Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

The way the SA business model is set up makes me wonder if this sort of outcome is inherently baked-in, regardless of the actual technology utilized.

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.

View on HN

At the Christmas outage, they had crews and aircraft in the same location and still weren't able to operate them because their system didn't believe they were in that location, and they had too few staff centrally to update the system with that information via phone.

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.

And if IIRC they couldn't do all this in a reasonable time because their system still required crew to call them on the phone to report location, availability, and to receive new assignments and that system didn't scale during severe weather.

South West needed to update its tech infrastructure. They know this. Apparently staff have to call in to schedule and when things aren't going well it goes south quickly.

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.

>>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.

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.

Airlines generally treat all flights as part of a matched pair: Home-out and back again. Even with a non-hub-and-spoke flight system like Southwest, this is still the case. Crews and (to a lesser extent planes) don’t wander the earth like Cain, they go out and come back (perhaps with a stop or two along the way).

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.

> 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

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.

Using a lower-capacity plane is still less of an issue for SWA than other airlines since they also don’t do assigned seating so they can bump a portion of the booked tickets rather than all of them. Although are you sure about the fewer seats on some planes things? I remember having identical planes for all flights being a central part of their business plan last time I had read about this. I can’t imagine them getting any benefit out of having 737s with different seating capacities.

> Using a lower-capacity plane is still less of an issue for SWA than other airlines since they also don’t do assigned seating so they can bump a portion of the booked tickets rather than all of them.

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.

SeatGuru shows their 737-700 is 143 seats and their 737-800 and 737 MAX 8 are both 175 seats.

An aside but some years ago I was taking a flight in Europe and I was fascinated to see the differences. It seems many budget airlines operate on a similar model but the EU has steep fines for late flights so there's a huge incentive to find alternatives.

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.

The one concern I'd have with such pressure is that there would be other essential corners cut in order to not end up being fined. Bad service on a dirty aircraft is one thing but if they end up skimping on something safety related, disaster is waiting to happen. While I'm sure there are lots of other penalties involved in cutting corners in those areas, including the prospect of losing an aircraft and many lives, people at the lowest levels often are receiving pressure for immediate concerns and the consequences of the larger event isn't something that's immediately real to them.

> 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.

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.

Also people want to go home. The aircraft don't care if they're in one city or another, but the crews do, for regional in particular it's normal to go home, and if you're out of position at the end of the day that's not possible.

And you have staffing contracts negotiated by relatively powerful unions that require some of these things.

> So theoretically any crew can operate any airplane.

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.

The 737 is a single type rating. They are interchangeable. That was the whole idea behind Boeing's MCAS system - the 737-MAX didn't fly the same due to the engines being pulled further forward on the wing, so they made a piece of software that made the airplane feel the same as the 737NG.

You can’t fly an 737-200 for 3 years and then jump into a 737 NG without difference training. You won’t know how to work the flight management systems.

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.

SWA has optimized their operations to the point where there is little margin for error. They have the quickest turnaround times. They land at the highest speeds their planes are designed for. They taxi at or maybe above the maximum allowed speeds once on the ground. This all works great most of the time but when it does fail, it tends to do so spectacularly since there is no slack in the system.

Except this outage has nothing to do with crew scheduling

Reply on news.ycombinator.com