[HN Gopher] Southwest Airlines Halts Flight Departures Amid Tech...
___________________________________________________________________
Southwest Airlines Halts Flight Departures Amid Technology Issue
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 92 points
Date : 2023-04-18 15:13 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| bob1029 wrote:
| 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| > 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| 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.
| mjcl wrote:
| SeatGuru shows their 737-700 is 143 seats and their
| 737-800 and 737 MAX 8 are both 175 seats.
| acomjean wrote:
| 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.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>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.
| brewdad wrote:
| 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.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| Except this outage has nothing to do with crew scheduling
| afavour wrote:
| 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.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
| labcomputer wrote:
| > 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_.
| tialaramex wrote:
| 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.
| antonjs wrote:
| And you have staffing contracts negotiated by relatively
| powerful unions that require some of these things.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > 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.
| selectodude wrote:
| 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.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| 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.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| 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.
| bink wrote:
| 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.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| This makes think, how can a CEO manage a tech team (headed by
| CTO) effectively? For sure he himself usually does not know much
| about the tech involved and even he does grow from the trench he
| doesn't know all arms.
|
| 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?
| uejfiweun wrote:
| This might sound dumb, but one interesting thing about Star
| Trek TNG was that Picard and Riker (captain / first mate) were
| the two foremost computer experts on the ship. It's explicitly
| stated that they have the most knowledge of how the ship's
| computer works.
|
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| That is interesting, but it requires suspension of disbelief
| to think that the foremost computer expert will also be the
| foremost management expert. The aptitudes and personalities
| required for deep understanding of tech rarely present with
| those required for effective management of large
| organizations.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| You make a fair point. Unless, of course, the computers
| become the best managers of all.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| Seems implausible that Riker would know more about the
| Enterprise's computer than Data.
| knodi wrote:
| In these 3 steps:
|
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Don't forget the part where you actually analyze the result
| to see whether the needs reported to the team creating the
| solution were accurate, and then triage the mistakes and
| misunderstandings that inevitably happened.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| Their "whoopsies, sorry we ruined your Christmas" mea culpa email
| was full of corporate horseshit and essentially no real changes,
| so this is pretty unsurprising.
| [deleted]
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Ironically, a Southwest Airline recruiter messaged me today.
| Maybe that's actually a good sign they've realized they need to
| take their tech stack seriously?
| adrr wrote:
| What tech stack? They make their pilots call in to find out
| where the planes/pilots are.
| halfjoking wrote:
| Grandparent should pitch he can fix it in 2 weeks for $1
| million.
|
| 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.
| ratg13 wrote:
| If the transcription messes up that flight might not fly ..
| which means the airline is out a ton of money trying to
| make alternative arrangements for a flight full of people.
|
| Your invention could bankrupt the airline in a matter of
| months.
| halfjoking wrote:
| That means you can upsell them after they deploy. Have
| the bot read back the formalized updates to confirm if
| you want more accuracy.
|
| 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?
| bink wrote:
| Unless you're an attorney.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Is it really fair to blame it on the technology? After a couple
| of oopsies it seems like it's more of a management issue than a
| technology issue.
|
| I imagine it's a lot easier to deflect blame by blaming it on
| computers though.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Well yeah, going down the '5-Whys' it ends up being management
| to blame
| tialaramex wrote:
| Not _always_. I read Accident Investigation reports for the
| transport industries in my countries. The vast majority of
| the time, management are a factor, for example the management
| of a bulk freighter haven 't allowed enough crew for it to be
| operated safely, or the management of a airport haven't spent
| money on the improved hardware that would have prevented a
| dangerous incident. These reports inevitably have
| recommendations, many of which are directed to management.
|
| 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.
| shuckles wrote:
| You could say it's management's fault they didn't know
| entire crews were on heroin. This is one of the challenges
| of being management: every failure is conceivably a
| management problem.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| The flaw with 5 whys (not to say I don't encourage it!) is
| they reflect the biases of the author while appearing
| unbiased and authoritative. So, it depends on who writes the
| post mortem who gets the blame.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Management decision frameworks are often like that, but "5
| Whys" is relatively innocuous - too simple to make
| tendentious. Mainly it is a reminder to dig until you hit
| bottom when doing root cause analysis.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Yes, because there's insufficient room for reality.
