What the fuck is wrong with you, Southwest Airlines?

[The Dog 44,120]

good news is they appear to be running their whole schedule and have been able to successfully reset. No mass cancellations so far today and few delays. 

[Parliament 14,283]

 

[Armybrat 40,873]

NSIAP…..Just saw this posted on a Las Vegas forum:

Have any of you read the explaination of why Southwest had such a bad week?  This was posted to facebook a couple days ago and I shared it on my page.

Larry Lonero
2d  · 
What happened to Southwest Airlines?
I’ve been a pilot for Southwest Airlines for over 35 years. I’ve given my heart and soul to Southwest Airlines during those years. And quite honestly Southwest Airlines has given its heart and soul to me and my family.
Many of you have asked what caused this epic meltdown. Unfortunately, the frontline employees have been watching this meltdown coming like a slow motion train wreck for sometime. And we’ve been begging our leadership to make much needed changes in order to avoid it. What happened yesterday started two decades ago.
Herb Kelleher was the brilliant CEO of SWA until 2004. He was a very operationally oriented leader. Herb spent lots of time on the front line. He always had his pulse on the day to day operation and the people who ran it. That philosophy flowed down through the ranks of leadership to the front line managers. We were a tight operation from top to bottom. We had tools, leadership and employee buy in. Everything that was needed to run a first class operation. When Herb retired in 2004 Gary Kelly became the new CEO.
Gary was an accountant by education and his style leading Southwest Airlines became more focused on finances and less on operations. He did not spend much time on the front lines. He didn’t engage front line employees much. When the CEO doesn’t get out in the trenches the neither do the lower levels of leadership.
Gary named another accountant to be Chief Operating Officer (the person responsible for day to day operations). The new COO had little or no operational background. This trickled down through the lower levels of leadership, as well.
They all disengaged the operation, disengaged the employees and focused more on Return on Investment, stock buybacks and Wall Street. This approach worked for Gary’s first 8 years because we were still riding the strong wave that Herb had built.
But as time went on the operation began to deteriorate. There was little investment in upgrading technology (after all, how do you measure the return on investing in infrastructure?) or the tools we needed to operate efficiently and consistently. As the frontline employees began to see the deterioration in our operation we began to warn our leadership. We educated them, we informed them and we made suggestions to them. But to no avail. The focus was on finances not operations. As we saw more and more deterioration in our operation our asks turned to pleas. Our pleas turned to dire warnings. But they went unheeded. After all, the stock price was up so what could be wrong?
We were a motivated, willing and proud employee group wanting to serve our customers and uphold the tradition of our beloved airline, the airline we built and the airline that the traveling public grew to cheer for and luv. But we were watching in frustration and disbelief as our once amazing airline was becoming a house of cards.
A half dozen small scale meltdowns occurred during the mid to late 2010’s. With each mini meltdown Leadership continued to ignore the pleas and warnings of the employees in the trenches. We were still operating with 1990’s technology. We didn’t have the tools we needed on the line to operate the sophisticated and large airline we had become. We could see that the wheels were about ready to fall off the bus. But no one in leadership would heed our pleas.
When COVID happened SWA scaled back considerably (as did all of the airlines) for about two years. This helped conceal the serious problems in technology, infrastructure and staffing that were occurring and being ignored. But as we ramped back up the lack of attention to the operation was waiting to show its ugly head.
Gary Kelly retired as CEO in early 2022. Bob Jordan was named CEO. He was a more operationally oriented leader. He replaced our Chief Operating Officer with a very smart man and they announced their priority would be to upgrade our airline’s technology and provide the frontline employees the operational tools we needed to care for our customers and employees. Finally, someone acknowledged the elephant in the room.
But two decades of neglect takes several years to overcome. And, unfortunately to our horror, our house of cards came tumbling down this week as a routine winter storm broke our 1990’s operating system.
The frontline employees were ready and on station. We were properly staffed. We were at the airports. Hell, we were ON the airplanes. But our antiquated software systems failed coupled with a decades old system of having to manage 20,000 frontline employees by phone calls. No automation had been developed to run this sophisticated machine.
We had a routine winter storm across the Midwest last Thursday. A larger than normal number flights were cancelled as a result. But what should have been one minor inconvenient day of travel turned into this nightmare. After all, American, United, Delta and the other airlines operated with only minor flight disruptions.
The two decades of neglect by SWA leadership caused the airline to lose track of all its crews. ALL of us. We were there. With our customers. At the jet. Ready to go. But there was no way to assign us. To confirm us. To release us to fly the flight. And we watched as our customers got stranded without their luggage missing their Christmas holiday.
I believe that our new CEO Bob Jordan inherited a MESS. This meltdown was not his failure but the failure of those before him. I believe he has the right priorities. But it will take time to right this ship. A few years at a minimum. Old leaders need to be replaced. Operationally oriented managers need to be brought in. I hope and pray Bob can execute on his promises to fix our once proud airline. Time will tell.
It’s been a punch in the gut for us frontline employees. We care for the traveling public. We have spent our entire careers serving you. Safely. Efficiently. With luv and pride. We are horrified. We are sorry. We are sorry for the chaos, inconvenience and frustration our airline caused you. We are angry. We are embarrassed. We are sad. Like you, the traveling public, we have been let down by our own leaders.
Herb once said the the biggest threat to Southwest Airlines will come from within. Not from other airlines. What a visionary he was. I miss Herb now more than ever.

