>SWA has claimed that the immediate causes of this weekend’s meltdown were staffing at Jacksonville Center and weather in the southeast U.S., but what was a minor temporary event for other carriers devastated Southwest Airlines because our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure. Our operation and our frontline employees have endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures. Our Pilots are tired and frustrated because our operation is running on empty due to a lack of support from the Company.
> our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure
I somehow notice a lot of this lately, in many different areas. I wonder if there isn't a common cause behind those. Is it just covid or something bigger?
It is large due to corporations taking on lean-business models from MBAs over the last decade+. When a business runs lean, it becomes more fragile to disruptions. Unfortunately due to our economic system, there is a semi-regular boon-bust cycle, so if it wasn't COVID, it would have been something else that kicks the stool out from under the legs of these corporations.
In the past this wasn't as big as an issue because the risk was spread out amongst a multitude of small to medium size corporations. But again, over the last few decades corporations have become mega-conglomerates through buyouts and mergers/etc... Too big to fail. All the eggs in fewer baskets. Again, in an attempt to keep growing, because in our current economic system and the culture promoted in it (partially by MBA's) is the idea that if your company isn't growing it's dying. And even if it's growing, if it's not growing by a large enough amount it is failing...
So you could have a 1,000 person corporations stabley making 100 million in revenue. Providing good benefits and salaries to all. But if its not growing, then it is viewed as failing ... It's truly an absurd mindset and culture.
Southwest is literally the poster child of low cost carriers. They started the whole business model, which consists of a few things:
* they operate literally one type of aircraft, and therefore only have to train their crew once, keep the specific set of parts, etc.
* they optimize the hell out of making sure their planes are in use carrying paying passengers for the maximum amount of time
* they fly a vast network of point to point using secondary airports, as opposed to coordinating at massive hubs
These are all things that would make recovering from a massive widespread disruption very hard, and Southwest has been doing it better and longer than anybody else.
This is only “a failure” if the loss from this is worse than all of the money they have saved over the years by running so lean.
This type of event is the obvious possible downside that is well known when you structure a company this way. It’s not that events like this aren’t expected, it’s that prepping for them costs more than the loss from not being able to absorb them.
Optimisation culture. Cut x cost by y%? Promotion! Everything collapses a few years later because there’s no buffers for anything? Who cares, those managers are already at their next job so it’s someone else’s fault!
this is the price we pay for rewarding "efficiencies" up and down the entire chain, leaving no slack whatsoever. with large companies or operations these efficiencies can be over really minor things as well because it means bonus for someone. the root cause of all of this is "short-termism". everyone is only worried about the next quarter, not the next 5 let alone 20-40 years.
if you remove all checks and balances, all forms of redundancy and run the system at 99% capacity.. even a simple unforeseen event can disrupt everything and grind it to halt.
Just imagine that most businesses are equivalent to running your whole stack on a single, self hosted at home, RPI. Including the git repository, and no backups.
According to this substack[1], it was a pilot walkout/"sickout" due to vaccine mandates. It's actually happening in more companies/industries than widely reported. I imagine it's also picked up steam since last weeks revelation from leaked internal Pfizer emails[2] that they used cells from aborted fetuses while testing the RDNA vaccine (testing - it's not in the vaccine), but have publicly stated otherwise. It was also pretty clear that they did not want the public to know from the text. And a lot of "religious exemptions" are being turned down. This would be a bit like taking a staunch vegan and forcing them to eat something (via threatening career) that was tested on animals while they said otherwise.
> The pilot emailed following the first Southwest post today (and provided his SWA ID to prove his identity). He asked that I paraphrase the email.
> Essentially, the union cannot organize or even acknowledge the sickout, because doing so would make it an illegal job action. Years ago, Southwest and its pilots had a rough negotiation, and the union would not even let the pilots internally discuss the possibility of working-to-rule (which would have slowed Southwest to a crawl).
> But at the moment the pilots don’t even have to talk to each other about what they’re doing. The anger internally - not just among pilots but other Southwest workers - is enormous. The tough prior negotiations notwithstanding, Southwest has a history of decent labor relations, and workers believe the company should stand up for them against the mandate. Telling pilots in particular to comply or face termination has backfired.
