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by FesterCluck
1267 days ago
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Everyone here is at least a little misinformed regarding their software and it's simulation abilities. They have control systems with the data they need, and this data is fed into the flight scheduling & monitoring UI. Their tech works, it just gets bashed on because it's different than a lot of other airlines. Used properly it can account for these things. What causes things like this is overbooking. Overbooking happens in more than just butts in seats. If you're not going to have enough ground crew to handle your SLA on flights, flights should be preemptively cancelled to keep them under that SLA. Airlines keep that SLA as low as safety permits. The max is set by the FAA at 3 hours for domestic flights and 4 hours for international flights (both ends). Southwest's software is doing it's job, it has adjustable tolerances. It will even take into account weather conditions reducing ground crew therefore raising SLA. But, the effect of the weather conditions on the ground crew is also adjustable by humans. As a matter of fact, while one would think it would just reference historical data, that's not exactly true. It references predictive models that are adjusted by experienced individuals. Those individuals can be ordered to adjust the parameters outside their honest assessment to allow for steps at the beginning of the process to operate smoothly. Weather prediction has a horizon. Southwest allowed excess bookings beyond that horizon, or they allowed excess last minute bookings. This weather event was massive and one-sided, yes, but it was also completely predictable. A human made the decision to widen the guardrails. There aren't a ton of people allowed to do that, I can think of maybe 3. Disclosure: I wrote software for SWA many years ago. Nothing I've said here is privileged, in fact most airlines operate this exact way. |
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I consulted for a few large carriers and this was my conclusion also. In fact most very large American enterprises have all the same issues. With airlines the problems simply become really visible all at once really quickly when things go wrong.
For the folks here on HN whose experience is mainly in Silicon Valley: it's hard to appreciate how little the execs at these companies care about software. They don't care, not even a little bit, and they definitely don't care what your opinions are. Their priority is growth, the stock price, and answering to the board (not necessarily in that order). The only carrier I heard about that cared for their IT was Continental and they were bought by United.
Compounding the issue is how staffing works at these companies. Being a full-time employee at an airline is considered attractive because you get benefits including cheap airline tickets. My understanding is that the airline ticket perk used to be much more awesome than it is today.
In any case, airlines bend over backwards not to have full-time employees. Depending on the company they have a vast army of contractors (on shore and off shore) who are on a revolving door policy lasting from 6 to 18 months. These folks come in, get trained up for a few months, turn around tickets in a grueling and dehumanizing environment, then they get to take a hike for a while until they can come back on another short-term stint. I had a colleague who had been full-time at SWA, he said his job literally only consisted of training people up on the systems, he rarely wrote much code himself, he was there to 'keep it all together.'
But honestly, the current crisis is not a surprise. The IT systems at big American enterprises are truly horrific. It is decades of homegrown software "integrated" with decades of acquisitions where systems are smashed together on short timelines in service of quarterly goals.
If you want to find the true culprit here, look up at the broader structure of the economic system. This mess is created by how we run the economy.