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The Man Who Saved Southwest Airlines with a '10-Minute' Idea
- Roritharr 11y agoA great example for lead bullets: http://www.bhorowitz.com/lead_bullets http://www.bhorowitz.com/lead_bullets
- swalsh 11y agoThat's an even better article than OP's, thanks :D
- boobsbr 11y agoI wish my project manager would understand this and face the fact that we're maintaining a 12-year-old application. Our application just can't do all the things the client wants in its current state and we have to keep grafting newer tech to it, and we end up with defects like a hydra.
- HenryTheHorse 11y agoThat was a good read. Thanks for sharing.
- inthewoods 11y agoThe whole book is worth a read - lots of good insights.
- plq 11y ago> The issue with their ideas was that we weren’t facing a market problem. The customers were buying; they just weren’t buying our product. This was not a time to pivot. A true gem, it's very important to make this distinction.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoInteresting. I never knew about this, and it certainly isn't true of Southwest today. These days they're the cattle-car of airlines, with their lack of assigned seating. I found this bit particularly interesting, though: > Today, the task of getting in and out of the gate in 10 minutes is impossible — but back then, says reporter Terry Maxon, the 10-Minute Turn saved the airline. What makes it so impossible? Airport security has gotten far worse, but that's long before the gate. At the gate, what makes this less possible than it was back then?
- skrebbel 11y agoPure guess: they were already driving the plane to the runway while people were still getting settled, and similarly they'd take people's luggage down while navigating to the airport. These days, I assume there are regulations that disallow anybody to move until the plane is at a full standstill. I wonder why, though. Seems to me like an airplane on the ground is a lot safer to stand in than a fully packed bus in a busy city. Any ideas?
- daurnimator 11y agoThe scale difference in airplanes can be massive. see accidents like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Yx7aNdGYZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Yx7aNdGYZo
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Symbiote 11y agoMy first thought: you would not want luggage blocking aisles if there's an accident on the ground. Also, aircraft (and trains) are held to a far greater safety standard. Yesterday's bus crash [1] is unlikely to have much investigation, never mind a change to driving practices, road engineering, law enforcement, or anything else. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/28/belgium-coach-crash-british-schoolchildren http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/28/belgium-coach-c...
- icc97 11y agoYou have to wonder how such a crash can happen on clear, dry open roads in good weather. Buses never travel that fast, nor will they have reckless drivers. There's a slight irony in that the coach is made by Van Hool which is a Belgian company - and make very good coaches from what I know. Belgium has a slightly mad thing that they allow buses full of people without seat belts / standing to travel at 50 mph along the motorways.
- hliyan 11y agoIs this one thing credited with saving the airline, or were there other efforts involved? I don't understand how a 10-minute turnaround time can turn an airline around so quickly.
- tartuffe78 11y agoIt seemed that it made up for the one airplane they had to sell, which destroyed their planned schedules, but it wasn't super clear. Maybe if they hadn't met previous obligations they would have gone under.
- phpnode 11y agoWell it's pretty straightforward, if turnaround time is only 10 minutes and your competitors take an hour then you can simply make more flights per aircraft per day than them. This is amplified when your flights are short distance domestic. Depending on destination it probably allowed them to make 2 - 3 extra flights per aircraft per day, at a time when jet fuel was not so expensive. That could make a massive difference to profitability.
- sliverstorm 11y agoHell, even in a day where jet fuel is very expensive, daily miles is still a key factor. Your margins might be smaller thanks to jet fuel, but more flights still means more revenue.
- baakss 11y agoThere were other efforts involved. Actually, if you're curious, there's some good analysis of Southwest Airlines' success in a book I read recently: "From Good To Great" by Jim Collins
- baakss 11y agoMy apologies, the book name was Great by Choice, as someone else pointed out. Both books are excellent and worth the read though.
- amelius 11y agoSounds like an easy idea to come up with, but more difficult to implement.
- geon 11y ago> "You guys are either going to turn these airplanes in 10 minutes or I'm going to fire every single one of you — and I'm going to hire a whole new crew that's willing to work and turn these airplanes in 10 minutes." Sounds like a great way to fail spectacularly. If it was impossible, it wasn't going to magically work just because everyone was too afraid to tell him.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- vidarh 11y agoIf it was impossible, the company would have failed: It was a hard constraint for them to turn around faster in order to maintain their flight schedule with one plane less in order to stop losing money.
