This Caused the Southwest Airlines Christmas Meltdown. 

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As a passenger that got caught up in this dysfunction, it's somewhat illuminating to understand more of the root cause. I've been in the IT business for 40 years, and I can tell you that many many companies are deferring investment in IT systems because they see the systems as an expense rather than as a tool. Any tool breaks, wears out, needs sharpening, lubrication or other such maintenance to keep it running correctly. This is interesting to see yet another example of an IT system that failed due to the negligence of the owners of the system.

I am not a pilot, but I am an IT professional. This is the result of companies treating IT as a cost center instead of something that makes the company money. "Why spend money upgrading systems when the ones we have already work?" This is why you upgrade before a disaster happens.

As a retired programmer who used to work on airline scheduling software, this is fascinating. Schedule optimisation has so many conditions it needs to take account of. And of course an airline wants to have the most efficient schedule possible, because those short turnarounds are what makes it money. But the downside of that is that the more efficient a schedule is, the less flexible it is, because there is no wiggle-room left to cope with disruptions. Good point there about the natural partitioning of the scheduling problem when there are multiple aircraft types to deal with. And, yes, 20-25 minutes to re-optimise a schedule is... too long. Also very good and fair point that it is usually the transitioning to new software which is most disruptive. Which adds to the reluctance to change the software. And, worse, depending on how old the software is, upgrading to faster hardware as a stop-gap measure... might be just as difficult as getting all-new software, because the software would need to be ported to run on the new hardware, not because the hardware is different, but because the software running on that hardware would be different... including the compilers which convert the program source into the actual program. Lots of subtle changes over time which would add up to the software not able to be compiled. Not until the software was updated. Even *worse*, if the program was written in the 90's, there may no longer be any programmers around who worked on the original software, so there will be nobody around who knows how it works "under the hood". A big mess, a too-hard problem which they just kept putting off fixing.

I was one of those stuck with a cancelled flight on Xmas eve. The scene at the gate was incredible. As each flight got cancelled, the 100 or so people waiting to board all got up and got into the long long lines to talk to the agents who were having to wrestle with an unbelievable amount of very upset customers. I waited 2 hours in line to speak to an agent and get flight credit. They were handing out additional vouchers like crazy too. There were flight crews who would get on the PA and update folks waiting to get onto their flight (since it hadn't been cancelled yet). One captain told everyone that if he could just get two more flight attendants, he could take off. Unfortunately, he never did get them and he ran out of duty hours to spare. Apparently rank and file employees had been warning management for years that the system needed to be updated but management ignored them and just kept pocketing the profits.

Scheduling is like trying to rub your belly and pat your head whilst jumping over a rope that's on fire. I'd love to see a video about the NOTAM issue

It would have been really easy to just dunk all over SW in this video. I'm blown away by how fair you were to the company in this video, not only giving them a fair shake but even complimenting the things they did well during the crisis.

As someone working in IT, i totally understand why they run ancient software. We have business critical software from the 80s still running, since it would cause massive disruptions trying to replace it. It's much less risk to just build a new software around the old one to add new functionality. Heck, we probably have business critical software that are up to 4 or 5 layers by now...

That ramp agent memo was a huge mistake. They could have included some carrots instead of just sticks. For example, they could have offered 20% above normal pay rates during the emergency, additive to overtime rates, and asked politely instead of demanded. Even a short "we really appreciate your efforts during this time of extreme need" instead of multiple references to "insubordination" would have helped a ton.

Nailed it! As an employee that got to experience this all in real time, I have to say this is the fairest, most accurate, and illuminating detailing of this tremendously unfortunate event. I know I learned a few things about the inner workings of the software and scheduling process (which is mind numbing to even contemplate, as your explanation shows!); As w many things, SWA unique system is both its greatest non-people asset and it’s greatest liability. The key is maximizing for the positive while minimizing the negative. Well-done sir!

My two kids were caught in that SWA mess. Their flight was delayed for 3 days. Luckily, I live 20 minutes from the airport and dad (me) had the privilege of spending a few more days with my kids. Sadly, this is not the case for many, if not most of those affected.

