4 ms·

Other airlines have staffing issues too. The bottom line here is that the hub-and-spoke model is more resilient than the point-to-point model.

• miguelazo 4y ago
  That is definitely not the case. The real issue is that even the staff that did show up didn't know where to go. There were employees lost for hours at Denver because the call-in scheduling system went down. Some employees hit their limits for work time before they could even obtain their assignments.
  • twblalock 4y ago
    That’s a symptom. The root cause was lack of resiliency in airplane routing. It’s the only thing that explains why Southwest was uniquely impacted this week. Every other airline has staff issues, and the same weather to deal with. With a point to point network, the coordination problem is much larger than with a hub and spoke network. That is probably what pushed Southwest’s software over the limit. But remember, the software didn’t fail by itself in a vacuum. Resiliency problems during a weather event were the root cause.
    • miguelazo 4y ago
      What other airline relies entirely on a call-in scheduling system?