The root cause is because "anti price gouging" laws are being enforced.
Previously, if there was a shortage of say plane brake discs, the wholesaler would jack the price up 10x for the last 3 sets. That would lead to one of the 4 customers who wanted to buy them to say "nah, it's too expensive, we don't need it that badly".
The person who wouldn't get a set was probably the guy restocking the spare parts shelf, while the people who really really needed those parts right now so a plane can takeoff got them.
In todays world, it's illegal to jack the price, one customer buys all the cheap stock (one to use, 2 as spares cos they heard about a shortage), and now 2 planes can't take off.
The same happens for thousands of other products all across the world. The end result is the people who really need goods can't get them, while others sit on piles of stock 'lucky we bought some just before they ran out!'. Endgame: The economy grinds to a halt over tiny shortages everywhere.
The proper solution is to allow and encourage price gouging again, and have a PR campaign to explain to the public how changing this law really is in their interests, even if it appears on the surface that paying $100 for a flashlight in an emergency can't be good for anyone.
Think about how difficult systems engineering is. Then realize that everything is systems engineering. But, very few people making decisions are systems engineers.
Ad-hoc heuristic decision making + political in-fighting can get you off the ground, but it can't keep you reliably airborne.
Over the last decades, capitalism was not regulated very much and, as a result, companies cut costs - and one of the easiest ways to do so is to cut resiliency measures like having a standby plane and crew at every major airport to cover for delays, technical problems or staff calling in sick.
Nowadays, no one runs with any sort of buffer if that isn't explicitly demanded by government or other regulations... and when the shit hits the proverbial fan, it hits hard as a result.
They also explicitly deny that a sickout is occuring:
> There are false claims of job actions by Southwest Pilots currently gaining traction on social media and making their way into mainstream news. I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise. Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes under these circumstances. SWAPA has not authorized, and will not condone, any job action.
In reality, a lot of pilots can just message each other on the side and say "f-it". Idk how many it takes to take down the system, but I suspect even 20% out sick could cause a cascading failure.
>Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes under these circumstances
They couldn't admit it if that's what they're doing. They'd have to deny it either way. Even an "unofficial" unorganized sick out.
On the other hand- if a pilot knew he was getting fired in two weeks for not getting vaccinated, and he happened to have two weeks sick pay, well then the company policy did all the "organizing" that needed to be done.
There is currently a major outage at a major part of the infrastructure of our nation, and nobody believes anybody about why.
The airline is saying it's something to do with weather, but somehow they're the only airline effected.
Everybody online seems to the think it's some sort of labor strike, but the union denies this and nobody can find anywhere where people are planning this.
And yet thousands of people are stuck in airports all over the country right now.
It just seems like something is going on, and that everybody is lying about it. Can't say I've ever really seen anything like this, and it genuinely freaks me out.
If it's a strike then it 9 times out of 10 means the airline will have to payout for delayed and cancelled flights. I would imagine they are trying to spin this every which way possible to eliminate the inevitable bill that will need to be paid. Financials are probably out of whack too since covid so this situation could really cripple/break them.
The most likely explanation is here [1]. Pilots (and apparently some air traffic controllers) are doing a sickout to protest vaccine mandates, presumably to make the powers that be understand just how difficult they can make things for the country if they proceed with intended mass firings. But the sickout is technically illegal, so nobody will acknowledge it. That is why you won't see a clear explanation of this incident - probably ever. You've never seen anything like it because we have never been in a situation where a significant percentage of the population is being threatened with the loss of their livelihood unless they take something that many consider to be quite dangerous.
I don't find pilots refusing vaccines in significant numbers plausible in the slightest. Airline pilots have to comply with plenty of regulations and they're continuously trained to comply with safety regulations. Thus you don't become a pilot or don't remain one for long if you're allergic to safety regulations. If there's one occupation where expert recommendations are respected, it's aviation, and for good reasons -- the safety record of the industry speaks for itself.
The tweet you linked is an account that's linked to at least one disinformation farm.
