| Truth is even they won't really know until they have time to do a post mortem. Some observations, though. - Via the departure control, manifests, etc...they DID know where their crews went. Any employee flying non-rev, deadhead, or on duty is recorded by employee number. There was likely a problem with keeping that synced with the crew management platform. - Large parts of this have little to do with technology. Point to point versus hub and spoke means less slack. And recently, SWA has removed even more slack trying to drive revenue with aggressively optimistic schedules, overbooking, tight crew slack, etc. If they didn't pull pack the schedule in small, manageable pieces like the other airlines did, there's no system that would save them. Seems likely they didn't pull back enough before the storm. There's a brink you can't go past, and a rate of cancels you shouldn't exceed. You have to guess right earlier. - Crew unions have historically negotiated out anything that looks like big brother, location tracking for example...even on-demand "I'm here". So lots of things that could have made this better didn't exist , on purpose. - A fair amount of the reset is just practicalities of using planes empty of pax to get rested crews staged in the right cities and bags to the right places. |