[Henry Hill 3,156]

[Pig Bellmont 8,720]

Here’s a tl,dr: 20 year old scheduling system got fucked. The end

[Armybrat 40,873]

Guess they’ve been using those Commodore 64s a bit too long.

[Grade of D as in David 13,253]

10 minutes ago, Armybrat said:

Guess they’ve been using those Commodore 64s a bit too long.

Commodore 64? They're still using the WOPR.

[Hagbard Celine 10,909]

    YOUR SWAPA LEADERSHIP
    TWO LEGACIES
    December 31, 2022

    Two Legacies
    Tom Nekouei, 2nd Vice President

    “You put your employees first. If you truly treat your employees that way, they will treat your customers well, your customers will come back, and that’s what makes your shareholders happy. So there’s no constituency at war with any other constituency. Ultimately, it’s shareholder value that you’re producing.”
    — Herb Kelleher

    “Arguably, our shareholders have suffered for a long time when it comes to getting a return and our employees have been very well taken care of.”
    — Gary Kelly

    How did we get here? How did we go from the most stable and profitable airline in history to the greatest meltdown in airline history? As with most organizations, the answer can be distilled down to one word: Leadership. Actually, in our case, it’s three words: Lack of leadership. While we continue to receive saccharine corporate-communications-department-written and legal-counsel-reviewed “we’re sorry” and “I love you” meaningless and generic messages from SWA corporate executives, they obscure a genuine cancer within our Company that has been an ever-growing existential threat that must be excised before it becomes terminal. And these messages obfuscate the actual corrective action that is absolutely necessary to pull out of this graveyard spiral that our Company’s so-called leaders have placed us in. That fix is actual and tangible accountability above the front-line worker level for the first time in our recent history. It is time to have a frank discussion about the root cause of the quagmire that we find ourselves in today. That root cause has a name.

    Systemwide meltdowns at Southwest Airlines have been increasing in frequency and magnitude over the past 15 years. From the original Midway Meltdown (and then the second larger one 1/3/2014) to destroying our on-time-performance with the added “virtual airframes” experiment to the “router brownout” (2016) to the “Jacksonville Center debacle” (Columbus Day weekend, October 2021) to what we are experiencing today, there are two common threads that bind each of these incidents together.

    First, they were all results of conscious operational, manpower, or tech infrastructure investment decisions made at the senior levels of our Company.

    Second, there has never been any real accountability for the decision-makers as a result of any of these fiascos, or the numerous smaller ones in between. If the saying that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results” is true, then what is it when the same people are allowed to do the same thing over and over again? Supreme insanity, perhaps?

    Herb’s legacy and the culture he built from the ground up was centered on his employees and empowering them to make proactive decisions at the lowest level possible. However, the culture that Gary Kelly ushered in with his ascension to the throne was the exact opposite. Gary’s vision was to become the darling of the investment community while building an insulated and vertical hierarchical structure where all decision-making authority was slowly stripped from front line experts with the most situational awareness and moved further up the cubicle chain in Dallas far removed from line operations. During that time, he took our Company from being known for our personality and agility to becoming a classic technocrat’s dream with an explosion of stove-piped vice-presidential fiefdoms that all communicate vertically with little-to-no horizontal integration.