Think about it for two seconds, if that really happened, there would be hundreds of witnesses, everybody would be talking about the flight number, there would be cell phone videos and corporate social media responses. None of those things exist, so either everybody on the plane, the airport, and all their friends and relatives are in on the conspiracy except this one bot account, or they're making shit up to stir up conservatives, which is what they've done all day every day since joining the site in January 2017.
This kind of subverts union leadership though. How can the union leadership negotiate in good faith when there's no evidence that they are in a position to control or act on behalf of members?
Then again, I think it's technically illegal for members of the airline industry to actively strike. So maybe this is how it's done for plausible deniability sake.
> The nationwide cancellations came as the airline announced Monday that the company will now require employees to get the COVID-19 vaccinated by Dec. 8.
> Some customers said they were told the cancellations are a direct result of the vaccine mandate.
> “I asked them specifically 'is this about weather' – because if it’s about weather, they can deny compensation. They said 'no, it’s not about weather.' I said 'is this about maintenance?' They said 'no, it’s not about maintenance.' I said then 'what is the problem?'" passenger Ron Frank said. “They said this is all because of the vaccine mandate. They said we had a massive walkout. They also said that air traffic control had a massive walkout because of the vaccine mandate. But to couch 1,000 cancelations because of a thunderstorm somewhere is not believable.”
It's a cluster of factors - the primary one being a lack of a bench of backup pilots - compounded by layoffs during COVID and now an inability to ramp up training to get pilots re-certified and re-hired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO39nIcuPhQ
COVID vaccine shenanigans with a large chunk of the workforce near retirement age and just saying "fuck your mandate, I'll retire early" is just the cherry on top.
Seeing stories like this makes me wonder if we'll ever see a company actually go bust based purely on the instability of its decades-old, duct-taped architecture.
I have a relative who works for a large credit card processor running on mainframe systems and I hear over and over again that they're all retiring and unable to fill the newly opened roles. This problem is compounded by the fact that their offshore contracting firms are cutting back on providing COBOL resources because there's a lot more money in supplying java/.net/etc. devs. The work culture there sounds so unsustainable and yet they're one of the largest payment processors in the country. If they were have widespread stability issues like this, things could get interesting.
Right. COBOL is not some mythical ancient knowledge that can't be learned today. I'm pretty sure anyone who can learn Haskell can learn COBOL too, it's just a question of making them want to.
Sounds like it isn't a myth - you yourself admit there aren't people who know it, just that would OFFER to learn it given the appropriate compensation.
By that logic, there isn't a shortage of anything if you have enough money.
Right... they can't train someone on COBOL? I call b.s. on that. It's an HR issue, you need blah blah degrees and yadi yadi yada experience. Big corps don't adopt to job economy changes over time like this unless their core business is built to adopt to economic changes. Inability to make exemptions and place the right first line managers over teams is what kills big companies, or forces them into an endless loop of unoriginal aquisitions and failures imo.
Banks are genetically incapable of doing anything useful in terms of technology. Their mainframe architecture was outdated 40 years ago! They will forever maintain their hacks and buggy software.
Not if they can’t find anyone willing to learn COBOL.
There’s huge demand for developers on modern systems. Seriously, how much are you going to pay a developer to do mainframe COBOL - and is that developer going to produce commensurate value, really able to hold together a crumbling antique infrastructure?
Decades-old does not mean duct-taped. It means every edge case has been hit, it's rock solid, and it works. There are many patches on top of patches, and the system is hard to comprehend for someone new. But it's a heck of a lot more stable that something redesigned.
The real issue here, is during bad weather and understaffed ATC, for some reason the airforce decided to do some training in airspace used by commercial flights. This military training part in the article is mentioned quickly, then completely ignored.
This was the US Military causing delays, cancellations, and people getting stuck overnight at airports. This was the US Military causing huge operational and financial issues for one of the most customer-friendly airlines out there. And the did this while eating up millions of dollars that are taken out of our paychecks - that they used to screw us. Time for congress to remove the funds that allowed them to conduct this training at a time when it caused problems for the general population paying their salaries.
If the cause is the military, why is southwest so disproportionately affected, and being affected in so many cities?
