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Comment by mkaic | Hacker News Reader

Got stuck in Denver yesterday thanks to this. Flight was delayed for 2.5 hours, airport was insanely crowded and the poor lady at the Southwest desk had a never ending stream of people asking questions she didn't have answers to. The airport bar was certainly making a heck of a lot of sales, though!

On a serious note, it seems somewhat of an oversight that Southwest's entire multibillion dollar operation can be ground to a halt due to the weather pamphlet printing system breaking. Talk about single points of failure!

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Is the weather pamphlet system owned by the airport bar business?

synergy

I imagine checking the weather is an important task for pilots.

You tend to want redundancy for important tasks.

On the other hand airlines work on very thin margins, controlling costs is important.

Airlines really do work on the thinnest or margins. I've seen a few Youtube videos on the topic but it's basically why you see zero startup airlines, it's basically impossible. The immense startup cost and operations cost coupled with the fact that your competitors are 100x bigger and can crush you like a bug.

I'm going to call BS on that... Ignoring 2020 and looking at their 2019 report (that was released in Jan 2020) we see they had their 47th consecutive year of profit [0]. They are making plenty of money and margin doesn't factor into it when they are pulling down massive profits like this.

[0] https://www.southwestairlinesinvestorrelations.com/news-and-...

And Southwest is one of the most profitable airliners too. They use huge planes between major hubs and stack you in like sardines only mildly more comfortable than Spirit.

I believe they were also the most profitable US airline last year because of how streamlined their entire operation is. They could afford it if they wanted it.

I wouldn’t consider 737s huge planes.

Also, their entire fleet is made up of 737s, so it’s not like large airports get a massive planes (maybe a MAX vs a -700, but still not a huge difference)

Of course margin factors into it. It always does. Margin accounts for all of that profit.

Looks like their net margin was about 10%. Which isn't super low. But it's no 30% plus like many of the tech giants.

Security is expensive. Redundancy also. Unfortunately they have great savings potential.

Indeed. I feel like many companies have their IT systems in varying levels of disrepair. Just look at the sheer amount of data breaches. At least this wasn’t a security breach (though I’d imagine (hope?) that it’d wouldn’t impact aircraft in flight.

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