    Rather than keeping the organization flat and lean with minimum distance between the nerve center of the organization and its executing appendages as Herb had originally designed, he added layer upon layer of bureaucratic fat, staffed by corporate automatons whose defining skills are sheltering the boss from bad news from below and never disagreeing with him. In his two decades at the helm, Gary Kelly managed to build an organization of yes-men and yes-women around him and promoted within that organization, based on agreeability rather than competence. As Pilots, we need look no further than the string of milquetoast headquarters “leadership” we have been subjected to within our own operations stovepipe in the Company. Additionally, one need only look at last week’s viral memo from the SWA VP of Ground Ops to his workers in Denver to see how far Gary Kelly allowed this Company to deviate from the culture and principles that Herb cultivated. Despite negatively impacting our Denver operation in a concrete manner and humiliating SWA on a national level, this VP remains in his position and will likely do so indicating the tacit approval for his “leadership” style by SWA executives. If nothing else, the world now knows that SWA management embraces the words of Herb’s legacy for public relations purposes only while having completely abandoned them in deeds. Image versus reality.

    With the above changes instituted by Gary Kelly came the proliferation of single-points-of-failure within our Company’s individual stovepipes, and at the top of that operational stovepipe as Chief Operations Officer, Gary Kelly installed another accountant and friend, Mike Van de Ven. And just like that, we were suddenly an operational flying and customer service company with the top three positions occupied by three holders of bachelor’s degrees in accounting from the University of Texas. A recipe for operational ignorance and collective groupthink. A monetization of the once vaunted Southwest culture and instead turning it into a headquarters-centric cult. A good old boys and girls network indeed. While this would temporarily bode well for our shareholders for the last decade, it slowly eroded our Company from within to set the stage for our current and complete meltdown.

    While altering the personnel culture around Southwest Airlines headquarters, Gary Kelly also instituted an obsessive focus on cost-control to increase shareholder return, turning Herb’s founding philosophy on its head. He introduced the much-ridiculed term Return On Invested Capital, or ROIC, to Southwest Airlines.

    Herb Kelleher once said that his greatest mistake was not embracing and investing in technology. This was a prescient warning to his successor, but it was one that his successor chose to essentially ignore for 20 years in his obsessive quest to maximize ROIC. Twenty years when the importance of technological infrastructure was going from “nice-to-have” to “must-have.” A fantastic accountant, Gary Kelly’s lack of strategic vision beyond a singular focus on increasing revenue at all costs has come to result in the grievous injury our Company is suffering through today.

    During Gary Kelly’s tenure as CEO, Southwest Airlines has returned approximately $12 billion to shareholders while increasing his own total annual compensation by more than 700%. Much of that money was spent executing billions of dollars in share buybacks. Share buybacks that were once illegal, that provide no benefit for the Company itself while artificially inflating share prices (thus inflating stock-based executive compensation) and sent the clear message that the Company has excess cash on hand but that the CEO thinks there is no better place for investment of capital within his Company. All while there were clear and constant signals that there were aspects of our operations that were in desperate need of significant investment and upgrade. And all while subject matter experts, including our analysts at SWAPA, pleaded with management to make the investments into our tech infrastructure before we suffered an existential meltdown.

    Even as recently as early November, SWAPA President Casey Murray said, “I fear that we are one thunderstorm, one ATC event, one router brownout from a complete meltdown. Whether that’s Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or New Year, that’s the precarious situation we are in.”

    SWAPA has been beating this drum to management for nearly a decade pleading with them to spend the necessary capital to prevent the ultimate consequence someday. As CEO, Gary Kelly made a conscious decision to make the less than necessary investments in tech upgrades in favor of maximizing shareholder return because, well, “our tech’s been working ok for 20 years.” While Gary’s financial acumen cannot be debated, his poor operational leadership and judgment have been demonstrated repeatedly with each meltdown and finally laid bare with the current situation we find ourselves in. A situation only exacerbated by the fact that he chose to surround himself with people who dare not disagree with him. However, while remaining the current Chairman of the Southwest Board of Directors, Gary did manage to hand over CEO reins to Bob Jordan this year before the ultimate consequence of Gary’s lack of investment in his own Company manifested itself. Meanwhile, Gary basks in the glow of a shelf full of awards from the business, finance, and investment world while they all completely ignore the internal damage he did to our Company in pursuit of those accolades. The airline darling of Wall Street who Gordon Gekko’d his own company from within through greed, ambition, and neglect for the operation itself.

