Southwest Canceled 5,400 Flights In Less Than 48 Hours (npr.org) 50
Southwest canceled more than 2,900 flights Monday -- at least 70% of its schedule for the day -- and more than 2,500 flights Tuesday as of 9:10 a.m. ET -- at least 60% of its schedule, according to flight tracker FlightAware. NPR reports: The number of canceled flights for Southwest Monday was more than 10 times higher than for Delta, which had the second-most cancellations by a U.S. airline with 265 flights called off. Other airlines have also ordered large-scale cancellations in the past week. Southwest spokesperson Chris Perry told NPR the airline's disruptions are a result of the winter storm's lingering effects, adding that it hopes to "stabilize and improve its operation" with more favorable weather conditions. Other issues that have exacerbated the airline's struggle to accommodate the holiday rush include problems with "connecting flight crews to their schedules," Perry said. That issue has made it difficult for employees to access crew scheduling services and get reassignments.
Kyle Potter, executive editor of Thrifty Traveler, called it an incredibly complex task for an airline with a network as vast as Southwest's to coordinate staffing and scheduling, particularly after weather delays. But with many areas seeing clear skies on Monday, the airline would seem to have few obvious reasons to cancel so many flights. Potter calls it a "full-blown meltdown." "This is really as bad as it gets for an airline," Potter said. "We've seen this again and again over the course of the last year or so, when airlines really just struggle especially after a storm, but there's pretty clear skies across the country." The U.S. Department of Transportation called the cancellations "unacceptable," and will be investigating the airline to see whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan (PDF).
Kyle Potter, executive editor of Thrifty Traveler, called it an incredibly complex task for an airline with a network as vast as Southwest's to coordinate staffing and scheduling, particularly after weather delays. But with many areas seeing clear skies on Monday, the airline would seem to have few obvious reasons to cancel so many flights. Potter calls it a "full-blown meltdown." "This is really as bad as it gets for an airline," Potter said. "We've seen this again and again over the course of the last year or so, when airlines really just struggle especially after a storm, but there's pretty clear skies across the country." The U.S. Department of Transportation called the cancellations "unacceptable," and will be investigating the airline to see whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan (PDF).
Maybe try Greyhound? (Score:2)
Seriously. If I was stuck with no hope of getting back in a few days, time to take a bus. Some of the newer ones are quit comfortable.
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> Maybe you could hitch a ride with a bunch of polka artists
Don't let Bernie borrow your Instamatic.
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if you happen to be in texas and want to go up north, I hear there's a kind old gentleman who is happy to help you out in that regard.
those busses even run late at night. so helpful.
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This solution is only viable if a very small number of people do it. If the majority of the stranded travelers were to opt for the bus option, the infrastructure just isn't there to handle that many passengers.
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Re:DOT investigation? (Score:5, Informative)
The president of the union representing Southwest pilots blamed the lack of crews to fly planes on scheduling software written in the 1990s and on management that he said failed to fix things after previous meltdowns, including a major disruption in October 2021.
https://coloradosun.com/2022/1... [coloradosun.com]
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Apparently their labor management software caked it's pants, and therefore Southwest had no idea where any of their crew members were, and thus couldn't assign crew to flights. Reportedly, they had every crewmember call a phone number to tell them where they are, so they could be assigned flights. Some employees were on hold for double-digit hours trying to get through, while booking hotel rooms and not knowing if they would be reimbursed or not.
My sister-in-law and her family's flight back home was cance
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Re:DOT investigation? (Score:4, Informative)
Not going to happen at Chicago Midway Airport, where Southwest has about 95% of the flight slots.
That's the least they should be required to do.
A spokeswoman for the flight attendants union said that Southwest had so much trouble because their computer systems are antiquated. For example, in order for workers on cancelled flights to find out reassignments, they had to call in on the phone and talk to a person. She calimed that there was up to a 17 hour wait to get answered, so apparently, the systems were only staffed/designed for normal conditions, and totally failed for substantial cancellations and delays.