> “The problems weren’t concentrated in just one particular region. The cancelations affected the entire Southwest network. People living in cities where Southwest has a big operation, like Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and where I am in the San Francisco Bay Area, saw cancelations in the double-digits.”
Decades old might definitely mean duct taped and unstable. In about 1995 I witnessed the beginning of the end of at the time very successful company that just had tripled their whole organisation. But the code base was 5 million lines of a lot of copy pasted literal spaghetti code. And only a handful of ageing coders that had been with the company almost from the start could get anything done. And then, one day, those damn customers demanded a Windows application, instead of the classy DOS application.
Decades-old, duct-taped architecture is endemic across the airline industry though, and AFAIK Southwest isn't even particularly bad on this front. American Airlines's original reservation system Sabre, still a major GDS player today, was first put together in the 1950s and is by some reckonings the oldest commercial (as in, non-government/military/research) computer system out there.
Southwest are better than most NA carriers in this regard, they switched to Amadeus a few years ago. Which is "only" 10-30 years old (depending on the components).
It is maddening. Even if the stated goal is to “get off the mainframe” everybody deep down knows it isn’t going anywhere for 10 years. We recently had a discussion about porting from one mainframe “module” to another due to cost. I asked why we don’t just continue paying for the current module since the goal is to sunset mainframe. Everybody on the call laughed.
So we will go ahead and “invest” several man years and god knows how much money into a platform everybody agrees we should get off of.
I've been on the other side of this and seen too many teams neglect to fix even the simplest and most frustrating bugs in a system because they're going to rewrite it "in the next six months". Usually the rewrite is still going years later, and the actual code used in production is left to rot, holding back other teams as well.
The way the survivorship bias works out, this is generally a strength, not a weakness.
You want to get good money, you learn how stuff works under the hood and get familiar with your predecessor architectures, emulate them if you need to.
I have to disagree. These systems aren't "survivors" - they're held together with a fragile weave of scripts, hacks, unsupported hardware and outdated knowledge. Often treated as a black box, they become an object that people have to hand-nurse through issues that would never trouble modern systems. The amount of effort and money that's expended to maintain these systems is typically far more than the upfront cost would be to replace them every decade with a more modern one, but that would look bad in the short term financials, so we keep babysitting the tower of glass and praying it doesn't fall.
A reply to myself since I can't edit: Survivorship bias may not completely describe what I'm talking about here but another commenter posted about Lindy Effect, which is 100% on the nose:
Your comment is being downvoted not because people disagree with you, but because it is not bringing anything constructive to the discussion. Perhaps if you bothered to write about what you think the meltdown really is related to, your commend would have some value.
Some financial facts that help explain the situation: over the past 10 years US airlines have spent about 95% of their free cash flows on stock buybacks. This is the money they could have used to have a buffer to deal with these situations or to improve their systems. Why do they care so much about their stock price over long term sustainability? In 2020, Southwest lost 3.1 billion dollars and took 6 billions of government money, but executives increased their own compensation by 5% to 14% and the CEO paid himself 9 millions dollars, of which 7 millions were in stock.
> This is the money they could have used to have a buffer to deal with these situations or to improve their systems.
Matt Levine covered this last year [1]. The basic gist of it was that the CEO is focused on the shareholders, and the best use of the money was on stock buybacks. Spending money on improving customer or labor relationships wouldn't have helped during the start of the pandemic when all the airlines were stuck in the same boat unable to fly planes, and the cash used by e.g. American Airlines for buybacks in the past 7 years to increase the stock value 113% would have only bought them 4 months of operating expenses. The most long-term value for shareholders was created through the buybacks, and the government being willing to prop the businesses up during downturns reduces the risk exposure from this strategy.
Thanks, I like Levine and remember reading that. He basically argues that airlines financial strategy was optimal for shareholders, given covid and guaranteed government support. But firstly, he only considers the two uses of money proposed in the NYT, improving customer service or reducing the debt burden. Secondly, his whole argument is predicated on airlines being bailed out by government - which is true, but I believe shouldn't. I personally believe a lot of value is being destroyed by lack of long term investment and short term incentives, leading to problems such as these ones. And finally, even Levine admits that buybacks might be suboptimal for other stakeholders (eg employees, clients).