    The Vote of No Confidence in Gary Kelly and Mike Van de Ven that your SWAPA Board of Directors took in 2016 after what was, at the time, the worst meltdown in our Company’s history has never been rescinded. We took that vote then because it was evident that neglect for tech infrastructure investment in favor of maximizing stock price was becoming an existential threat to our careers and our Company’s longevity. We took that vote as a symbolic message to Gary Kelly in an attempt to wake him up to the fact that, while he may be the darling of Wall Street, his employees knew that he was risking the future of the Company we love through his lack of focused investment to fortify our operation. But instead, Gary Kelly continued his aggressive growth of the network in the pursuit of ever-increasing revenue without the commensurate investment in tech infrastructure necessary to support that explosive growth. A classic symptom of the “but that’s how we’ve always done it and it has always worked” sickness within our corporate leadership while ignoring the reality that “it has always worked” because the network was much smaller.

    And now, Gary Kelly’s chickens have come home to roost. In true Southwest fashion, our executives continue to apologize and “accept responsibility” out of one side of their mouths while making banal excuses that deflect from the true cause out of the other side. “Unprecedented storm,” “employee no-shows,” “decreased pick-up rates,” “point-to-point network,” and the list goes on. While many of us thought that perhaps this event would be the final straw that snaps the Southwest Board of Directors out of their fiduciary slumber and wake them up to the fact that they have allowed Gary Kelly to be an unchecked one man show to the eventual detriment of the Company itself, it is clear that Southwest management is circling the wagons as they have always done in the past. No acknowledgment of the magnitude of the mistakes they have made. No attempt to hold the responsible decision-makers accountable. No indication that there will be a course correction in the future. No understanding of the fact that the people who drove the bus into the ditch in the first place must be first removed from the bus before it can be removed from the ditch and repaired.

    Gary Kelly still reigns supreme on the board of this Company despite having overseen the decisions and setting the conditions that made this most recent fiasco possible. I, for one, am tired of seeing my Company’s good name, and in some cases our fellow employees’ reputations, dragged through the mud in national media. I’m tired of the abuse they are receiving on the line from rightfully frustrated travelers whose travel plans and worlds were turned upside down during the most important family and travel time of the year. I am fearful for the future of our Company as the long knives come out from government regulators, lawmakers, the flying public, media, and lawyers and get pointed directly at the heart of our future careers. This meltdown was easily avoidable. It was predictable and it was predicted.

    This is not a Southwest Airlines problem. This is not an employees of Southwest Airlines problem. This is not an unprecedented weather problem. This is a Gary Kelly problem. First to step forward over the years to take credit and accept all his CEO of the Year awards, Gary Kelly is nowhere to be found to step forward and take responsibility for this crisis that has his DNA all over the scene of the crime. He and his complicit Board of Directors are in hiding likely planning their public relations strategy to “survive” this and keep their lucrative income streams intact. The cold hard truth in this scenario is simply that the highest layer of management in this Company will not have their families’ lives upended by the turmoil their decisions have caused. They will be able to walk away with millions of dollars over the years and further cash in their stocks and options to not impact their standards of living even one iota. Gary Kelly will still enjoy living in his newly constructed retirement mansion in the toniest of Dallas neighborhoods while waxing philosophical in financial media interviews about what it takes to be a successful CEO. But the burden of Gary’s and his fellow senior executives’ and board members’ folly will be borne by the front-line employees without millions of dollars in compensation packages to their names. The ones whose futures and family fortunes literally depend on the success of our Company.

    I do not begrudge the vast sums of money our executives earned for working their way up the corporate ranks. I am a capitalist, and I love American upward mobility. I do, however, begrudge earning vast personal wealth while running our Company’s operations and culture into the ground. But that’s not how “shareholder capitalism” works. All that matters is share price, and Gary Kelly knows share price! Gary Kelly was charged with protecting the precious legacy that was passed to him by Herb Kelleher. Herb had already done the heavy lifting; all Gary had to do was not drop it. But instead, Gary Kelly’s only enduring legacy is that he destroyed Herb Kelleher’s. Rest in peace, Herb.

