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Comment by lowbloodsugar | Hacker News Reader

They rely on telephones???

They relied on hand written notes for baggage until 2017... 2017...

This is going to be a prime example CIO's can use as what happens when a company fails to invest in IT, treating as a cost center to alway gut budgets from

Somewhere there are Sysadmins, and Devs at southwest just face palming at the years and years they have beggged for resources to improve things

It isn’t just tech problems that drive this kind of stuff, SWA couldn’t get a deal worked out with AMFA to use bag scanners until 2016.

> Southwest said it will begin scanning bags on the tarmac this year to improve accuracy. Other large U.S. airlines already use this technology. Southwest's contract with bag handlers did not include a provision for using scanners until 2016. The airline then spent time evaluating technology and testing scanners at a few airports.

https://www.keranews.org/news/2019-02-20/southwest-airlines-...

That's obviously not a blanket case of "AMFA bag handlers categorically refuse to use bag scanner tech" but rather "SW, unlike other airlines, didn't negotiate (early enough) the use of bag scanners in its contract with AMFA bag handlers."

SW decides what their priorities are when negotiating these contracts and deciding the terms. Other airlines obviously prioritized bag scanner tech and made the necessary tradeoffs to make it happen while SW didn't. Half the blame at the very least should be apportioned to SW.

I didn’t say it was categorically anyone’s fault, I just wanted to illustrate that airlines have unusual constraints on them so assigning blame to any one party is hard. The limitation are unusual compared to what we experience in less regulated, less unionized industries.

The fact that a provision was required tells me there was already a provision, negotiated by the AMFA, requiring bag handling to be done a certain way to protect jobs by indirectly limiting innovation and automation.

These sorts of things rarely benefit customers.

The question is did SW attempt to add it before and it was rejected by the union? or is this just another example of SW not putting tech in the foreground, and instead treating it like a cost center that only needs to be maintained?

I don't really care if Southwest tried to negotiate for it, chose not to for some well thought out reason or just dropped the ball. The fact that they have to negotiate for it is broken. The "system" is not set up to allow for agility and innovation. Instead, it acts on protectionist incentives on all sides, none of which directly consider the consumer first.

Since the airline industry, like most transport, exists only through subsidized infrastructure, it's prone to uncompetitive practice all around.

I realized this on my travel this holiday, just considering the entire security theater apparatus in the US. It's not just that the lines are longer and slower; they added differentiated tiers of service for the line, and the longer waits and ban on liquids encourage more purchases once through the gate. All the players involved in the racket will look at these add-ons and say, "sounds good for my bottom line," even though it acts as a tax on service quality.

And most of these things will likely remain because the technical considerations and the political realm exist in an equilibrium; giving the consumer more options can't be done within the logistical and safety requirements of large-scale air travel, thus it's up to the whims of the political system to coordinate and come to an agreement. A "sky highway" technology could automate away a lot of the coordination in flight, and smaller/more efficient aerial vehicles with VTOL and low noise could present a lower footprint for air travel, but these disruptions to the model are still a long ways away from reality.

I thought its pretty normal to reschedule a canceled flight by phone.

It isn't normal for an employer to not even know where flight crews even are physically located without a phone call and then additional phone calls to get them scheduled onto subsequent flights.

Then you tack on a hugely understaffed call center and problems with their phone systems and you have a hell-storm.

AIUI the problem is they're using the same lines for passenger and crew rescheduling. So they don't know where their pilots and crew are and can't communicate with them when the lines get hammered with customers trying to reschedule their flights that are canceled because they don't know where their pilots and crew are to staff them.

The phone reliance in this case is for dispatchers to know where crews and airplanes are. In the article crews will call in for location and assignment (where to go to serve a flight) but are on hold for hours because there's not enough people to talk to and, I guess, update something that looks like this:

http://resources1.news.com.au/images/2013/08/02/1226690/4683...

I have more than a few flights cancelled in my travels, never once have I rescheduled by phone. It was always on the mobile app. 90% of my travel is on American or Delta

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