Southwest Airlines halts flight departures amid technology issue
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I imagine it's a lot easier to deflect blame by blaming it on computers though.
At least it’s better than root cause analysis, which is walking back until you want to stop and declaring that the root.
The real root is the creation of the universe. I mean that sincerely. When you follow definitions of causality, time and the universe, you end up with the Big Bang as the root of your graph. Everything is else is editorializing.
The important part of the above is by refusing create the whole tree you actually get something solved. Sometimes you will get the right one, sometimes you won't. You can spend a lot of time building a tree of problems, and find tens of thousands of things you can fix - and now you have a larger todo list than you have time to do and likely you don't get anything done. Or analysis paralysis in other words.
So, in this case the real question is “will they pick the branch that blames the people that pay and promote them, or take the branches that are of the least resistance.” Something this contentious would be vetted by committee in some way or another and at that point any upward finger pointing would be almost certainly curtailed in favor of a less contentious branch.
But once in a while it really isn't. My "favourite" was a fishing vessel which capsized killing everybody aboard. Why did it get into trouble? Because the entire crew were using heroin. That report has zero recommendations because there's nothing to recommend. It's already both illegal and obviously a bad idea to operate vessels at sea under the influence of drugs or alcohol, so there's nothing to recommend, those guys had only themselves to blame for their deaths.
And probably on the boat when it capsized and high on heroin too.
Factually describing the outage doesn’t remove responsibility; whoever didn’t take the first crisis seriously enough will face it soon enough. Right now, they need engineers, the FAA, flight controllers, etc. to unstuck them. Then there will be a blameless diagnostic. Then heads will roll and I’d be surprised if the most demotion won’t be a general manager.
Thank you for completing your job application for the [not available] position!One of the key processes that failed over Christmas was assigning personnel to crews and crews to flights. You can store a working option regularly (every hour) and revert to that, with local modifications, when things stop working. It won’t make things good, but it will avoid having to strand all flights for days.
In lieu of that management should require business resiliency processes allowing the business to continue manually when the computer systems inevitably fail.
“Every problem blamed on ‘computer error’ involves at least two human errors, one of which is blaming the computer.”
— Tom Glib
Oddly, the economy one seems to be the one that people vote for, with predictably stupid results. Also for some reason the economy only includes the gasoline refining industry, so make sure to switch careers so you can be a productive member of society!
Throughout the 80s Jack Welch, then CEO of General Electric, was seen as a genius. My god! Look at the stock!
He gutted the company in favor of financial services, and now is just a shell of what it once was.
C'est la eighties.
- Weinberg’s 'First Principle of Financial Management' and 'Second Rule of Failure Prevention’
- 'First-Order Measurement', Quality Software Management, Volume 2, Gerald Weinberg, Dorset House Publishing, 1993
That's a hardware problem.
>How many software engineers does it take to fix broken flight software?
That's a management problem.
>How do you fix this software problem?
This question has been closed for being off-topic.
At the end of the day, if crew A and plane B are in wildly-unexpected places, no amount of computational prowess can correct that reality. Contingencies can be installed at every level, but then you don't have a viable business anymore. E.g. keeping a backup crew and spare plane on the ready 24/7/365 at every airport just in case is not going to scale. It also still won't deal with the worst scenarios.
This really is a massive management failure. They couldn't re-route crews and aircraft, they couldn't consolidate ones that were already in the same location, and they couldn't fix it because they under-staffed to an absurd degree.
Better technology would have helped a ton. But that isn't, to me, the story here. This is an epic mismanagement story that may ultimately kill Southwest. They cost cut technology for years, then cost cut away their backup staff too.
Southwest should be more resilient in some ways in that all of their flights are done with the same type of plane, so they can always swap in a different plane for the task, and within the limits of employment contracts/government regulations, they can also easily swap crews around, as long as they keep that out-and-back scheduling.
That's not that unusual for their size airline. But, some of their planes have more seats than others, so on fully booked routes, swapping in a smaller capacity plane is still a problem. Certainly, a smaller problem than if they swapped in a plane the current crew couldn't fly.
I don't know where other airlines keep contingency planes, but I'd imagine they might keep them at their larger hubs, which would give you a decent chance of having a contingency plane at the right location; with Southwest's model, I think any contingency planes are going to have to first deadhead to the route, adding more confusion and delay. :/
At least they fixed this one quickly; once the backlog got too big last time, it was very difficult to fix.
Other airlines can do similar. Assigned seats don't prevent an airline from bumping you; it's been a while, but I've had my seat changed without my involvement as well as had to figure out what to so when someone else had a boarding pass with the same seat as mine. I've had pleasant surprises too; booked towards the front of the cabin for a plane without an extra leg room section, but the plane that was used had extra leg room for that row, so bonus.
> I can’t imagine them getting any benefit out of having 737s with different seating capacities.
It's probably a mix of things; one being they bought many 737-700s before larger models were available, but it looks like they've got 192 737-MAX7s on order, so it seems that they'll have three sizes for a while and probably have two sizes once the 737-700s age out. Some routes probably don't provide enough customers to fill the larger planes, and using a smaller plane reduces operating costs. Two sizes isn't that many. Alaska operates more sizes and has fewer aircraft.
This business model is kinda what made southwest what it is today. I think like "just in time" manufacturing, it can save you money when its working but it might not be as fault tolerant.
From a podcast transcript: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/podcasts/the-daily/the-so...