    Respectfully and with a heavy heart,
    Captain Tom Nekouei, SWAPA 2nd Vice President

https://viewfromthewing.com/now-that-the-meltdown-is-over-heres-what-southwests-pilots-have-to-say/

[Homercles 10,206]

Spoiler that shit, Admiral

[Hagbard Celine 10,909]

sorry - too late to edit

[Francisco 2.0 32,416]

[TeeDubya 3,362]

 

[HenryJames 66,159]

[YGIFS 19,452]

I think the same people that designed the SWA reservation and weather systems ran today's House Speaker election.  

Stalwart institutions of the American fabric...all turning into the customer service desk Wal-Mart.

My daughter had kids out of class today and one of the two teachers because they were stuck on SWA flights all across the country with no plan home.

 

[Hagbard Celine 10,909]

44 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

godddamn that's craftsmanship right there

[Hagbard Celine 10,909]

https://wingsclub.org/videos/bob-jordan-the-december-luncheon-2022/

this won't stay up long

[hornian 5,222]

8 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

https://wingsclub.org/videos/bob-jordan-the-december-luncheon-2022/

this won't stay up long

Screenshot it then. Geez. 
 

Edit: just realized it’s a video. So screenshot and close caption each frame, please. 

Edited January 4, 2023 by hornian

[Assman 1,830]

Just flew a 3-day trip.  Never saw a cancellation on the airport screens and everything seemed to be back to normal, including only 1 of the 4 airplanes I flew having working wifi.  We fucking suck at anything that involves technology. 

[millhouse 2,616]

[Gatorubet 30,286]

it’s really a mystery. I think they use the same technical experts that the IRS uses. Top. Men. 

[Leverage 2]

doesn’t this shit happen ever year around the holidays. that’s why I didn’t go back home this winter. I’ll wait until the spring.

[Homercles 10,206]

9 hours ago, Leverage said:

doesn’t this shit happen ever year around the holidays. that’s why I didn’t go back home this winter. I’ll wait until the spring.

No the complete collapse of an airline’s operations across the country doesn’t happen every year

[kevwun 15,855]

It can happen to any airline on a smaller scale any time there's a multi state weather event.

[royiv 9,339]

3 minutes ago, kevwun said:

It can happen to any airline on a smaller scale any time there's a multi state weather event.

I don't think you understand what happened to WN. They lost total control of their crew scheduling system and had no idea where their crews and, in some cases, aircraft were. That maybe *can* happen to any airline, but *hasn't* happened to any other airline that has the scale that WN does.

[Chopper 17,243]

5 minutes ago, kevwun said:

It can happen to any airline on a smaller scale any time there's a multi state weather event.

Other airlines don't lose track of where their working staff are...uh...working.

Other airlines can recover from a weather problem much faster.

[kevwun 15,855]

I'm talking about mass cancellations and people stranded in a city for a few days because there are no flights available.  That happens to an airline once a year at least, just not nationwide.  I did say smaller scale.  It all started because of the weather and snowballed out of control because of their scheduling system.  It has never gotten to that level with another airline, but regionally it has happened before.  I have been through it with AA.

Edited January 5, 2023 by kevwun

[Bobby_Batronic 1,994]

5 hours ago, Chopper said:

Other airlines don't lose track of where their working staff are...uh...working.

Other airlines can recover from a weather problem much faster.

1. Yes, they most certainly can. 
 

2.  Usually. 

[Chopper 17,243]

1 hour ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

1. Yes, they most certainly can. 
 

2.  Usually. 

3. Sure, okay. 

4. Southwest's problems can't be blamed on the weather. Even the company itself walked that excuse back a few days after DOT called them out. 

[YGIFS 19,452]

(preface-I worked as a bus boy and barback, all due respect to the service industry)

Southwest is reminding me of that server you have every other fucking work lunch that straight away without even smiling or saying hello.........immediately launches into, "Whoah.  We are totally slammed for lunch today.  It's gonna be awhile.  Anyway, welcome in.  I'm Ashley, and I'll be right back..."

And you're left wondering, "I didn't do anything wrong.  I am here to eat lunch and pay you.  And spoiler alert, it's noon on a weekday.  This has probably happened before.  And it's probably gonna happen again.  People tend to eat lunch at restaurants, you know...on their lunch hour." 

[Bobby_Batronic 1,994]

12 hours ago, Chopper said:

3. Sure, okay. 

4. Southwest's problems can't be blamed on the weather. Even the company itself walked that excuse back a few days after DOT called them out. 

