Re:Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours
by miguelazo on Tuesday December 27, 2022 @05:51PM
(#34154927)
That is definitely not the case. The real issue is that even the staff that did show up didn't know where to go. There were employees lost for hours at Denver because the call-in scheduling system went down. Some employees hit their limits for work time before they could even obtain their assignments.
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Re:Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours
by twblalock on Wednesday December 28, 2022 @01:12AM
(#34158011)
That’s a symptom. The root cause was lack of resiliency in airplane routing.
It’s the only thing that explains why Southwest was uniquely impacted this week. Every other airline has staff issues, and the same weather to deal with.
With a point to point network, the coordination problem is much larger than with a hub and spoke network. That is probably what pushed Southwest’s software over the limit. But remember, the software didn’t fail by itself in a vacuum. Resiliency problems during a weather event were the root cause.