5 ms·

im kind of doubting that thread, not necessarily fraud but not every employee has the full picture * this memo[1] from the SWA VP thats circulating dated Decem

• phpisthebest 4y ago
  There have been plently of reporting about the bag issue, including a Chicago local reporter posting a video of 100's or maybe even 1000's of bags in chicago most of southwest tags on them It appears there was a MASSIVE disconnect between baggage and people, bags are ending up all over the place even though the people never left.
  • tiahura 4y ago
    Sounds the the perfect setup for an AirTag commercial.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      iPhone alert: there are ten thousand airtags near you
      • giantrobot 4y ago
        Well that at least narrows it down to near you. /s
      • joezydeco 4y ago
        I'm kind of curious about that. If AirTags rely on nearby iPhones to capture tag IDs as they pass by and relay them to Apple, will a ramp worker with an iPhone in his pocket start seeing shorter battery life?
        • bombcar 4y ago
          I suspect yes but almost imperceptibly. It’s got to be less power than the phone uses to stay in contact with the towers.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      The rare times I check a bag I throw an AirTag in. Although the airline app has always been accurate it's cheap insurance if a bag isn't properly scanned or something.
      • airtag 4y ago
        I've been flying with an airtag in my luggage in Europe since summer this year. It's been great. My luggage missed a connection in december, when I arrived at the destination I could instantly see that it still was at the other airport. So while the others were waiting for the bags, I could already file a complaint (at the nearly empty complaints queue). Then three hours later I could see bag movement to the tarmac and knew that my bag cought the next flight. Also, when in a city, it's a lot of fun to say: bring me back to my bag instead of looking up the hotel address. For anyone with an iphone & checked bags I can really recommend it.
        • Dragonai 4y ago
          You bagging the username "airtag" just to share this comment is so funny. I think this is a great idea though and I didn't even think about "bring me back to my bag" - that's awesome :)
    • kayodelycaon 4y ago
      I’ve been using AirTags for this since they came out. It’s nice to see my bag made it with the plane. :)
• kart23 4y ago
  https://old.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/zw5lsl/southwest_pilots_hows_it_going/j1tne9z/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/zw5lsl/southwest_pi... i believe this story. the scheduling system is too fragile and can’t automatically pick up disruptions to crew movement. they’re still manually scheduling some crews, but I think their main problem is they don’t have a way of knowing which crews are where and therefore can’t schedule flights. and it’s not every single piece that’s going to take 30 days, but it seems pretty likely that some bags will be lost that long.
  • raverbashing 4y ago
    > the software for scheduling is woefully antiquated by at least 20 years. No app/internet options, all manual entry and it has settings that you DO NOT CHANGE for fear of crashing it. But hey it's cheaper if we don't change it right? /s (and I kinda can agree with this, like 10% because they might end contracting with some bigger IT company that doesn't care about shipping something that works)
    • 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
      Replacing an airline scheduling system sounds insanely complex. So many moving pieces, tens of millions of physical entities to track per day: crew, passengers, planes, spare parts, luggage, crew maximum allowed shift schedules, open gates, interacting with domestic+international terminals, seat assignments, and so on. Edge cases on edge cases on edge cases developed over years, probably in some god awful language running on a mainframe somewhere before “best practices” were a thing. Modernizing such a system would take enormous political + real capital. The new system would undoubtedly have many growing pains as formerly resolved problems were not covered in the new system. It’s no surprise nobody would want to touch such a system.
      • jchanimal 4y ago
        One of the more tangible outcomes from my work on mobile sync is the United scheduling software. Seems like Southwest was too little too late on IT upgrades. https://www.couchbase.com/customers/united-airlines/ https://www.couchbase.com/customers/united-airlines/
• cududa 4y ago
  Well I mean the article we’re commenting on mentioned the baggage issue and has pictures of it
• sokoloff 4y ago
  > [it’s] pretty much an airport thing and not an airline thing. Airports are in charge of deplaning your luggage and bringing it to you That depends on the airline and airport. It’s extremely common for the airline which operates out of a large part of a terminal to do their own ramp work. Southwest employs thousands of ramp agents to do their own ground ops and under-wing work at their bases.