You can believe that or not. I don’t care. But I’m telling you that scheduling having no idea where people are at isn’t as far fetched as you think it is. I remember an instance where the scheduling for a coworker’s  former company called to inform him that he had a trip. He told them he’d be right there. 
 

I didn’t make any claims about the meltdown being non weather related.  

[DalTxHornFan 3,116]

Somewhat on topic -- I bought some more LUV today.  This event is a blip on the 4th quarter, but I'm thinking they will reinstate dividends sometime this year.

[Hagbard Celine 10,909]

texmo

Spoiler

Southwest’s Christmas Mess Has Roots in Its Long Financial Success

The Dallas-based airline has always lagged behind in technology. Its leaders saw that as a feature, not a bug.
By Joseph Guinto
January 6, 2023 1

[Image: Southwest Airlines Holiday Cancellations]
Southwest Airlines crew members and passengers search through unclaimed luggage at William P. Hobby Airport, in Houston, on December 28, 2022. Brandon Bell/Getty

Southwest Airlines executives might wanna get away following the company’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad past couple of weeks. With nearly 17,000 flights canceled, lost luggage piled up in airports throughout the country, and countless passengers told they’d have to wait for days to find flights home from holiday gatherings, some industry analysts have called it the worst service disruption a major U.S. airline has ever endured. In a filing today, the company estimated the cost to its bottom line at between $725 million and $825 million.

The whole debacle might be judged as something of an unforced error, considering that Southwest’s top brass have admitted they knew that the software the company uses to track flight crews and reschedule flights was “behind” the times and could be overmatched in the event of an unusual weather or air traffic event. That system has been cited as one of the major contributing factors to the airline taking much longer than its competitors to recover from the winter storms that affected much of the country heading into the Christmas weekend.

Southwest’s vulnerability on this front had, in fact, been exposed on a smaller scale as recently as Columbus Day weekend in 2021, when storms and a brief Federal Aviation Administration shutdown of airspace in Florida resulted in the cancellation of more than 2,500 flights. (Three months before he took over as CEO, Southwest’s Bob Jordan told me that the Columbus Day outage was “completely unique” and that he “wouldn’t anticipate that happening again.”)

Union leaders have been sounding the alarm about such technological shortcomings for years. Casey Murray, who represents the company’s pilots, told me in 2021 that his colleagues wanted “operational upgrades,” even if those came at the expense of higher salaries. “At the end of the day, you can pay us five hundred dollars an hour,” Murray said. “But if the company is not sustainable, that doesn’t really do us any good.”
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So why didn’t Southwest invest in improvements earlier, especially considering that the company has said it spends about $1 billion a year on various forms of tech? That may have to do with a long-standing bias in its corporate culture against relying on technology to solve business problems—at least without a clear return on investment. Such an approach might even seem justified when you consider that Southwest posted 47 consecutive years of profits between 1973 and 2019, avoiding the bankruptcies and mass layoffs that afflicted so many other air carriers during those decades.

During more than one of the multiple interviews I conducted with him during his career, Southwest’s longtime, legendary cofounder and CEO, Herb Kelleher, said that while the airline wouldn’t skimp on the latest tech for its planes, he viewed technology as a “servant, not a master” and believed Southwest didn’t see the need to buy every “shiny new” tech toy on the market—even if other airlines were doing so.

That kind of penny-pinching was rooted in Southwest’s focus on keeping its operations simple. For instance, its first tickets weren’t tickets at all. They were receipts dispensed from what Southwest called “love machines” but were actually just cash registers, like those you’d find at a grocery store. Southwest printed “This Is a Ticket” on the back of those receipts so it wouldn’t have to invest in specialized ticketing machines like other airlines had.

This approach didn’t mean Kelleher was opposed to deploying the right kinds of technology at the right times, though. In one speech after his 2004 retirement, he regaled the audience with an anecdote from the early years of Southwest. A competitor had begun offering a fare that Kelleher wanted to counter. Company executives studied their options and then came back to Kelleher. He recalled one of them saying, “Well, Herb, we can’t do what you want because our computer program will not allow it.” Kelleher replied, “Well, you know, this is kind of a grave crisis at Southwest Airlines. Because I’ve now got to make a decision on whether the computer runs this airline or I do. So let me tell you what my decision is. You go down and tell that little computer that its ass just got fired.”

