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Comment by rhaway84773 | Hacker News Reader

It feels like SouthWest has been at the center of every scheduling disaster in the US over the past few years.

Even if it’s out of their control (many of the issues were within their control), it seems Southwest fails way worse than every other US airline.

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That period also included a massive expansion of Southwest’s footprint— something like 18 cities. I fly a lot and never had much trouble with them until this last week. United and American have been far worse for me in terms of delays and cancellations, not to mention their disgruntled staffs.

>not to mention their disgruntled staffs.

Isn't this just normal for all American customer-service people? I guess it's relative though.

No. Southwest staff is almost never disgruntled. They're hired and known for their positive attitudes. The company culture is very different from other airlines, which is why there are a lot of books written about it.

I've flown Southwest dozens of times. While I like their lower costs it's pretty easy to see where they are cutting costs with operations. In "normal" conditions their cost cutting is just functional. In any sort of exceptional situation their entire system fall apart.

On what other occasion has their entire system fallen apart? Most every other passenger I encountered during this debacle said something to the effect of “this never happens on Southwest”. I do agree that they’ve been squeezing the system (especially labor) the last few years during their covid expansion, however. This weather was apparently the final straw.

Every single one has had this happen. Delta by memorial day, Alaska Airline in May, a whole bunch of them Aug 7, and June 17-20, Apr 3.

I happens quite frequently, but unless you follow airline news, or you were personally impacted you would not necessarily know.

The inc article I linked to above has several examples of other days where SWA cancelled hundreds to a thousand flights at one time. But today has clearly dwarfed even the worst of the previous incidents.

Yes, the scale is completely different. As the commenter after you noted, the events you're referring to happen all the time with other airlines as well.

Weather... or Chris Johnson.

https://twitter.com/AtSouthwest/status/1606543397996855296

This one affected a lot of people traveling to the 2021 US Grand Prix in Austin & it supposedly didn't affect Southwest [my Alaska flight was cancelled after four hours of "any minute now"]:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2021/10/2...

Southwest flies all the flights it markets, they do not contract regional carriers for any flights like all of the airlines SkyWest is contracted by.

Regional carriers typically operate smaller aircraft with less senior crew and sorta serve to expand the mainline carriers markets and also often serve to feed the mainline carriers experienced pilots for their mainline aircraft.

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