Just a tiny bit of blackmailer-sabotage or vandal mischief-making – the sort of thing often underreported for legitimate reasons! – could've been the margin between some mild embarassment & the total collapse we saw. (For example: tying up the call-in lines to turn a normal hold time of minutes into hours, or long busy signals.)

Simple monocausal stories are for unsophisticated spectators.

So you just inherently believe all that is reported as fact?

Remember when the Gulf of Tonkin incident was “for real really real” and we invaded Vietnam?

Or the WMDs in Iraq?

I’m not tinfoil hatting - Just calling out how interesting it is 3 major events in a documented as fragile industry happen so close.

That’s literally all I mentioned in my orig comment.

Well, no, the US military was (openly) in Vietnam in support of South Vietnam long before the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Heck, the US military was there (again overtly) in support of France for several years before South Vietnam existed as such. And, ironically, they were there in support of the Viet Minh – which later became both North Vietnam and the Viet Cong – even before that, with almost no break between, starting in July 1945.

Insofar as there was an international incident that led to the US invasion of Vietnam it was – though it took a few years for the response – Pearl Harbor, not the Gulf of Tonkin. All the subsequent fighting in Indochina was breakdown in relation between erstwhile allies who were all already present, after the Japanese were driven out and had surrendered.

Tying that to this thread: why is what’s reported about the airlines taken to be fact? (And I’m not speaking as if I mean this is malicious (as the Tonkin incident was) - just reported incorrect from fact for other “capital friendly” (face saving) reasons.)

Didn’t someone say “believe half of what you read…” somewhere?

I just don't think it's ruled-out by the simple official story. Some but not all of the reasons why I believe there might be more to the story are based on decades of life experience:

* Whenever the media reports on something I know about intimately, they get it wrong, preferring pleasing simple narratives to the full details. Hence, I assume their stories on things I don't know intimately show a similar skew towards oversimplification, missing-details that are embarassing to the key actors, and audience-pleasing explanations.

* I've not ever been in IT security for a major or public company. But even in tiny organizations, I've observed strong incentives – not all misguided! – to downplay malicious mischief as a contributor to any problems. Organizations don't want to encourage the perpetrators with publicity, nor encourage copycats. Orgs also don't want to be embarassed by lax measures. From direct reports from individuals at larger organizations – and reliable public accounts of late-reported hack/extortion incidents – I believe these incentives can be even stronger at large, slow-moving, distributed-responsibility public companies (though of course the penalties for explicitly-misleading statements also larger).

* Plenty of mean, crazy, or self-interested people may have it out for Southwest, from previously-angered travellers to disgruntled employees to motivated short-sellers (individuals or formal funds). And even if the potential for sabotage was under formal investigation right now, the investigators – private or public – might want to hide that fact until definitive evidence collected & perpetrators are prosecutable. It can take months or years for the real story to emerge!

A fragile outdated system finally reaching a chaotic breaking point is one possible & sufficient answer, of course.

But it's also a potential weak-point to be pushed-over-the-edge by motivated saboteurs or extortionists. In fact, such a weak point is ideal for certain criminal schemes, because of its deniability by both perpetrator and victim as merely a problem of aged systems & incompetence.

So, only the naive would rule it out entirely based on only self-serving public narratives.

> So, only the naive would rule it out entirely based on only self-serving public narratives.

I don't technically disagree, but it is also just as naive to ignore our human proportionality bias and discount the relative probability of the available evidence.

I'm not saying it definitely was an attack, nor even that it likely was. Just that it's premature to "definitely" rule it out so soon, just 3 weeks out, given the incentives involved & base rates of both extortion/vandalism & (often well-meaning but at the very-leats ass-covering) reporting-misdirection about the same.

You seem to agree with me that it remains a possibility, so not sure we actually disagree about any particulars of the event, just the discussion.

Imagine there were a well-refereed, bettable proposition like, say, "By the end of 2030, will either (a) someone be criminally charged for contributing to the Southwest service disruptions of late 2022; or (b) will a knowledgeable Southwest insider or law enforcement agent report they saw evidence that intentional acts worsened the Southwest service disruptions of late 2022?"

Just from base rates of such mischief, & without yet digging deeper, I'd consider an answer of "YES" to have around a 2-3% chance. And something with a 1-in-50 chance of having happened is absolutely a valid topic of speculation deep in forums like this!

Such tail events are where lots of the big wins, & big losses, for industry & society arrive – but also, such real-but-rarer outcomes get habitually ignored by simple mainstream summary coverage, which needs to put neat bows on stories for uninformed & distracted audiences, by short deadlines.

To protest deep in the threads, and insist that a 3-weeks old official-spokesperson story is "definitely" the whole explanation, case-closed, stop-speculating-its-hurting? That's actually hostile to helping curious people understand a complex world based on limited & conflicted information sources.