Airlines with government backing end up with the only rational choice being to take more risk.
I'm reading a book right now called "The Power of Nothing to Lose" which explores the primary and second order effects of individuals and companies being put into situations where they literally have nothing to lose. It's been an interesting read so far - recommended.
The explanation of "weather and an FAA shutdown" doesn't make sense given that, according to the article, other airlines aren't experiencing this at all.
Oh, and for folks talking about a pilot protest against vaccine mandates, that theory is discussed at length toward the end of the article.
I imagine this kind of thing cascades quite badly if it goes wrong, so it's not unimaginable that they just got unlucky regarding where machines are/where crews that are rested are and it collapsed from there, whereas other airlines got lucky/predicted the consequences better/had more resilient planning.
(EDIT: which would match the union statement /u/hnburnsy quotes: but what was a minor temporary event for other carriers devastated Southwest Airlines because our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure. Our operation and our frontline employees have endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures.)
Southwest also operates a flight network that relies on flights making multiple stops along the way, whereas many other airlines may have more direct flights that aren’t impacted as much by distant flights being delayed.
The union explicitly denies that a sickout is occurring in that same statement you've quoted:
> There are false claims of job actions by Southwest Pilots currently gaining traction on social media and making their way into mainstream news. I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise. Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes under these circumstances. SWAPA has not authorized, and will not condone, any job action.
Southwest runs 3 to 4K commercial flights per day, which is about 1 in 7 commercial flights overall in the US. They depend on aircraft doing many short hops over the course of a single day: 7 or 8 is not uncommon. When things go bad it tends to disrupt the system very badly.
These numbers come from the US DOT ontime database. You can access the data in ClickHouse at https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443 (user=demo, password=demo). This is a public instance running on Altinity.Cloud.
Southwest is lucky we don't have the same consumer protection laws in the U.S. as E.U. citizens have. If we did, they'd be paying out to passengers big time this weekend. (Or, more realistically, they would have taken better precautions to prevent an event like this from happening in the first place.)
Interestingly, there might be something similar for the US:
> If your flight is cancelled and you choose to cancel your trip as a result, you are entitled to a refund for the unused transportation – even for non-refundable tickets. You are also entitled to a refund for any bag fee that you paid, and any extras you may have purchased, such as a seat assignment.
According to an analyst that CBS talked to https://www.cbsnews.com/news/southwest-flight-cancellations-... Southwest was hit harder because of they way they organize their routes. Not having "hubs" means they can't create alternate routes quickly. So the delays in Florida cascaded back, stranding planes and crews as well as passengers. He also says they'd already scheduled more flights than they can handle, but I don't know exactly what that means.
>Online speculation that Southwest’s new vaccine mandate has led pilots to stage a sickout is being denied by the union representing Southwest pilots.
>That follows reporting on social media that some of the issues the airline is suffering could be related to that issue. A spokesperson for the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) told the Arizona Republic it was not aware of any work stoppage and wouldn’t condone it anyway.
>SWAPA, however, has authorized its members to demonstrate against the mandate.
sounds like there is a vaccine mandate-related sickout going on, and the union is unofficially encouraging it but doesn't want to be seen as doing so. I don't know why that would be the case; there's no law against airline employees doing an industrial action. Maybe the union doesn't want to be denounced for being allegedly "anti-science"?
If this is the result of a sickout, I assume the current administration could direct the Dept of Defense to make military pilots available to Southwest in the event of an extended availability issue with their union pilots.
Not as brutal as Reagan breaking the ATC union, but supporting a common carrier in a time of crisis. I don’t believe a federal case has been heard yet where the vaccine mandate or terminating those refusing it has been found unlawful.
Readit News
>SWA has claimed that the immediate causes of this weekend’s meltdown were staffing at Jacksonville Center and weather in the southeast U.S., but what was a minor temporary event for other carriers devastated Southwest Airlines because our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure. Our operation and our frontline employees have endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures. Our Pilots are tired and frustrated because our operation is running on empty due to a lack of support from the Company.
https://www.swapa.org/news/2021/swa-in-the-news/
I somehow notice a lot of this lately, in many different areas. I wonder if there isn't a common cause behind those. Is it just covid or something bigger?