- technofiend 11y agoIt worked in this instance. Sometimes your boss is just a tool and you suffer the consequences. I specifically advised my boss not to sell a certain hardware and software combination because it was problematic. In fact eventually the vendor dropped all support. But one of our sales guys got dollar signs in his eyes and sold it anyway to a customer of ours. Sure enough I was regularly sent out to "do something" to fix it because the systems kept crashing. Finally my boss gave me one of those "if you don't fix it today, don't bother coming back to work tomorrow" ultimatums. What exactly am I supposed to do? Rewrite the network driver for this LAN card myself? That was my last day on the job. I heard from a friend the company had to rip the entire network out and give a new one free to customer after he threatened to sue. I never did hear if the sales guy had to pay for it.
- djrogers 11y ago>I never did hear if the sales guy had to pay for it. Yeah - that's not on the salesperson. The basic 'social contract' when someone takes a sales job is that the product the company sells isn't a fraudulently useless piece of crap. The salesperson didn't design, spec, or build the hardware. He didn't architect or write the drivers, he didn't QA the product, and he damn sure didn't assume the company would sell something that didn't/couldn't work. Where the hell was your QA manager? Your product manager? Those are the folks that should be responsible for this - not the salesperson.
- jusben1369 11y agoI'm so torn reading this. I do occasionally fly Southwest and I'm always impressed with how everyone working for Southwest seems just as focused on on time as I am. At the same time I think they started the "race to the bottom" that has made air travel such an increasingly unpleasant experience now in the US.
- ghaff 11y agoPeople Express is probably the most guilty party. Southwest has just been probably the most successful at building a business around no frills flying. Given deregulation though, the race to the bottom was pretty much inevitable. Too many people pick flights on the basis of lowest price.
- JadeNB 11y agoI don't know my history of cheap airlines, but it seems that, today, Ryan Air is much more egregious about "racing to the bottom" than any other airline.
- ghaff 11y agoThat's probably true based on what I've heard. (Though I've never flown them and hope to keep it that way.) Spirit in the US is apparently pretty bad too. However, they're pretty much all governed by the same calculus that a lot of people are going to buy their tickets based on whichever fare is lowest. There's some wiggle room on service quality within that constraint but not a whole lot.
- dmethvin 11y agoFlying on Southwest is actually the most pleasant experience that I've had, compared to the other carriers. They allow two free checked bags for example, and their employees are much friendlier and helpful. They give out free beer and wine several days a year (Mother's Day, Father's Day, Southwest's birthday, etc.) There certainly has been a race to the bottom in air travel the past few years, but it doesn't look like Southwest is participating.
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- galago 11y agoIts interesting how the 'reduce friction' mantra was basically as true in 1972 as it is today.
- mcphage 11y agoI'm sure if the Romans wrote business texts, it would be in there, too :-)
- rpedela 11y agoI recommend reading Great by Choice [1] which talks more about Southwest Airlines and what makes them great. The book is about "10X companies" and what they have in common, but also what they do differently from their competitors. For example, Southwest Airlines copied PSA's business model verbatim but PSA [2] went out of business. The book talks about why. The main reason I like the book and others in the series [1] is that it is like reading a really long research paper about what makes great companies great with entertaining anecdotes sprinkled in. 1. http://www.jimcollins.com/books.html http://www.jimcollins.com/books.html 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines
- baakss 11y agoSeconded on the book choice. Although, I thought the business parts of the book were excellent, but the mountain climbing anecdotes were absolutely gut wrenching. I actually at times found some of those passages about people freezing to death difficult to read. Others may have found it a bit more entertaining than I did though, and the life lessons about preparation and calculations are applicable to business.
- moheeb 11y agoI don't consider Southwest Airlines great at all. They are my least favorite airline to fly. I've experienced some pretty terrible customer service from them. I feel their boarding routine is the worst in the business. What, in your opinion, makes them "great"?