Niraj Chokshi: Right, exactly. There was this union official who told this story where there was a plane ready to go that was missing one flight attendant. And they had several on board already as passengers. But none of them could reach the headquarters quickly enough to tell them, look, we’ll work this flight. And so the flight ended up getting canceled.
Michael Barbaro: Even though the flight attendants were on the plane.
Niraj Chokshi: Right, exactly. And so this kind of thing was happening across the board. And the airline just could not keep up with the nature of the problem.
Michael Barbaro: Because basically, they had an antiquated scheduling system.
Niraj Chokshi: Right, right. And Southwest has acknowledged that, too, even before this crisis. After Thanksgiving, they invited a group of journalists to Dallas. And I was there. And the CEO was telling us about his goal of modernizing the operation. There are all these sorts of systems that they want to upgrade.
They want to make better. And he mentioned this system. He said, we’ve got flight attendants who have to call in. This is a process that could be automated. And he said, it’s not OK. And so they knew. They had started to work on it. That’s what they say. But unfortunately, they were still working on it when Christmas comes.
>>Michael Barbaro: Even though the flight attendants were on the plane.
>>Niraj Chokshi: Right, exactly. And so this kind of thing was happening across the board. And the airline just could not keep up with the nature of the problem.
Perhaps more importantly, they had provided no means to push decision-making to the edges of the system.
This is apparently an absolutely critical difference between the armed forces of Ukraine and Russia, where UKR has updated to modern command & control pushing decision-making out as far into the field as possible, while RUS has very centralized C&C, so UKR can outfight them even though outnumbered 5:1, and both sides are running short of artillery.
Here, SW, cannot even fix parts of their system when the fix is literally on the tarmac fully configured and loaded, just not centrally approved. They can't just say, we're good, every item on the checklist is verified, we're going, here's the data, we can update via communications en-route. I'd bet that such solutions exist within an hour of scheduled takeoff for more than 50% of the situations. Instead, it looks like they are 100% shutdown.
In my case the alternative appeared to be an entire backup airline that seems to exist only to serve other airlines when they experience issues. A plane was quickly scrambled from (IIRC) Lisbon and flown to Heathrow and we were all shepherded onto it as quick as they could possibly manage. The plane was garbage, service was garbage and food was garbage but they did get us in the air quickly. Ultimately they missed their 4hr delay window by about twenty minutes so I was entitled to something like 600EUR of compensation anyway.
I imagine there are a number of reasons why this wouldn't work domestically in the US but without the threat of fines there simply isn't any incentive to provide it anyway.
I think that’s not wrong, but one of Southwest’s efficiencies is that they only operate one “type” (term of art) of airplane. So theoretically any crew can operate any airplane.
So, in theory, it doesn’t matter which crew is at the airport as long as they meet the rest requirements. You could just use the greedy algorithm and assign the first available crew in the queue to the next flight at each airport. And, since you need a crew to get the airplane to the airport, there are usually crews in the same places as airplanes. (But you have to know that an available crew exists at that airport to do this)
Where that breaks down a bit (and where you need a smart algorithm or more compute) is that you can end up with crews at an airport, but the crews are all timed out. So while the airplanes are mostly fungible, the crews are mostly not.
The complexity is really filling all the planes for the next-n rounds of flights with crews such that none of the crews times out up to your time horizon. But that only works if you know where all the crews and planes are (and how much time each crew has left)
Also, keeping a backup crew at each airport isn’t super expensive because crews are only paid for the time they are operating the airplane while the doors are shut.
This doesn’t actually hold up to reality because 737 variants are not interchangeable. Gauges may be in the same place but have a different appearance. There have been accidents directly caused by differences between variants. (Shutting down the wrong engine because the air conditioning now used bleed air from both engines, not just the right one.)
My understanding is difference training is required to certify a pilot for a specific variant.
They are the same type, so you don’t need to re-qualify for the type. But you need to do training to move between variants of a type. It’s just a lot less training.
Edit: phrasing/typos
"FAA lifts nationwide ground stop for Southwest Airlines flights after equipment issues"
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/southwest-airlines-flight...
Use vocode.dev to take the pilot calls. Use bot to ask the relevant questions, and get transcriptions. Send transcriptions to ChatGPT to formalize into well-defined json updates to the database. It's a 2 week project, max.
Your invention could bankrupt the airline in a matter of months.
And don't forget premium voices. I'd argue using General Adama's voice from Battlestar Galactica leads to less mistakes.
This is Battlestar actual, what's your status?
Who won't give accurate information when they hear that?
The only way he can do is to trust his CTO and let him pitch changes and innovations and such. But how does a CTO do that? Again he has to rely on his generals to make the judgement.
This all sounds like a job impossible to do right. Any idea?
Perhaps this was prescient. As tech begins to play an increasingly dominant role, the humans who directly manage that tech will play an increasingly dominant role as well.
1) Gather requirements of what the business expect the systems to do provide which capabilities for the business to operate and grow for the future.
2) Present this to the generals and ask them "how can we get here with which changes or new systems?".
3) Analyze document the proposed changes outline pros and cons. Make recommendation to CEO.
Repeat the loop again with action plan and timeline, if the CEO agrees which i'm sure the CEO will have input on where action plan is focused on and timelines. Ask for input from all Cxx and SVPs - repeat loop after this point.
Repeat until actionable work items are created and assigned to people to execute on. Monitor execution and keep doing it again and again until all the changes are in.
But fuck investing in the business.
> Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.