In the past this wasn't as big as an issue because the risk was spread out amongst a multitude of small to medium size corporations. But again, over the last few decades corporations have become mega-conglomerates through buyouts and mergers/etc... Too big to fail. All the eggs in fewer baskets. Again, in an attempt to keep growing, because in our current economic system and the culture promoted in it (partially by MBA's) is the idea that if your company isn't growing it's dying. And even if it's growing, if it's not growing by a large enough amount it is failing...
So you could have a 1,000 person corporations stabley making 100 million in revenue. Providing good benefits and salaries to all. But if its not growing, then it is viewed as failing ... It's truly an absurd mindset and culture.
* they operate literally one type of aircraft, and therefore only have to train their crew once, keep the specific set of parts, etc.
* they optimize the hell out of making sure their planes are in use carrying paying passengers for the maximum amount of time
* they fly a vast network of point to point using secondary airports, as opposed to coordinating at massive hubs
These are all things that would make recovering from a massive widespread disruption very hard, and Southwest has been doing it better and longer than anybody else.
This type of event is the obvious possible downside that is well known when you structure a company this way. It’s not that events like this aren’t expected, it’s that prepping for them costs more than the loss from not being able to absorb them.
Just imagine that most businesses are equivalent to running your whole stack on a single, self hosted at home, RPI. Including the git repository, and no backups.
> The pilot emailed following the first Southwest post today (and provided his SWA ID to prove his identity). He asked that I paraphrase the email.
> Essentially, the union cannot organize or even acknowledge the sickout, because doing so would make it an illegal job action. Years ago, Southwest and its pilots had a rough negotiation, and the union would not even let the pilots internally discuss the possibility of working-to-rule (which would have slowed Southwest to a crawl).
> But at the moment the pilots don’t even have to talk to each other about what they’re doing. The anger internally - not just among pilots but other Southwest workers - is enormous. The tough prior negotiations notwithstanding, Southwest has a history of decent labor relations, and workers believe the company should stand up for them against the mandate. Telling pilots in particular to comply or face termination has backfired.
[1] https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-a-southwest-airli...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUXGB5FzhPc
Previously, if there was a shortage of say plane brake discs, the wholesaler would jack the price up 10x for the last 3 sets. That would lead to one of the 4 customers who wanted to buy them to say "nah, it's too expensive, we don't need it that badly".
The person who wouldn't get a set was probably the guy restocking the spare parts shelf, while the people who really really needed those parts right now so a plane can takeoff got them.
In todays world, it's illegal to jack the price, one customer buys all the cheap stock (one to use, 2 as spares cos they heard about a shortage), and now 2 planes can't take off.
The same happens for thousands of other products all across the world. The end result is the people who really need goods can't get them, while others sit on piles of stock 'lucky we bought some just before they ran out!'. Endgame: The economy grinds to a halt over tiny shortages everywhere.
The proper solution is to allow and encourage price gouging again, and have a PR campaign to explain to the public how changing this law really is in their interests, even if it appears on the surface that paying $100 for a flashlight in an emergency can't be good for anyone.
Ad-hoc heuristic decision making + political in-fighting can get you off the ground, but it can't keep you reliably airborne.
Nowadays, no one runs with any sort of buffer if that isn't explicitly demanded by government or other regulations... and when the shit hits the proverbial fan, it hits hard as a result.
Vaccine mandates. All the staff have walked off the job rather than be jabbed.
> There are false claims of job actions by Southwest Pilots currently gaining traction on social media and making their way into mainstream news. I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise. Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes under these circumstances. SWAPA has not authorized, and will not condone, any job action.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-a-southwest-airli...
In reality, a lot of pilots can just message each other on the side and say "f-it". Idk how many it takes to take down the system, but I suspect even 20% out sick could cause a cascading failure.
They couldn't admit it if that's what they're doing. They'd have to deny it either way. Even an "unofficial" unorganized sick out.
