[etempleton]

Good times are for getting the house in order so things don’t go sideways in the future and creating frameworks for when things inevitably do go sideways. If you have good plans and everyone is one the same page people can fall back to standard operating procedure and not over think things or panic because they don’t know what to do.

In the case of Southwest they failed to invest in critical infrastructure and probably contingency planning as well. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I am sure there were/are people who knew this was a ticking time bomb.

[baxtr]

What exactly happened at Southwest?

[etempleton]

There are some threads online from Southwest employees. Essentially the entire system, which relied on dialing in via phone, failed catastrophically.

Those employees could, if not see this coming, at least knew the system was antiquated and brittle. A failure of some magnitude was inevitable. This failure however was so bad that they lost everything. They didn’t know where their own planes were, where their crew was, where baggage was, anything. It was all lost or at least inaccessible for days. The details of how and why the failure happened I am sure will come out, but essentially this was tech debt that the previous CEO saw no value in improving.

[baxtr]

Thanks! Very insightful.

Can you share links to the threads you mention?

[etempleton]

Here is a reddit thread from a Southwest Pilot and has a quote from some other employees as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/zw6upo/h...

[TedDoesntTalk]

They canceled close to 3000 flights in the last few days, stranding hundreds of thousands of people.

[late2part]

More like 10k:

"This week, with cancellations from other major airlines ranging from none to 2%, Southwest has canceled nearly 10,000 flights as of Wednesday and warned of thousands more Thursday and Friday, according to FlightAware. "

https://apnews.com/article/business-transportation-us-depart...

[nijave]

I think they were doing close to 3k per day for a few days