| > calling a staffing emergency saying all hell is about to break loose That memo is specifically about ground operations at DEN, and specifically because of the arctic weather conditions and a high number of sick calls and ramp agents that outright quit. You can earn more flipping burgers in Denver than you can as a SWA gate agent with five years of experience. Failing to pay staff is also a management failure. The scheduling software crashed due to the number of pilots and flight attendants that were out of position and the number of changes that were made to the schedule. I would imagine that there was an overflow in some situation -- i.e. "the number of changed schedules should never exceed 65535" that worked every year until this one. But this system was already known to be unstable, another Reddit comment said that "there are settings you don't change for fear the entire thing will crash." Which it has before in 2016. Not expecting that history will repeat itself and doing something about it is also a management failure. > Also its pretty much an airport thing and not an airline thing Absolutely incorrect. While the airport runs the automated conveyance system that gets the bag from where the rampers drop it to the baggage claim, the people that handle the baggage at every manual step in between are SWA employees. If there aren't enough of them, the bags don't make it on the plane on time. Notice that the people doing this work for Southwest Airlines are all wearing Southwest uniforms. Like most complicated failures, this was failure with multiple causes and contributing factors. The core of the problem seems to be that management was rent-seeking without making appropriate structural changes to keep up with system load. |