I find it especially ironic that SWA system failed them, and this large failure was preceded by worse and worse "near failures", since SWA is in the aviation business.

In the aviation arena, high reliability is maintained in part by careful analysis of "near failures": lessons are extracted and improvements are made to aircraft designs, procedures, etc.

By contrast, the "near failures" of the SWA system as a whole don't appear to have been utilized to motivate system improvements.