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Comment by pookha | Hacker News Reader

They've operated without the hub-and-spoke model years but they haven't had to operate with over 8% of their staff leaving. They're understaffed. It was a major issue with Southwest all throughout 2022 and it got brought up on their earnings call with investors. They're a budget airline and they can't afford to take that kind of staffing hit.

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From a friend that works there this is not a staffing issue. It is a software issue. Apparently, their system that tells them what staff is where is broken and doesn't know where anyone is. So now they need everyone to call and tell them where they are to update the system, but the phone lines to do so are totally overwhelmed. This is also causing them to be unable to book hotels for the staff that is stranded. Most people are just buying their own hotels and hoping for reimbursement in the future.

Some additional hearsay evidence that this whatever the initial cause was it has been compounded by some massive IT failures: https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/zw5lsl/southwest_pi...

This is interesting and topical considering what's happening in places like Twitter..

..And the one thing that might have saved Southwest in the past, its ferocious employee loyalty and willingness to go several extra miles when the shit hit the fan because they knew they were being taken care of, has been utterly destroyed by the new management.

People were loyal to Herb (not SWA) because Herb was loyal to them. Herb’s gone, loyalty’s gone.

You could both be right -- could be that a hub/spoke model would fare better in a software failure, because everyone would return to the hub and things would be straightened out the old-fashioned way.

Not having staff didn’t seem to stop them overselling what they can handle, however. They took a risk on stretching as far as they could go in an ideal environment and here we are.

This is probably tied to how deeply ingrained the overselling habit is in the airline industry in general. They're legally protected when doing this, and it's why that doctor got dragged off that flight.

Are you referring to that time that United dragged a doctor off a Toronto bound flight? God, I will never forget that.

That was a United flight, not Southwest. Southwest and Delta are the only two good US based airlines left.

Southwest does not overbook their flights as a matter of policy.

https://www.southwest.com/help/changes-and-cancellations/ove...

Proof appears to be in the pudding here. They absolutely overbook, all airlines do. Dated a few attendants over the years and they’ve all echoed similar experiences with folks being double booked especially so during this time of year. I’ve been bumped on a SW flight, got the extra travel voucher so it worked out. They absolutely do overbook.

If you read the linked faq, there's a difference betwen overbooking and overselling. If Southwest sells all the seats for a segment, but they end up flying the segment with a different plane than scheduled, there may be less seats than scheduled passengers. That's more likely to happen furong the holidays when flights are very full and weather delays are common and there's more equipment changes.

To me, that reads as a crappy distinction intended to inspire some pity for Southwest.

The effect is the same either way. Someone paid for a ticket and they don't get to board the plane.

C'mon, there is a huge difference between an airline selling a seat they don't have and not having it due to an equipment issue.

Or, to look at it from another perspective:

The airline sold you something that they can't deliver because they refuse to keep extra planes around. They refuse to keep extra planes around because that would eat into profits, and would mean their execs wouldn't be able to buy their third gold-plated yachts.

The difference is intent. Overbooking intentionally creates conflict likely to result in a ticketed passenger unable to board. Overselling also results in a ticketed passenger unable to board, but was not intentional; at least not directly intentional. You could argue flying planes with different capabilities offers the possibility to have a lesser plane subsituted and that's an intentional choice, but...

Another way to think of it is what could an airline have reasonably done to avoid the situation? If it's overbooking, the reasonable thing is to not overbook. If it's overselling, they could choose not to fully book their scheduled equipment, but is that reasonable? They can't choose to have 100% reliable planes and crews and weather and ground operations. Stuff happens, and it's certainly reasonable to be upset when it does, but understanding why it happened can be helpful, so making a distinction between overbooking and overselling makes sense to me.

Aren't all Southwest Airlines planes identical?

No, they're all 737s, but there's a lot of variation within that.

Seatguru says [1] southwest flies three variants, 737-700 with 143 seats and 737-800 and 737-Max 8 both with 175 seats.

If a -700 gets substituted in, that's a lot of missing seats. I've also flown on planes where one seat is out of service for whatever reason and usually has a plastic cover on it.

[1] https://seatguru.com/airlines/Southwest_Airlines/information...

Thank you for the correction here

  > They're legally protected when doing this, and it's why that
  > doctor got dragged off that flight.

To be clear, it was United that dragged a doctor off a plane. Not Southwest.

As a policy Southwest is one of (the?) only airline that doesn’t overbook flights. They only sell the seats they have. From a business perspective it would be dumb to not offer all those seats for sale.

This is definitely their fault, but nothing like United pulling the doctor off the plane

Other airlines have staffing issues too.

The bottom line here is that the hub-and-spoke model is more resilient than the point-to-point model.

That is definitely not the case. The real issue is that even the staff that did show up didn't know where to go. There were employees lost for hours at Denver because the call-in scheduling system went down. Some employees hit their limits for work time before they could even obtain their assignments.

That’s a symptom. The root cause was lack of resiliency in airplane routing.

It’s the only thing that explains why Southwest was uniquely impacted this week. Every other airline has staff issues, and the same weather to deal with.

With a point to point network, the coordination problem is much larger than with a hub and spoke network. That is probably what pushed Southwest’s software over the limit. But remember, the software didn’t fail by itself in a vacuum. Resiliency problems during a weather event were the root cause.

What other airline relies entirely on a call-in scheduling system?

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