Re:How Southwest Airlines melted down
by Tao3300 on Wednesday December 28, 2022 @05:53PM
(#34167111)
They probably had that kind of wiggle room once upon a time. Then some sort of pandemic turned everything to just enough planes and skeleton crews.
It'll be interesting to see. I'm sure Congress with go through it pretty strongly (opinions, that is), assuming they ever have a successful vote for a Speaker.
With a normal airline, you have pilots sitting on "reserve" at bases, who can be called in at any time to fill in any gaps that may occur. They are being paid but are not flying, it's quite a good gig if you can get on the reserve list.
I don't know how this is handled at Southwest, who does not fly hub-and-spoke and thus doesn't have a bunch of pilots sitting reserve around a base at, say, Atlanta.
In the past I had a job where some contract required a trained body to be on site 24/7. The company hired EXACTLY enough workers to fill the position, with _zero_ slack for anything.
That lack of slack is hell. It makes any disruption, even minor ones, require the other workers to work more time. Major disruptions mean soul-crushing crunch level hours to just get by.
Slack _must_ be planned into a system, otherwise there won't be any safety / recovery margin, and you're seeing the results live with Southwest's implosion.
It seems to me that just like pre-staged inventory helps in logistics management, that extra planes and crews in the rotation could improve operations under these circumstances.