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Animats

Yes, if both management and the union say there wasn't a job action, there probably wasn't.

The Washington Examiner seems to be one of the parties that made this up.[1]

[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-airlines-shou...

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This rag specializes in misinformation and fake news.

> if both management and the union say there wasn't a job action, there probably wasn't.

This is just making an uninformed opinion based on the apparent factional interests of an organization.

Both can have an interest of denying it. For example, management don't want to scare off investors and stocks to go down and it is not in the interest of the union legally to admit that it initiated such a collective action, especially while they are in court for a case relating vaccine mandates.

It is also fair to doubt what is officially said given deceptive claims that the weather caused them to stay grounded even if it didn't affect other airlines and that airliners fly above most adverse weather conditions.

Weather regularly grounds airlines - the problem is not weather in flight, the problem is weather at specific airports, and with how southwest flight graph is constructed the knock on effects can be huge (it's also why in hub-spoke setups you have huge investments into making hubs capable of dealing with extreme weather)

Which still doesn't explain why other airlines operating at these ports didn't experience this kind of large scale disruptions and why no weather maps were shown (as far as I know) to back up these claims.

Other airlines were disrupted, but not to the same level, due to different level of dependance on said stop. The second most affected airline IIRC had Jacksonville as minor stop, and out of all impacted, only Southwest used what they call "line flow" flight planning. Which results in Southwest being the only one to end up with stuck planes that were supposed to service a many routes way further away.

Most low-cost airlines operate on a sort of "distributed hub-and-spoke" (many small hubs instead of one/few big ones), with plane going bidirectionally on a route to non-hub airport before any route switching happens. This means that so long as the "hub" isn't severely impacted your disruption is somewhat contained and you still have access to a fleet of planes&crews that can be reassigned. A pattern like this:

  H->A->H->B->H->C->H ;; H = "Hub"; A,B,C - spoke airports

Disruption at A,B, or C doesn't block unrelated flights, only disruption at H.

Southwest instead flies like this

  A->B->C->D->E->F->G

If B is in any way blocked, flights B->C, C->D, D->E, E->F, and F->G are all going to be disrupted, possibly without replacements plane/crew combinations available. If the disrupted airport has a lot of overlapping "lines" like that, the disruption quickly turns catastrophical.

Also, appears that at least some approaches were manually vectored recently at KJAX, which isn't fun if there's a shortage of controllers.

Weather maps don't show unusual adverse weather conditions. Other didn't show apparent impact, even lesser. Face it, it's not the weather.

Because it was not just weather. It was combination of weather with low staffing of local ATC and disruptions to flight patterns. Weather is just one of the triggers.

Which would have impacted heavily local airlines too, which didn't happen. Also again, weather maps do not lie.

I'm seeing on twitter a lot of reports of cancelled flights for American Airlines today (200+ cancelled, 500+ delayed).

I saw one explanation (no idea if it's true) that individuals were taking sick days because their banked PTO wouldn't get paid out if they're terminated on Dec 8 because of the mandate. So not a "sick out" that's organized, but possibly a lot of employees just taking their 'paid vacation' while they still can.

Some have also claimed that PTO's are the precursor to likely (mass) resignations too.

Who? You need to include sources when making fantastic and difficult to independently verify claims. Otherwise you’re just spamming propaganda.

It doesn't matter. What mattered is it sparked my curiosity in knowing more, above and below my immediate reply as well as the rest of the comments in this post, however true or false they are. Everyone goes somewhere and I (try to) go where they've been with some DYOR.

Some things I never knew until recently:

- PTO isn't federally and legally required yet most companies do it

- Some states have some influence on PTO policy

- Southwest Airlines is a Texas-headquartered company

- Because of claims that MSM are either incompetent or narrative-driven, secondary and tertiary conjectures leading to this headline should be considered as well

- Lastly, a visit to Wikipedia yielded this line:

> If PTO hours go unused, employees may sometimes call in sick near the end of the year so they can obtain the benefit of paid leave before it disappears. Employers may counter this tendency by paying employees for some or all of their unused days at year-end or upon retirement or resignation.[1]

PTO is a form of compensation. Every place I’ve worked at has paid me for unused, accrued PTO when I left. But I’ve also never been terminated, so don’t know if that matters.

Some states require this, some don't.

I've worked in places that do pay unused PTO and places that don't - all in the same state. My experience is paying it out is less common.

Unused PTO must be paid out in many states and in states where it is not legally required it is generally still required if the business has historically done it. Beyond that, Southwest pilots are unionized. No sizable union would allow separation without PTO payout.

Unions are for people in the Union, aka the people still working there, not for those getting fired with cause (failure to get vaccinated). This sounds exactly like something a union wouldn't care about.

What are your credentials for telling us things that unions do and don’t care about? What unions are you in? What direct experience do you have with how unions decide what’s important to them?

This is definitely not true.

Unions absolutely negotiate separation terms, etc.

> I saw one explanation (no idea if it's true) that individuals were taking sick days

Good news! If you actually read the article, you get information like:

“Nothing like that is true,” Jordan said. “We didn’t see sick leave beyond normal. In fact, we saw our crews picking up open time to the extent that they could.”

RTFA: it’s better than random Twitter speculation. I mean, yeah, it’s about Southwest and not American, but it’s hard to see why pilot behavior would be different.

That doesn't seem to exactly contradict Covzire. Covzire was talking about vacation, while the quote is mostly talking about sick leave.

Covzire was claiming without any proof whatsoever that they saw "lots of reports on twitter."

They're saying they took sick days instead of vacations.

That's entirely about sick leave.

I think I misunderstood, but my main idea might still stand. Some companies treat vacation and sick days as the same thing, and put them in the same bucket called PTO. Some companies separate them. I'm not sure what Southwest does. If Southwest separates them, then labster's quote could be true while simultaneously a lot of employees are out on vacation days due to wanting to use them up before quitting.

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