This post is an excellent reminder that even HN is not immune to rampant conspiracy theorists and to take everything with a grain of salt. HNers are not uniquely intelligent nor capable.
"If it was the weather, why is only SW affected?"
Same question, but for vaccines.
United, Delta, American, Alaska all instituted the same mandate.
(The answer you seek is in the linked article, which literally has a section starting with the quote "The common question, then, is why Southwest was affected so much worse than other carriers.")
“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,” he said.
Are you telling me that SW is so unique that it is the only airline with so much flow in Florida? I genuinely don't know. Do you happen to know?
> Jordan said it was particularly the line-flow system that Southwest uses as part of a point-to-point network that made it harder for Southwest to recover than other airlines with heavy exposure in Florida, such as American, which has a hub in Miami as part of its hub-and-spoke network.
Southwest is unusual in having this "line-flow" system.
The link you provided lists Allegiant Air as one of the other airlines that flies to/from FL ( and uses the same system ), but there is no report same issues as SW has/had.
For the record, I don't really care one way or another, but I am not that big on taking executives word at face value; even outgoing ones.
I saw several of your replies scrolling through this page, yeah, you need to learn a lot.
Am I wrong to ask why two seemingly similar systemsrespond differently to an event that seemingly should affect them the same way? I do not think so. If the approach is wrong, then tell me that. I am not a scientist. I am just a guy on the interwebs, who sees flimsy excuse for an excuse and calls it out.
The FAA problem was in Jacksonville. Wikipedia lists Allegiant’s top Florida destinations as Orlando, St Pete, and Ft Myers. Also, according to Wikipedia, Jacksonville is a minor city for Allegiant.
I think what rankles a bit is you are coming up with these pet theories that force others to present easily obtainable (including from TFA) information. So no, you're not wrong to ask the question, you're wrong to have demonstrated contrarianism rather than curiosity.
The claim it's the weather is the one that needs extraordinary evidence because the claim is that weather that day only affected Southwest, whereas the claim Southwest pilots were the only ones to organize makes more sense.
The Florida explanation doesn't make sense because my parents also had issues going from CA to Oregon.
Occam's razor
Nah. Storms are often highly localized, and different airlines have different cities they fly a lot through. A nasty storm cloud over Miami might not interrupt flights over Fort Lauderdale.
Weather over Chicago is gonna screw up ops for United. Weather over Atlanta will fuck up Delta.
> The Florida explanation doesn't make sense because my parents also had issues going from CA to Oregon. Occam’s razor.
Unfortunately, the simplest Occam’s Razor explanation is ignorance here.
Here’s an example Southwest flight. Tampa to St. Louis to LAX to San Jose.
https://www.southwest.com/air/flight-status/path.html?depart...
You might be flying LAX to SJC, but still be affected by planes getting stuck in Florida.
It would probably eliminate X even if one of them said it's not X assuming the other did not say it is.
Look at the airlines operations. SW is different than many of the full price airlines in that they run the leanest of operations almost everywhere. Isolated weather can easily disrupt SW while more capable operations with more robust networks continue just fine.
I highly doubt any real number of airline pilots are walking out over a vaccine mandate - because they've probably been vaccinated for months now.
The NMB wikipedia article describes the process airline pilots unions must follow before being allowed to strike. The legal basis for this is found in the Railway Labor Act.
>NMB programs provide an integrated dispute resolution process to meet the statutory objective of minimizing strikes and other work stoppages in the airline and railroad industries.
A few key points from the video: The last time a major airline was allowed by the NMB to strike it lasted for 24 minutes before they were ordered back to work by President Clinton. It is the NMB's mission statement to prevent strikes and labor disruption in the airline and rail industries. Job actions (including sick outs) are not allowed. When Pilots did a slow down by following FAA regulations precisely a Judge stopped them.
I am not a Southwest employee so I cannot tell you how many pilots walked out. What I can say however is that if the union claimed to be involved with job actions that would be an admission of a crime.
That's just a conspiracy theory