There is no excuse for this.
Re:DOT investigation? (Score:5, Informative)
The EU rules on this strike a good balance.
The airlines have a duty of care, so have to cover accommodation and food costs for the duration of the delay, and also are required to reroute you on alternative carriers if available. Being denied boarding when you are eligible for carriage gets you decent compensation as well, so airlines are better at not overbooking unreasonably.
If your arrival at the destination is delayed by more than a few hours, you are entitled to monetary compensation.
But the EU doesnt make airlines liable for other trip costs like accommodation at the destination or holiday costs - thats what you have travel insurance for, so its a reasonable balance with regard to liability (after all, the hotel wouldnt be liable for your flight if the hotel is unavailable).
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The EU rules on this strike a good balance.
The airlines have a duty of care, so have to cover accommodation and food costs for the duration of the delay, and also are required to reroute you on alternative carriers if available. Being denied boarding when you are eligible for carriage gets you decent compensation as well, so airlines are better at not overbooking unreasonably.
If your arrival at the destination is delayed by more than a few hours, you are entitled to monetary compensation.
But the EU doesnt make airlines liable for other trip costs like accommodation at the destination or holiday costs - thats what you have travel insurance for, so its a reasonable balance with regard to liability (after all, the hotel wouldnt be liable for your flight if the hotel is unavailable).
Even the EU doesn't cover flights cancelled because of weather.
If you get stuck in Barcelona because it's snowing, airlines aren't obligated to do anything but get you on the next available flight. Of course a good airline will try, but lets face it there are few good airlines left in the world.
The problem here is, many of the airports affected by snow are in places where snow and ice is so rare that it doesn't make financial sense to have the clearing and de-icing equipment that airports which regula
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Actually, EU261 has covered “duty of care” for weather-related delays and cancellations for about 5 years now - weather-related causes are still a viable defence against compensation, but airlines are still required to cover food and accommodation costs, and reroute you at the earliest possible time.
Re:DOT investigation? (Score:5, Insightful)
It can make them stop promising levels of service to the customers they can't reliably deliver. It doesn't solve the problem of SW not having enough capacity -- how much capacity to build is not the government's problem. But making promises you can't deliver is.
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It can make them stop promising levels of service to the customers they can't reliably deliver. It doesn't solve the problem of SW not having enough capacity -- how much capacity to build is not the government's problem. But making promises you can't deliver is.
This is the tree of cheap flying bearing fruit.
Low Cost Carriers [LCC] like Southwest get their prices by having a high load factor (the percentage of seats filled by paying arses). A budget airline's load factor needs to be above 75% to break even, ultra LCCs need to be above 80%. Southwest's average load factor is 78.5% but they are far from the worst. Most LCC's get into load factors of 88%. Many premium airlines also get into higher load factors but this is offset by having fewer seats on an aircraft
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It's not only seat capacity. Southwest is also know for turning planes around at the gate as quickly as possible. In other words, little room for error.
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Na, they should order them to pay for what they said they would pay for. Its pretty amazing that people white knight online for these companies when all we want them to do is follow the law and hold up their end of any bargains. We just want them to do this: https://www.southwest.com/assets/pdfs/corporate-commitments/customer-service-plan.pdf?clk=7396032
A perfect storm of cluster-F (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Scheduling system that doesn't auto-update based on whether a crew member's flight actually happened. Manual updates are fine when the situation is small, but this simply can't scale to a catastrophic disruption like this.
2) Who was the idiot that tried to update the VOIP system for both customer calls and internal calls the week before Christmas?
3) Weather is horrible for everyone
4) One of their major hubs (DEN) had a collapse independent of the weather problems, apparently due to a critical mass of folks being unavailable for loading/unloading.
The post-mortem on this one will be epic. However at least some (perhaps all) of these causes are pointing to a failure in corporate IT planning and business process collapse. Some employees on Reddit have been saying it's been heading towards a catastrophe like this for a while, but I'm still pretty shocked that it could get this bad in this day and age for such a highly regulated industry.
