But the Southwest system is not "phone-based" by design, I presume? They are going via phone because the decision support system for ops/crew control are down/u

But the Southwest system is not "phone-based" by design, I presume? They are going via phone because the decision support system for ops/crew control are down/unusable? If they've resorted to doing all their scheduling manually with pen and paper, any data pushed to the edge (air crews, ground staff etc) will need to be transmitted in a similarly manual fashion. The gate/ground/air crews are not making autonomous decisions about who is flying what, when and where. That is decided by some ops/crew control structure in the airline.