On the other hand- if a pilot knew he was getting fired in two weeks for not getting vaccinated, and he happened to have two weeks sick pay, well then the company policy did all the "organizing" that needed to be done.
Since there is still skepticism from the other commenters too, if the union was lying could someone explain their motives?
Like what benefit does would the union have to provide confidence to the nature of the disruption? Or to cover for their pilots/employees?
Otherwise their statement being the truth is cool too
Dead Comment
The airline is saying it's something to do with weather, but somehow they're the only airline effected.
Everybody online seems to the think it's some sort of labor strike, but the union denies this and nobody can find anywhere where people are planning this.
And yet thousands of people are stuck in airports all over the country right now.
It just seems like something is going on, and that everybody is lying about it. Can't say I've ever really seen anything like this, and it genuinely freaks me out.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28824370
Edit: deleted link to tweet, comment below points out that it was from a suspect Twitter account.
Of course, zero pushback on this nonsense idea
The White House thinks they can force unilateral changes to the union contracts.
If the unions admitted to what was going on, the White House would have more legal authority to intervene more directly with the unions.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Think about it for two seconds, if that really happened, there would be hundreds of witnesses, everybody would be talking about the flight number, there would be cell phone videos and corporate social media responses. None of those things exist, so either everybody on the plane, the airport, and all their friends and relatives are in on the conspiracy except this one bot account, or they're making shit up to stir up conservatives, which is what they've done all day every day since joining the site in January 2017.
Then again, I think it's technically illegal for members of the airline industry to actively strike. So maybe this is how it's done for plausible deniability sake.
if its internal mismanagement then they do, as always follow the money.....
> The nationwide cancellations came as the airline announced Monday that the company will now require employees to get the COVID-19 vaccinated by Dec. 8.
> Some customers said they were told the cancellations are a direct result of the vaccine mandate.
> “I asked them specifically 'is this about weather' – because if it’s about weather, they can deny compensation. They said 'no, it’s not about weather.' I said 'is this about maintenance?' They said 'no, it’s not about maintenance.' I said then 'what is the problem?'" passenger Ron Frank said. “They said this is all because of the vaccine mandate. They said we had a massive walkout. They also said that air traffic control had a massive walkout because of the vaccine mandate. But to couch 1,000 cancelations because of a thunderstorm somewhere is not believable.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHOU
This doesn't make any sense at all. If a vaccine-mandate induced ATC walkout was the cause, all air carriers would be disrupted, not just Southwest.
I suspect this is someone pitching his own views about a situation he doesn't know the true cause of.
Deleted Comment
COVID vaccine shenanigans with a large chunk of the workforce near retirement age and just saying "fuck your mandate, I'll retire early" is just the cherry on top.
Dead Comment
I have a relative who works for a large credit card processor running on mainframe systems and I hear over and over again that they're all retiring and unable to fill the newly opened roles. This problem is compounded by the fact that their offshore contracting firms are cutting back on providing COBOL resources because there's a lot more money in supplying java/.net/etc. devs. The work culture there sounds so unsustainable and yet they're one of the largest payment processors in the country. If they were have widespread stability issues like this, things could get interesting.
The entire problem is that they don't pay well for what is supposedly a rare resource. And nobody wants to learn a dead language for peanuts.
Offer 500k/yr, and me and about 100 million other people will be learning COBOL starting tomorrow.
The problem is now you have a bunch of D-level cobol coders without any experience, domain knowledge, etc
Which is where we are with most Java dev shops.
But everyone knows it’s a dead end. So yeah they need to pay very well to get the fixed they need.
By that logic, there isn't a shortage of anything if you have enough money.
There’s huge demand for developers on modern systems. Seriously, how much are you going to pay a developer to do mainframe COBOL - and is that developer going to produce commensurate value, really able to hold together a crumbling antique infrastructure?
The real issue here, is during bad weather and understaffed ATC, for some reason the airforce decided to do some training in airspace used by commercial flights. This military training part in the article is mentioned quickly, then completely ignored.
