It appears there was a MASSIVE disconnect between baggage and people, bags are ending up all over the place even though the people never left.

Although the airline app has always been accurate it's cheap insurance if a bag isn't properly scanned or something.

It's been great. My luggage missed a connection in december, when I arrived at the destination I could instantly see that it still was at the other airport. So while the others were waiting for the bags, I could already file a complaint (at the nearly empty complaints queue). Then three hours later I could see bag movement to the tarmac and knew that my bag cought the next flight.

Also, when in a city, it's a lot of fun to say: bring me back to my bag instead of looking up the hotel address.

For anyone with an iphone & checked bags I can really recommend it.

I think this is a great idea though and I didn't even think about "bring me back to my bag" - that's awesome :)

It’s got to be less power than the phone uses to stay in contact with the towers.

i believe this story. the scheduling system is too fragile and can’t automatically pick up disruptions to crew movement. they’re still manually scheduling some crews, but I think their main problem is they don’t have a way of knowing which crews are where and therefore can’t schedule flights. and it’s not every single piece that’s going to take 30 days, but it seems pretty likely that some bags will be lost that long.

But hey it's cheaper if we don't change it right? /s

(and I kinda can agree with this, like 10% because they might end contracting with some bigger IT company that doesn't care about shipping something that works)

Modernizing such a system would take enormous political + real capital. The new system would undoubtedly have many growing pains as formerly resolved problems were not covered in the new system. It’s no surprise nobody would want to touch such a system.

I've worked with airline scheduling software at almost the scale of United (about half the size, for the largest customer). That was using an Oracle database, which was a bit of a pain and a big expense, but worked fine as long as there was competent admins and competent devs. Would Couchbase be disaster-proof even when run by clowns?

Not saying there aren't better and worse choices for databases in any given situation. Just saying that there are lots of them that work perfectly well in competent hands.

If they've resorted to doing all their scheduling manually with pen and paper, any data pushed to the edge (air crews, ground staff etc) will need to be transmitted in a similarly manual fashion.

The gate/ground/air crews are not making autonomous decisions about who is flying what, when and where. That is decided by some ops/crew control structure in the airline.

Unions fight to keep a lot of data from being automated instead of manual because the automated data can be used to build individual performance metrics. For example, some baggage handling unions fought against bag scanners because then you could tell how much work different union members did.

They’re trying to keep from getting optimized to death like an Amazon warehouse worker.

Unfortunately that same automated data is really useful for dealing with situations like this. Once the manually entered data is out of sync with the real world the errors compound and you have cascading failures.

That depends on the airline and airport. It’s extremely common for the airline which operates out of a large part of a terminal to do their own ramp work.

Southwest employs thousands of ramp agents to do their own ground ops and under-wing work at their bases.

Why not? Some things aren't hard to predict, it's like a Ticketmaster employee saying "our site is probably going to go down when the Taylor Swift tour goes live". If you know your systems are deficient then you can predict they'll fail in a crisis, especially if that failure has happened before (as it has for Southwest).

This is obviously intentional, and in many parts of the US totally legal. I don't know specific Colorado laws but there is no federal law against this.

Scheduling is not an issue, and there is no need to waste an ED's time on such things. Some urgent care spots specifically have a "doctors note" service.

It doesn't make the policy any better (I've worked such jobs), but I don't think there is a need to exaggerate how the process works in real life.

It looks like this is not a fun week for anyone who works at Southwest.

1. Hiring more people (more than 3 days in advance).

2. Paying people more so they don't quit.

3. Giving people paid sick time and not threatening their jobs when they take it so that they don't come to work sick and get a bunch of their colleagues sick.

4. Selling fewer tickets and running fewer flights if you don't have enough capacity to support the current workload.

An airport subcontractor came to us having issues with getting enough baggage workers. Issue was they paid minimum wage, were located 30 minutes outside the city, and there was no public transport. There was no way for the workers to get to the job! The narrative was "these worker are so untrustworthy/lazy/full of excuses." So they would pay a 50% to an agency hoping gig-contractors could save them on single-day contracts rather than just putting that money to better wages or transit perks.

Contempt really does describe the management attitudes I ran into.

It's worse than contempt, it's abuse. He is looking for ways to make recovery from illness more difficult than it needs to be, and in turn hope some will come to work when they can't get a "regular" doctor visit in time - during a holiday week.

That memo is specifically about ground operations at DEN, and specifically because of the arctic weather conditions and a high number of sick calls and ramp agents that outright quit. You can earn more flipping burgers in Denver than you can as a SWA gate agent with five years of experience. Failing to pay staff is also a management failure.

The scheduling software crashed due to the number of pilots and flight attendants that were out of position and the number of changes that were made to the schedule. I would imagine that there was an overflow in some situation -- i.e. "the number of changed schedules should never exceed 65535" that worked every year until this one. But this system was already known to be unstable, another Reddit comment said that "there are settings you don't change for fear the entire thing will crash." Which it has before in 2016. Not expecting that history will repeat itself and doing something about it is also a management failure.

> Also its pretty much an airport thing and not an airline thing

Absolutely incorrect. While the airport runs the automated conveyance system that gets the bag from where the rampers drop it to the baggage claim, the people that handle the baggage at every manual step in between are SWA employees. If there aren't enough of them, the bags don't make it on the plane on time.

Notice that the people doing this work for Southwest Airlines are all wearing Southwest uniforms.

Like most complicated failures, this was failure with multiple causes and contributing factors. The core of the problem seems to be that management was rent-seeking without making appropriate structural changes to keep up with system load.

Additionally I was told (by a crew member) Southwest refused to meet wage demands with ramp / fuel crews so they all quit. Apparently they sent them an email basically saying a recession is coming so be thankful you have a job... Meanwhile all other jobs pay more in the area. Anecdote I know, but we did have to wait 2.5 hours for fuel on my flight.