| Causality is this big DAG with tons of incoming edges,
| going back to the beginning of time. 5 Whys is creating a
| path 5 edges long. This is often useful, but it's not "the
| truth". If each node has 10 incoming edges, there are
| 100,000 paths you could take.
|
| 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.
| bentcorner wrote:
| "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made
| a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded
| as a bad move."
| darkerside wrote:
| To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create
| the universe, as they say
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| A _real_ 5 whys analysis probably should give a tree. Why
| did X happen? Because A, B, and C. Why did A happen?
| Because A1 and A2. And so on.
| drivers99 wrote:
| Fishbone diagram is one way to do that
|
| https://asq.org/quality-resources/fishbone
| bluGill wrote:
| You don't need to do that because there will be more
| 5-whys. Just pick whichever of A1, A2 seems like a bigger
| deal and find a B that seems like the biggest
| contribution - until you get to some deep root cause you
| can solve and mitigate. Then you fix that one issue and
| move one. You WILL see more issues, if they are always in
| other places you must have got the right one, if not then
| you will see this again and this time you can go down A2.
|
| 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.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| This is specifically where bias comes in. People
| selectively prune the tree in ways that are either
| interesting (in a positive take) or deceptively based on
| their desire to avoid certain topics. Because the tree
| can be so large it isn't always obvious even to the
| author whether they picked a branch because it was useful
| or because it served some other purpose - divert focus to
| a team they want to see behave differently, avoid taking
| blame for something, avoid being asked to fix something
| they don't want to, etc.
|
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| Once again, there is only so many times you can keep re-
| running the same tree before someone will look for a
| different root cause. If you only run the process once
| you can place blame wherever. However when it is multiple
| different people for slightly different problems running
| it over several years, eventually you will get to the
| right branch.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Only if it's independent in each run. Even with different
| people on different problems they're still subject to the
| same pressures by the people that pay and promote them.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Apparently the last CEO cut a lot of costs in favor of
| profitability.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Everything is working, I don't think we need that IT team
| then....
| deltree7 wrote:
| OTOH, there are lot of IT teams that are truly bloated
| brewdad wrote:
| That depends on how effective they are when truly needed.
| Firefighters in my town do busy-work 70% of the time.
| When they are needed, I'm happy we didn't send 70% of
| them home for the day.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| This always triggers me to think that it is really difficult
| to give a score of what a CEO does. Many times they pumped up
| stocks and quit before problems they created surfaced yet.
| They were hailed as heroes and the next guy ate shit.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Case in point: Jack Welch
|
| 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.
| lancesells wrote:
| I feel this is the same way with US Presidents, although
| it's not really their choice when it comes to leaving.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| There's a large range. Some things, like executive
| orders, can be instant. Some things, like leaning on
| congress to do something, might take longer to have
| measurable results. Some things, like the economy,
| regularly only affect the next person.
|
| 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!
| bluGill wrote:
| Every country without regular turn over on top seems to
| devolve to an evil dictatorship over time. Sometimes
| kings can be forced to give up power, until they become
| non-evil just for lack of power, but this takes
| centuries.
| pjmorris wrote:
| "A loss of X dollars is always the responsibility of an
| executive whose financial responsibility exceeds X dollars."
|
| - 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
| ren_engineer wrote:
| it's basically inevitable with how Southwest operates, they
| trade resiliency for efficiency. Same reason modern supply
| chains are so fragile, minimal redundancy anywhere. Tech seems
| to be one of the last places where people understand the value
| of resiliency, the way these companies run would be like not
| keeping database backups to save on storage costs. Or not
| having any excess capacity provisioned to handle traffic surges
| or hardware failures
| adrr wrote:
| It's almost never a technology issue. It's an investment and
| prioritization issue.
| [deleted]
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >How many software engineers does it take to screw in a
| lightbulb?
|
| _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._
| bertil wrote:
| The technology is not working because of a lack of investment,
| that much was obvious at Christmas.
