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The other carriers do also have a tipping point of no return, where their software can't handle the situation. But, they were more aggressive about canceling fl
by taway22323 4y ago
The other carriers do also have a tipping point of no return, where their software can't handle the situation. But, they were more aggressive about canceling flights in careful waves before they got to that point.
Some of the observations here are correct, but there's a big missing piece. Southwest went too far in with an overoptimistic schedule. They won't say that because then there's no easy scapegoat, it's just a pure management thing.
- angry_octet 4y agoThere is always a trade-off between robustness and efficiency. By leaving less slack the SWA schedule is more efficient, but also more tightly strung. When failures exceeded the slack capacity the whole schedule fell apart. The problem of recovery is also extensively studied. But it seems like SW did not put enough effort into having fault tolerant restart. This whole event is a management decision.
- taway22323 4y agoRight. I'm saying though, it's not just the initial state of less slack in their system due to hub and spoke versus point to point. It's also that other airlines were more realistic about backing off flights earlier and more aggressively as a reaction to the developing info on the storm.
- angry_octet 4y agoIt paints a picture of an organisation which didn't see the need to accurately assess risk on a real time basis. If I was the COO I would want rolling projections for the week based on good/bad/ugly weather. But it seems SW was too busy cutting costs and building capacity as cheaply as possible to think about that.