This was the US Military causing delays, cancellations, and people getting stuck overnight at airports. This was the US Military causing huge operational and financial issues for one of the most customer-friendly airlines out there. And the did this while eating up millions of dollars that are taken out of our paychecks - that they used to screw us. Time for congress to remove the funds that allowed them to conduct this training at a time when it caused problems for the general population paying their salaries.
> “The problems weren’t concentrated in just one particular region. The cancelations affected the entire Southwest network. People living in cities where Southwest has a big operation, like Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and where I am in the San Francisco Bay Area, saw cancelations in the double-digits.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)
So we will go ahead and “invest” several man years and god knows how much money into a platform everybody agrees we should get off of.
The way the survivorship bias works out, this is generally a strength, not a weakness.
You want to get good money, you learn how stuff works under the hood and get familiar with your predecessor architectures, emulate them if you need to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
These systems are in place and will continue to be maintained simply because they've stood the test of time.
I wouldn't mind taking a 250$ an hour position with on the job training.
Odds are they're getting outbid by easier jobs. If I can write Javascript for 130k or COBOL for 130, I'm doing JS.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/06/bailout-c...
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2021/04/09/pay-...
Matt Levine covered this last year [1]. The basic gist of it was that the CEO is focused on the shareholders, and the best use of the money was on stock buybacks. Spending money on improving customer or labor relationships wouldn't have helped during the start of the pandemic when all the airlines were stuck in the same boat unable to fly planes, and the cash used by e.g. American Airlines for buybacks in the past 7 years to increase the stock value 113% would have only bought them 4 months of operating expenses. The most long-term value for shareholders was created through the buybacks, and the government being willing to prop the businesses up during downturns reduces the risk exposure from this strategy.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-17/the-go...
I'm reading a book right now called "The Power of Nothing to Lose" which explores the primary and second order effects of individuals and companies being put into situations where they literally have nothing to lose. It's been an interesting read so far - recommended.
Oh, and for folks talking about a pilot protest against vaccine mandates, that theory is discussed at length toward the end of the article.
(EDIT: which would match the union statement /u/hnburnsy quotes: but what was a minor temporary event for other carriers devastated Southwest Airlines because our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure. Our operation and our frontline employees have endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures.)
Here’s an article from the AP that mentions the “point-to-point route network” as a contributing factor in terms of a cascading failure: https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-business-travel-8abd4e0...
> There are false claims of job actions by Southwest Pilots currently gaining traction on social media and making their way into mainstream news. I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise. Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes under these circumstances. SWAPA has not authorized, and will not condone, any job action.
These numbers come from the US DOT ontime database. You can access the data in ClickHouse at https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443 (user=demo, password=demo). This is a public instance running on Altinity.Cloud.
All I get is a white screen with the word "Ok"
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.35...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Compensation_Regulation
> If your flight is cancelled and you choose to cancel your trip as a result, you are entitled to a refund for the unused transportation – even for non-refundable tickets. You are also entitled to a refund for any bag fee that you paid, and any extras you may have purchased, such as a seat assignment.
From https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer....
Though compensation for delays, not so much.
Additionally with many similar aircraft and oy one class of service, substituting equipment is much easier for Southwest than traditional carriers.
More flights than pilots.
Like when your PM brings in work from the previous sprint, to the current, fully loaded sprint.
>Online speculation that Southwest’s new vaccine mandate has led pilots to stage a sickout is being denied by the union representing Southwest pilots.
>That follows reporting on social media that some of the issues the airline is suffering could be related to that issue. A spokesperson for the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) told the Arizona Republic it was not aware of any work stoppage and wouldn’t condone it anyway.
>SWAPA, however, has authorized its members to demonstrate against the mandate.
sounds like there is a vaccine mandate-related sickout going on, and the union is unofficially encouraging it but doesn't want to be seen as doing so. I don't know why that would be the case; there's no law against airline employees doing an industrial action. Maybe the union doesn't want to be denounced for being allegedly "anti-science"?
Not as brutal as Reagan breaking the ATC union, but supporting a common carrier in a time of crisis. I don’t believe a federal case has been heard yet where the vaccine mandate or terminating those refusing it has been found unlawful.