Whichever machine replaced the “little computer” that got sacked came with its own limitations, and those became glaringly apparent after Southwest acquired another low-fare carrier, AirTran, in 2011. AirTran’s route network included international destinations, which Southwest didn’t then have, and it offered assigned seats, which Southwest still doesn’t.

Up until the AirTran acquisition, Southwest couldn’t have assigned seats even if it wanted to. Its reservation system was then three decades old and incapable of making seat assignments. The system also couldn’t accept payments in foreign currencies. Even more shockingly, it was so rigid that Southwest was locked into offering the same flight schedule six days a week, with just one day of flexibility.

It took until 2014 for Southwest to commit to changing that, through a $500 million reservation-system overhaul that went online three years later. Another $300 million went into new electronic communications and other upgrades for mechanics and ramp agents. Prior to those investments, Southwest employees had communicated about aircraft weight and cargo by filling out paper slips and sending them to one another through pneumatic tubes.

In 2018, then–Southwest president Tom Nealon told me the huge investments in new technology would never have gotten approved if there hadn’t been a case to be made for their yielding more revenue. Indeed, the airline then projected the new reservation system would generate $500 million by 2020—thus paying for itself. (That estimate was made well before the COVID-19 pandemic cratered air travel.)

Southwest has also made recent investments in tech upgrades for ground-crew and maintenance operations, but it now must face the financial penalties of not having improved its crew-scheduling software. The Columbus Day cancellations in 2021 cost the airline $75 million. The more recent cascade of cancellations—starting December 21 and lingering on through January 2—will cost it significantly more, as reflected in the net fourth-quarter loss it projected in today’s filing. The company has already offered thousands of affected passengers the equivalent of more than $300 each in airline points.

It might get costlier still, if Washington has a say. The U.S. Department of Transportation, which regulates the airlines, has said it will investigate Southwest’s “unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays” and will look to ensure Southwest offers proper compensation to those affected. Meanwhile, the chair of the Senate’s powerful Commerce Committee, Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington State, has pledged hearings into the Southwest snafu and said her committee will examine ways to make it easier for fliers to get compensated for cancellations.

That will mean public relations problems for Southwest as its executives are called to the congressional carpet. It could also result in more regulations for all airlines—in terms of both what types of route networks they’re allowed to fly and how much leeway they have to cut back on flights. The irony of all of that: in 1978, back when “This Is a Ticket” was good enough to get on board a Southwest flight, proponents of deregulating the airline industry held up Southwest as an exemplar of how less government interference in the nation’s skies could lower prices and benefit passengers. Now Washington might use Southwest as an example again—this time of why passengers should get more protections.

Edited January 7, 2023 by Hagbard Celine

[Hagbard Celine 10,909]

failin' on up

Spoiler

AP

Promotions, not job cuts, follow Southwest’s holiday chaos

January 10, 2023 GMT

Travelers queue up at the check-in counters for Southwest Airlines in Denver International Airport Friday, Dec. 30, 2022, in Denver.

Southwest Airlines announced a number of executive promotions on Monday, Jan., 9, 2023, days after announcing that last month’s service meltdown will cost the company up to $825 million, but none of the changes involved the highest ranking officers. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)

 

DALLAS (AP) — Southwest Airlines announced a number of executive promotions on Monday, days after announcing that last month’s service meltdown will cost the company up to $825 million, but none of the changes involved the highest ranking officers.

The airline said the changes “will strengthen our operational execution” while also saying they were long-planned and a continuation of restructuring that began in September under a new CEO, Robert Jordan.

Four of the five executives getting promoted joined Southwest in 2001 or before, although one left for five years before returning to the Dallas-based airline.

The most notable move was the promotion of Adam Decaire from vice president of network planning to senior vice president of network planning and network operations control. Southwest said this would add reliability to its operation by creating “a tighter feedback loop” between designing the schedule and actually flying it.
 

A Southwest spokesman said no one was demoted or left the company in connection with Monday’s moves. Some of the promotions were to fill openings left when other executives moved up — Decaire took on duties handled by Andrew Watterson before he was elevated to chief operating officer in October.
 

Southwest canceled more than 16,700 flights over the last 10 days of December that began with a winter storm and grew worse when its crew-rescheduling technology broke down under the strain of reassigning thousands of pilots and flight attendants. The airline said last week that the crisis would lead to a money-losing fourth quarter because of lost revenue and higher costs to recover the operation.