- baakss 11y agoFrom an article attached to the book: "From an initial list of 20,400 companies, we sifted through 11 layers of cuts to identify cases that met all our tests (our study era ran through 2002). Only seven did. We labeled our high-performing study cases with the moniker "10X" because they didn't merely get by or just become successful. They truly thrived. Every 10X case beat its industry index by at least 10 times. Consider one 10X case, Southwest Airlines (LUV). Just think of everything that slammed the airline industry from 1972 to 2002: Fuel shocks. Deregulation. Labor strife. Air-traffic controller strikes. Crippling recessions. Interest rate spikes. Hijackings. Bankruptcy after bankruptcy after bankruptcy. And in 2001, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. And yet if you'd invested $10,000 in Southwest Airlines on Dec. 31, 1972 (when it was just a tiny little outfit with three airplanes, barely reaching breakeven and besieged by larger airlines out to kill the fledgling), your $10,000 would have grown to nearly $12 million by the end of 2002, a return 63 times better than the general stock market. These are impressive results by any measure, but they're astonishing when you take into account the roiling storms, destabilizing shocks, and chronic uncertainty of Southwest's environment. Meanwhile, Southwest's direct comparison, Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA), flailed and was rendered irrelevant, despite having the same business model in the same industry with the same opportunity to become great." Src: http://www.jimcollins.com/books/great-by-choice.html http://www.jimcollins.com/books/great-by-choice.html
- afterburner 11y agoNow, do it in 9!
- metasean 11y agoTangential anecdote - In bootcamp, our drill instructors were famous for giving us a countdown and then counting us down along the lines of "You have 10 seconds, 10, 9, 7, 3, 2, 1, you're done!" In addition to skipping numbers, the "3, 2, 1" portion was said as quickly as they could manage. I think we only ever got about 50-75% of any supposed allotment of time. To this day, I still can't hear a countdown without wondering what numbers will be skipped, and of course, I expect "3, 2, 1" to only take up about a second and a half.
- StillBored 11y agoBeing fast was good for the customer too. Being able to show up a few minutes before the plane was scheduled to depart, buy a ticket, walk out on the tarmac, board, and take off is a far cry from modern air travel. The "bus" mentality, really worked in TX where the cities are close enough to have a lot of commerce/travel but far enough away that driving can take a considerable amount of time. Flight time between dallas->houston is an hour, driving is 3 hours. The problem is that with full planes, reliably buying a same day ticket is basically impossible. Add in parking/shuttles, security and and all the BS pushes the time in excess of 2 hours. Plus, its hard to guess at weather a few days out, so sometimes you know on the way to the airport that delays/etc are going to cause a flight to take longer than driving. The 5 minute faster boarding time on SW is no longer a customer service advantage when the customer has been waiting over an hour to board.
- nickff 11y agoThe quick boarding and exiting times are important not because they provide a customer service advantage through convenience, but because they reduce the amount of time the aircraft spend on the ground. Time spent on the ground is basically waste from the perspective of the airline, and this is especially critical for short-haul routes where these delays add up to a significant portion of the aircraft's day. If the aircraft is flying 1 hour trips, and you can reduce turn time from 20 mins to 10, that means that the whole trip is reduced from 1hr20min to 1hr10min, which works out to a 12.5% shorter trip time for the given route. This means you can either transport 12.5% more people on this route with a given number of aircraft, service 12.5% more equivalent routes with these aircraft, or reduce your fleet size (and marginal costs) by 12.5%.
- anovikov 11y agoDown here in Europe it is still okay to call a taxi 1.5 hours before takeoff, get to the airport, buy a ticket and fly. Is American security checks system so inefficient? In Europe it normally takes maybe 10 minutes if you go the normal line or max 2 minutes if you go choose 5-10 euro fast track, plus 2 minutes to buy that fast track on a separate counter, which a bit sucks.
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- xpda 11y agoNPR doesn't give much credit to the SW airlines ads of the 1970's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR7JApjgIGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR7JApjgIGw
- Cymen 11y agoWhy isn't it possible to get in and out at 10 minutes? Is the modern airport a design failure?
- cperciva 11y agoThe largest factor is probably bigger planes. Southwest started out flying 737-200s; their fleet is now mostly 737-700s and 737-800s.
- ItsDeathball 11y agoJetways. The article mentions boarding passengers while others are still leaving the plane. That's only possible on a 737 by using two doors, which is only practical if passengers walk out on the tarmac and board/disembark via sets of mobile stairs.