How Southwest Airlines melted down

Re:How Southwest Airlines melted down by angry_octet on Thursday December 29, 2022 @07:07AM (#34171828)

There is always a trade-off between robustness and efficiency. By leaving less slack the SWA schedule is more efficient, but also more tightly strung. When failures exceeded the slack capacity the whole schedule fell apart.

The problem of recovery is also extensively studied. But it seems like SW did not put enough effort into having fault tolerant restart.

This whole event is a management decision.

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Re:How Southwest Airlines melted down by taway22323 on Thursday December 29, 2022 @08:18AM (#34172307)

Right. I'm saying though, it's not just the initial state of less slack in their system due to hub and spoke versus point to point. It's also that other airlines were more realistic about backing off flights earlier and more aggressively as a reaction to the developing info on the storm.

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Re:How Southwest Airlines melted down by angry_octet on Thursday December 29, 2022 @10:49PM (#34181564)

It paints a picture of an organisation which didn't see the need to accurately assess risk on a real time basis. If I was the COO I would want rolling projections for the week based on good/bad/ugly weather. But it seems SW was too busy cutting costs and building capacity as cheaply as possible to think about that.

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