 

[SurlyBDR 22,830]

Lulz

[AUS-97HORN 11,814]

seriously   SW.....

 

they lifted the national ground stop,  now its just Love

 

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/southwest-airlines-flight-delays/index.html

Edited April 18, 2023 by AUS-97HORN

[Grade of D as in David 13,253]

Southwest airlines computer system

[BearSchlong 8,109]

ABC news just said Southwest blamed a unspecified vendor. I wonder who it is?

[Your Mom 4,841]

Commodore 

[BearSchlong 8,109]

Update: blaming their firewall vendor.

[Pescado_Rojo 19,428]

11 hours ago, BearSchlong said:

Update: blaming their firewall vendor.

I wonder how far behind they were on patches and updates. 

[Captainant 27,726]

11 hours ago, BearSchlong said:

Update: blaming their firewall vendor.

 

16 minutes ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

I wonder how far behind they were on patches and updates. 

HAH blaming a vendor for a business down situation is some bush league shit that demonstrates a fundamental lack of ownership by the business. If a single point failing brings their shit down, that's on Southwest for choosing to build it that way. You can build high availability and durability into a firewall layer pretty easily, it just costs more.

So those smart guys with MBAs decide to go the cheap route because "hey it's unlikely to fail right? Just look at those vendor SLAs!" And then their dicks are in their hands when it happens so they play the blame game instead of solving the problem like they should have in the first place 

Edited April 19, 2023 by Captainant

[Pancho 44,962]

I had just touched down at SJC when I noticed the pilot taking the long route to the gate. As we make the turn towards the gate area, he slows down to halt and comes on the air to give us the good news (“we made it!”) and the bad news (“soufwest meltdown and we don’t know how long we will be stuck here.”)

 

While it was only 30 minutes, it was annoying as fuck.

[CooterBrown 18,022]

Had a connection through St. Louis today. I received a total of 16 texts with a new departure time. The OG was at 4:45. It got pushed to 5:20, 5:15, 6:50, 5:30, 7:40, 9:15, and 10:20. Back and forth multiple times. When it changed to the final 10:20 departure, the gate agent said our plane was coming from Jacksonville and she’d let us know when it was actually in the air. So, we head to the lounge at 4:00. An hour later I get a text that it’s now 5:40. They had an unused plane sitting at the airport that no one knew about. So they fired it up to get us to Austin.

[RPM 26,339]

They lost a 737?

[CooterBrown 18,022]

They lost a 737?

Apparently. I couldn’t believe it when the agent said that. It hadn’t been used since the day before but the scheduling system kept pushing my flight instead of bringing that plane into service. Makes me wonder if they run it with post it notes on a giant board.

When it got rescheduled the gate number was “LIMA”. I had to ask the agent WTF that meant so she told me about the missing plane.

[Captainant 27,726]

21 minutes ago, CooterBrown said:

Apparently. I couldn’t believe it when the agent said that. It hadn’t been used since the day before but the scheduling system kept pushing my flight instead of bringing that plane into service. Makes me wonder if they run it with post it notes on a giant board.

SWA is still running on 90s-era software that requires human operators to input state data like which plane is where. Little to not automation. They've happily rode their software off a cliff and now they're trying to figure out how to modernize without rebuilding. 

[Your Mom 4,841]

It wasn’t a lost airplane. St Louis is a maintenance station and most likely that plane was having work done on it and wasn’t available until they got done with it.  They try not to plan on using those planes if they don’t know how long the work will take.  When the work gets done it suddenly becomes available.  Front line employees don’t really know much more than a tiny slice of the big picture, that agent was just regurgitating what someone in Dallas told them. 

[Armybrat 40,873]

1 hour ago, CooterBrown said:

Apparently. I couldn’t believe it when the agent said that. It hadn’t been used since the day before but the scheduling system kept pushing my flight instead of bringing that plane into service. Makes me wonder if they run it with post it notes on a giant board.

When it got rescheduled the gate number was “LIMA”. I had to ask the agent WTF that meant so she told me about the missing plane.

So they flew you to Peru?

[YGIFS 19,452]

From the Arch to Machu Pichu, Southwest has you covered!  Wait, you wanna come back from Peru?  Best we can do is a flotilla from Guyana. 

[hookemATL 11,834]

Avoid the Flavor Aid in Georgetown if you do end up in Guyana. Heard it has a bit of a “wang” to it.