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This is clearly a case of real-world recovery not matching test scenarios or results.
Things stand out:
How to recover if the phones are down due to volume?
What channels are the most important (out-of-band, crew, customer), how are they protected and isolated from impacting each other?
What should the crew / customer do in the event the website or call center is non-operational?
They have the classic, call customer service line, when there is no way their customer service is scaled to this level of volume and i
Re:A perfect storm of cluster-F (Score:5, Insightful)
Who was the idiot that tried to update the VOIP system for both customer calls and internal calls the week before Christmas?
That kind of tells us everything we need to know about their IT and overall leadership. Many companies have change freezes at the end of the year, and most of those are just doing it because they know that a lot of employees will be out of the office. For Southwest it's one of their busy times of year on top of that. Unless the phone system was literally going to stop working before the end of the year if they didn't upgrade (and if so, why wasn't it upgraded before the last minute), allowing that change to go through at that time is just insane.
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We have two projects to change major software platforms, one being our phones.
Both are on hold due to being the end of the year.
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I worked with two who did it for risk management purposes: Sears (back in the 80s and early 90s when they were still big) and Discover Card. Typically that made me busy (in the construction design side, not the network or software side) during the holidays since they would want the projects to start in January.
Re:Sloshdut: News for Nerds with a flight tomorrow (Score:4, Insightful)
It's Christmas. Airline issues affect a LOT of people indirectly. Even Slashdotters have families.
I'm supposed to pick up a family member at SeaTac tomorrow. They're not flying Southwest, but I worry about collateral problems impacting her flight.
Re: Sloshdut: News for Nerds with a flight tomorro (Score:3)
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To OP: these issues impact even computer systems administration
You certainly wouldn't know that from the summary or the headline. Agree w/ OP and would mod him/her up ... but I haven't been granted mod points in a year-ish. :-|
Re: Sloshdut: News for Nerds with a flight tomorr (Score:2)
Re:Sloshdut: News for Nerds with a flight tomorrow (Score:5, Funny)
Of course they don't give a flying fuck, the flight was cancelled.
something left to strive for (Score:2)
an incredibly complex task for an airline with a network as vast as Southwest's to coordinate staffing and scheduling
Looks like there are still some good things improved software could do for the world then.
Apparently schools find their schedules nearly impossible to compile too
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This very much depends on the school. Depressing story: my father-in-law created the master schedule at an inner-city high school for several years. There were lots of requirements specified in the relevant laws and regulations; the most important -- and usually conflicting -- ones were: students have to take a certain number of class periods, each period can only have a certain number of students, and there is a certain number of tea
Good (Score:3)
That's a much better headline than the one from Universe #5423, which is "A total of 73 flights from Southwest crashed in 48 Hours".
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That's a much better headline than the one from Universe #5423, which is "A total of 73 flights from Southwest crashed in 48 Hours".
Isn't that the universe whose FAA decided to integrate flight decks into the Internet of Things, such that the bulk of Southwest's fleet was running on older versions of Android via LTE?
IIRC there were a few 737s running off on iOS and they had no reported problems, except they all refused to land in Redmond.
Let the wild ruckus commence! (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle, Microsoft, Accenture, Tata, Infosys... squadrons of salespeople offering legions of implementers are being deployed as we speak. Oracle is madly running the numbers on how to lowball licensing, and how quickly they can turn the screws on a true-up. Accenture is scouring the field of resources around SouthWest's head offices for cheap, mediocre front line people. Microsoft... I don't know what they're doing, but I know they'll be in the final downselect...
SouthWest will need to look like they're fixing their problems, and announcing a partnership is a very public way to do it. So the small, capable companies are excluded in favour of optically "better" choices. And so the hyenas will descend. May god have mercy on their souls.