|
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| I would be surprised if they can solve all their issues in 5
| months no matter now much focus is put into it.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| A few weeks after the first big incident, I applied for a
| couple of open IT roles at Southwest. Though I was well
| qualified for all of them, I never heard back from SWA, not
| even a "Thank you for applying" type of email. Makes me
| wonder if they thought the first incident was a fluke and
| they could go about business as normal. Also makes me wonder
| if they put out a bunch of ghost jobs to appear like they
| were staffing up. Most companies will at least acknowledge
| receipt of job applications no matter how unqualified the
| applicant and Southwest didn't even do that much.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Maybe they also have a 'technology issue' in their
| recruiting process and they think nobody is applying.
| meltyness wrote:
| From swa@myworkday.com Thank you for
| completing your job application for the [not available]
| position!
| bink wrote:
| You're gonna need a fax machine to apply.
| dopylitty wrote:
| It really does come down to management. There are ways to make
| computer systems reliable but private companies seldom have the
| budget, will, organization, or patience to develop their
| systems to those specs.
|
| In lieu of that management should require business resiliency
| processes allowing the business to continue manually when the
| computer systems inevitably fail.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I can't find the exact quote or its source, but one thing I've
| heard that has stuck with me is (probably unintentionally
| paraphrased):
|
| "Every problem blamed on 'computer error' involves at least two
| human errors, one of which is blaming the computer."
| xd1936 wrote:
| "At the source of every error which is blamed on the
| computer, you will find at least two human errors, one of
| which is the error of blaming it on the computer."
|
| -- Tom Glib
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| And Sidney Dekker will tell you that blaming things on "human
| error" won't actually help you find the root cause of the
| problem.
| badrabbit wrote:
| There is human error which is an error of an employee and
| there is process flaw which is managent's problem and while
| they are humans the flaw is not an error it is
| incompetence, especially when it happens more than twice.
| pgrote wrote:
| It appears to be over except for Dallas Love Field Airport.
|
| "FAA lifts nationwide ground stop for Southwest Airlines flights
| after equipment issues"
|
| https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/southwest-airlines-flight...
| massysett wrote:
| Why does FAA need to impose a ground stop? Couldn't the airline
| decide for itself that it's not going to have its own planes
| take off?
| dpcx wrote:
| It's probably easier to allow the FAA to propagate the
| message than for SWAs systems (that seemed to be failing) to
| try and do so.
| kloch wrote:
| This implies the outage was affecting their Pilot's ability
| to get accurate weight/balance data.
| sixbrx wrote:
| My wife and I had a recent bad experience on SouthWest, where we
| boarded the plane at Love Field in Dallas and then were made to
| wait 2.5 hours on the tarmac, because their IT system had a
| different passenger count than what the crew counted. After
| several attempts at counting again, they ended up having to go to
| each passenger row by row with a manifest in hand, and verify the
| passenger boarding pass and driver's license. I think aside from
| their IT system problems, this situation was made worse because
| as a passenger you don't have an assigned seat, so it's not
| obvious when someone is missing or a seat has two or more
| contending passengers.
| MavisBacon wrote:
| I'm in the middle of dealing with this as I'm not a proud nor
| rich man and always keep crawling back to Southwest. Flying
| Nashville > Phoenix > Oakland right now. As far as I can tell
| they just delayed all flights by 30 mins which set things back in
| place somehow
| game_the0ry wrote:
| They'll take tax payer bailouts, buy back stock, cut staff, and
| pay record bonuses to executives.
|
| But fuck investing in the business.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Perhaps we shouldn't do those bailouts...
| game_the0ry wrote:
| I concur
| hardtail29 wrote:
| Hey! Do us all a favor and don't post links to stories hosted on
| sites that won't let you read them until you subscribe. Here is a
| link to the AP News story which you can read freely as long as
| you don't mind the ads. https://apnews.com/article/southwest-
| flights-grounded-faa-fa...
| elSidCampeador wrote:
| https://archive.is/HWoER
| NickBusey wrote:
| From the HN FAQ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
|
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| kencausey wrote:
| https://archive.is/HWoER
| elromulous wrote:
| Am I the only annoyed with the use of the word "technology" to
| mean anything computer related? That would be like saying
| turbulence is "an issue with physics". A hammer is a type of
| technology too.
|
| Edit: phrasing/typos
| satellites wrote:
| The more vague and hand-wavy it sounds, the better it is for
| corporate PR statements.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-04-18 23:02 UTC)