• burkaman 4y ago
  > I'm pretty sure that guy didn't know of the software crash before it happened Why not? Some things aren't hard to predict, it's like a Ticketmaster employee saying "our site is probably going to go down when the Taylor Swift tour goes live". If you know your systems are deficient then you can predict they'll fail in a crisis, especially if that failure has happened before (as it has for Southwest).
• avalys 4y ago
  It's not really a software "crash", it's more like, they know their process can't handle more than a certain amount of disruption before falling apart. And so if you can see that due to weather, etc. a lot of disruption is likely to happen, you can predict there's going to be a problem, and also predict that you simply don't have the staffing and systems in place to do anything about it.
• pcurve 4y ago
  Wow... that memo... is filled with such contempt. It's shocking. I wouldn't want to work there.
  • cratermoon 4y ago
    That's a "beatings will continue until morale improves" message.
    • paganel 4y ago
      That's also an excellent ad for why unions are needed.
      • tpmoney 4y ago
        Aren't most airline employees in a union?
        • cratermoon 4y ago
          Air traffic controllers had a union until 1981, when Reagan's aw-shucks niceness led him to abruptly and unilaterally disband PATCO and fire all the striking controllers. PATCO had endorsed Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.
  • burkaman 4y ago
    Yeah, and just to add some context for people who might not be familiar with US healthcare, what the VP is asking for is effectively impossible, so this is an order to work sick. The majority of Americans cannot just "go to the doctor" whenever they feel like it, especially 4 days before Christmas. The best most people could do in this situation is call a doctor's office and be told they can get an appointment in a couple months, or go to the emergency room if it's an emergency. So the choice here if you're sick is to waste emergency healthcare workers' time and probably pay extra for unnecessary emergency care, go to work sick, or get fired. This is obviously intentional, and in many parts of the US totally legal. I don't know specific Colorado laws but there is no federal law against this.
• karlkatzke 4y ago
  > calling a staffing emergency saying all hell is about to break loose That memo is specifically about ground operations at DEN, and specifically because of the arctic weather conditions and a high number of sick calls and ramp agents that outright quit. You can earn more flipping burgers in Denver than you can as a SWA gate agent with five years of experience. Failing to pay staff is also a management failure. The scheduling software crashed due to the number of pilots and flight attendants that were out of position and the number of changes that were made to the schedule. I would imagine that there was an overflow in some situation -- i.e. "the number of changed schedules should never exceed 65535" that worked every year until this one. But this system was already known to be unstable, another Reddit comment said that "there are settings you don't change for fear the entire thing will crash." Which it has before in 2016. Not expecting that history will repeat itself and doing something about it is also a management failure. > Also its pretty much an airport thing and not an airline thing Absolutely incorrect. While the airport runs the automated conveyance system that gets the bag from where the rampers drop it to the baggage claim, the people that handle the baggage at every manual step in between are SWA employees. If there aren't enough of them, the bags don't make it on the plane on time. Notice that the people doing this work for Southwest Airlines are all wearing Southwest uniforms. Like most complicated failures, this was failure with multiple causes and contributing factors. The core of the problem seems to be that management was rent-seeking without making appropriate structural changes to keep up with system load.
• barkingcat 4y ago
  luggage is totally an airline thing, not an airport thing
• jcomis 4y ago
  I flew out of Denver after several delays/cancels and not only was the baggage area full of bags, the outside gate area was absolutely flooded with bags COVERED in snow. Which means they have been there for days. I'm talking dozens and dozens of haulers loaded to the brim with bags covered in snow. The baggage area was wall to wall bags. Additionally I was told (by a crew member) Southwest refused to meet wage demands with ramp / fuel crews so they all quit. Apparently they sent them an email basically saying a recession is coming so be thankful you have a job... Meanwhile all other jobs pay more in the area. Anecdote I know, but we did have to wait 2.5 hours for fuel on my flight.
  • chasd00 4y ago
    a people problem like you describe seems much much harder to solve in any reasonable time frame compared to a software issue.
• verall 4y ago
  There's tons of people without bags, and additionally due to the total operational breakdown there is no one to ask about where your bag is and hear any idea about what's going to happen.
• deleted 4y ago
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