You touched upon the core issues. Yes, SkySolver should be able to get a solution quickly. Yes, there should be systems in place to co-ordinate invidividual act

You touched upon the core issues. Yes, SkySolver should be able to get a solution quickly. Yes, there should be systems in place to co-ordinate invidividual actions of 20k people with rapid adjustments. Yes, they should have procedures in place to do "black starts". But they don't. And you can't design, test, and roll out even a new communications system to 20k users literally overnight. If they existing scheduling system doesn't already email crew, then do they have email addresses for all them? If so, it's probably in HR somewhere; if that's outsourced then it could take days for SWA to get that pulled out even on an expedited basis. If they send email, what percentage of crew will receive it? In what timeframe? Email campaigns are notoriously porous. And how do crewmembers provide feedback? A standalone web page? Great--how do you authenticate? By interfacing the existing system? What will that take? Probably not, though--it appears the existing feedback mechanism is a manual phone call to a person. Do crewmembers even have login IDs? Finally, even with perfect communication there's the problem of getting people where they need to be when the transport system is very flaky. I think that's probably the issue when the CEO said 'they would get things manually set up, and then something would happen and we'd have to start all over again.' The pilot's union and others have been critizing SWA for not investing in infrastructure. The previous CEO, responding to the previous melt-down, said something about 'you can't test for these kind of scenarios.' That's wrong. You can't do it easily or cheaply, but it is possible. They haven't done it, they haven't developed robust systems, and now they can't instantly resolve the problem.