Hacker News Reader

Comment by JamisonM | Hacker News Reader

There is a tension in the article between "the capitalists are pitting the consumers against the front line workers" premise and the "the capitalists are eliminating the front line workers" point made in the article.

Southwest's meltdown was about computer systems that coordinate "offline" based on assumptions instead of online based on passing information back and forth on a regular basis.

Southwest was a very reliable airline, it didn't have some sort of day-to-day understaffing problem, they executed an unorthodox business strategy [0] in the last year or so that has degraded their performance, and bad weather exacerbated the problem.

0: https://www.inc.com/kelly-main/southwest-becomes-one-of-amer...

View on HN

Inc. makes it sound like point to point (rather than hub and spoke) is the problem, but that seems like a distraction. Airlines operated PtP for decades; hub and spoke is a relatively new approach that has its own issues.

What got Southwest could get any airline: being stretched too thin, running schedules too tight, having everything just in time, all to cram as many fares into the sky as possible.

American also had huge delays and cancellations, United kind of always has huge delays and cancellations. There but for the grace goes any other airline in this situation.

The lesson from all this, it seems to me, is that if a meltdown can happen to a company like Southwest, which has ample resources and talent, then it could happen to anyone.

> Airlines operated PtP for decades

This is only really true prior to deregulation in 1978.

After that, Delta began hub-and-spoke out of Atlanta, and the majority of airlines followed them.

These days, as far as I can tell, Southwest is the only major carrier that doesn't follow this approach. It has its downsides. You don't have pilots sitting "on reserve" at bases ready to fly at a moments notice if there are gaps in the system. There isn't a need to shut down and esentially "reboot" the airline when there is a major disruption, which is what Southwest just had to do. Delta had the second highest cancellation rate due to this winter storm, and that was at 10%. Southwest had to cancel 70% of their schedule.

> The lesson from all this, it seems to me, is that if a meltdown can happen to a company like Southwest, which has ample resources and talent, then it could happen to anyone.

That doesn't strike me as the lesson at all, the lesson seems to be that if you have a part of your process that is brittle (staff tracking & scheduling) you need to be aware of that limitation and either address it or not execute a business strategy that makes it sure to break under duress. American & United had a lot of delays and cancellations but they did not have to essentially shut down their airlines so they could spend a few days figuring out where their crews actually were! Southwest had to do that! (And many of the SW crews had to book their own accommodation in the hopes that they would be reimbursed because everything was broken.)

The article does make it seem like the ptp model is the issue.. and it is the issue in the sense that ptp is certainly harder to support if you can't actually track where your staff is.. but having the worst staff tracking system in the industry and straining that part of your business by adding more routes that require more stringent staff tracking is kinda my point!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com