>>they had several on board already as passengers. But none of them could reach the headquarters quickly enough to tell them, look, we’ll work this flight. And

>>they had several on board already as passengers. But none of them could reach the headquarters quickly enough to tell them, look, we’ll work this flight. And so the flight ended up getting canceled. >>Michael Barbaro: Even though the flight attendants were on the plane. >>Niraj Chokshi: Right, exactly. And so this kind of thing was happening across the board. And the airline just could not keep up with the nature of the problem. Perhaps more importantly, they had provided no means to push decision-making to the edges of the system. This is apparently an absolutely critical difference between the armed forces of Ukraine and Russia, where UKR has updated to modern command & control pushing decision-making out as far into the field as possible, while RUS has very centralized C&C, so UKR can outfight them even though outnumbered 5:1, and both sides are running short of artillery. Here, SW, cannot even fix parts of their system when the fix is literally on the tarmac fully configured and loaded, just not centrally approved. They can't just say, we're good, every item on the checklist is verified, we're going, here's the data, we can update via communications en-route. I'd bet that such solutions exist within an hour of scheduled takeoff for more than 50% of the situations. Instead, it looks like they are 100% shutdown.