a way but never enough political and actual capital to do this. You could build your own airports, buy other airlines but you run the risk of losing the spot if you don't actually use it.

The cost would be so high tickets could double if it was even possible.

It's not just some money it's insane amounts of money and even then you can't always do it, for example because you cannot own slots for flights you don't actually operate. Those revert back to the airport and get sold to someone else.

Airlines, especially post-deregulation, operate on razor thin margins.

Perhaps, though this is probably hard given airports, take off slots and such.

Sometimes the backup plan is occasional failure. Resiliency is expensive. We don't tend to own up to our decisions when we (companies, individuals, etc.) opt to pay for for limited resilience. But besides our irrational denials, it's often a rational trade off.

Take the recent FB downtime for example. FB's bigness means that FB downtime had some significance but FB is not critical infrastructure. Thousands of decisions, trade offs and compromises reflect that. If there's trade off between costs or speed of software development and resilience... FB will/should not always choose resilience. That's rational.

Being stranded for a day because airlines is something that happens n% of the time. Cost of the mode.

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