Bad software + Bad policy = Mad Mgmnt (Score:4, Insightful)
People inside the airline, and pilots from other airlines (pilots like to talk to each other) say that Southwest has old software for managing crew scheduling. Under normal circumstances, this would probably not be a problem, but when you mix-in very bad weather (which can delay or strand an aircraft and its flight crew, preventing follow-on flights from occurring) with a pilot shortage, it's a problem.
Why a pilot shortage? Well, there's several answers:
First, most airline pilots in the US have historically been retire military pilots - the airlines got the benefit of pilots trained by the best, and tested in very difficult and stressful conditions, and the pilots got a second career with less stress and better pay. With the end of the Cold War, however, the Air Force and Navy shrunk dramatically, so that the pool of pilots is much smaller than it used to be (the last big pool of military aviators who served before the huge down-sizing are retired/retiring).
Second, COVID policies put airline pilots in an impossible situation and while many chose to keep flying in the hopes that they would get away with it, many chose to retire instead. Get away with what, you ask? Well, Southwest, for example, mandated COVID vaccinations for its pilots [bloomberglaw.com] but this forces pilots to directly violate FAA flight crew regulations and risk losing their licenses - The FAA forbids [faa.gov] pilots to fly if they have taken any new drug that has not been completely FDA approved (NOT emergency approved) and in the marketplace for sale for at least one year - they cannot even get a medical certificate. Part of the COVID emergency junk the government shoveled was this document [faa.gov] which SEEMS to approve the COVID vax, but only if you read it a certain way; in typical bureaucratic butt-covering mode, the document says it's OK as long as the pilot has no negative side effects (but of course as all pilots know, if there's an incident and the investigators see that, they'll say "well, clearly you had a negative side effect, so the waiver does not apply to YOU, and so the verdict is: "pilot error"). Note, this is a policy matter (for this discussion, it does not matter if the vaccines are good or bad, whether they're the best drug ever or are killing people). Pilots who built careers flying were placed in a no-win situation with a lot of uncertainty and a significant number of the already reduced talent pool thought it over and said "I'm out". After all is said and done, many pilots still want to have valid licenses and be able to fly privately, and perhaps even return to commercial after the hysteria and mandates recede (if they ever do).
For an airline with barely enough pilots for the best of times, a little bad weather, and some old software, this can reach a tipping point. That makes this a management failure. Management failed to have better software available as the pilot shortages increased over a span of YEARS (the whole industry has long known of the military pilot reductions). Management failed to schedule their flights with enough slack during a season known for bad weather. Management insisted on the vaccine mandates for its aircrews at a time when it knew full-well that FAA policies made this a violation of medical rules for pilots. When their pilots' union pushed back, the airline wasted good will, and money, and time, fighting them in the courts.
As with nearly all business failures, the fault lies with people with MBA degrees, corner offices, golden parachutes, and no practical real-world skills.
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This was rated "insightful"? The FAA Medical Division was fully appraised of the status of the COVID vaccines and raised no objections. Nor did any medical officer with a shred of professional integrity They work; they were known to work as early as April 2021; they had been tested on 100,000s of people - far more than most drugs - by the time they became available for pilots.
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"The FAA Medical Division was fully appraised of the status of the COVID vaccines and raised no objections" - um, sorry but there's no clause in any FAA regulations that says "oh, never mind, as long as we're "appraised of the status"..."
By "They work", I presume you mean the vaccines. I wish you had not done this because [a] as I pointed out it's not relevant to this discussion, and [b] to reply properly I will have to reply in a way that disagrees, but this will drag things into a vaccine argument and pe
Prioritizing Returns (Score:2)
I'm having issues with the whole story (Score:3)
I see reports of pilots and crew unable to get hold of management on the phone, etc. Now, I've seen incompetence, like when I was a programmer for the Scummy Mortgage Co in Austin, TX (actual name upon request), and even they wouldn't collapse like this.
What I'm wondering is whether the real culprit is that Southwest was taken down by ransomware.
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