It's worth noting that Southwest is still running the SAME software for their scheduling. I spent almost 40 years writing software, and I can guarantee you that fixing or rewriting (probable need) an enterprise-level software system is a project which will require at least a full year (very likely more) and cost many millions of dollars. This story is still developing, the fundamental vulnerability is still there. IT is nearly always underinvested in the commercial sector, because it is a cost center, not a revenue center. I'd wager real money that this is not the last time this sort of thing will happen, possibly again to Southwest, or possibly to another airline with similar systems (IOW, most airlines), or possibly again to an FAA (or other government) system. Or maybe all of the above. Enjoy your flight!

As an employee perspective I can tell you that it was horrible because many people only wanted to go back home and we couldn't help them to get a flight and even baggage office was burned out due to the work load. Greetings from Southwest airlines México SJD/ MMSD

Having worked in IT for quite some time There's some things that jump out at me a) "If it ain't broke don't fix it" is all well and good until b) 17:25 "Its the upgrade process itself that runs the highest risk to cause a disruption". You've just described what is broken (the upgrade process). Most good tech companies spend a portion of their budgets ensuring the upgrade process IS robust to the point where it's just part of the routine. The good tech companies treat upgrades the same way Southwest treats take-off's and landings, aka part of doing business where all the issues have been engineered out and it's the exception where things go wrong

My brother was a scheduler. He started with Western airlines and eventually retired from Delta. It was a very stressful job. Thank you for showing us the inner workings of a scheduling system. His job did have some perks. Personnel could be scheduled for Minneapolis-Saint Paul or Honolulu. Even though he didn't drink alcohol, he had one of the best stocked home bars I've ever seen. It seems alcohol was considered an appropriate gift for schedulers. Packages with little notes appeared on his desk for 2 decades. He had some great parties, and never got a hangover.

Growing up and living in the American Southwest, we always flew Southwest (and still primarily do). We were one of the flights that got cancelled while travelling and ended up renting a car and driving back home (~15 hours). At the time I was upset and if Southwest didn't make it right, I was going to start flying American more, but Southwest refunded our tickets and reimbursed us for the rental and gas within a week or so of filing our claim. Then they gave us each free 25k in points. All together I think they did a good job making up for it and I will continue flying them in the future.

As an airline pilot scheduler i can’t even imagine what those southwest schedulers were going through during that meltdown.

I was a truck driver delivering to the largest fast food restaurant. A few years back, there was a major snow storm in the northeast U.S. Drivers and warehouse workers received a similar letter about doctor notes. It took over 2 weeks to be at full staff. If asked, it would have been solved in a few days.

As an IT professional, I can say that hyper scalable systems (Systems that can handle any demand eg. google/RU-vid/facebook...etc) are extremely difficult to build and extremely expensive to maintain.

I spent two hours and 30 minutes sitting in the flight deck in Nashville the day after xmas. This was just before the mass cancellations and booking shutdown. The situation was.... frantic, to say the least. There were aircraft all over waiting for gates, compounded by snow that was delaying aircraft getting out due to deicing. We barely missed the DOT 3 hour rule which would have cost millions just for our flight. I ended up being on duty for 17 hours that day and lucked out getting a hotel. I then spent 12 hours the next day just to let them get me back to base. Even on the inside, your crews are normally nearly just as clueless as to why things are happening, and are just as subject to them. Plenty of people had to pay for rooms or cars out of pocket several nights in a row because they were simply lost in the system. I appreciate this informative look into the system and meltdown, because I honestly didn't know a lot of what was presented here.

This seems to have more in common with the Northeastern Blackout of 2003 than aviation per se. Basically, you had a network system loaded near capacity, then critical links went down in the right place and time fast enough that the recovery mechanisms couldn't keep up, leading to a full collapse. And then finally, the only path to recovery was to perform a Black Start and reset things to a known stable configuration.

As someone who works in IT and has worked in high traffic high volume businesses (Banks) the moment you said batch processing I immediately realised the problem, this kind of data is completely possible with modern (and even 1980s tech) technology to process in real time, as long as the infrastructure is right, it’s so clear that the tech they’re using is not properly fit for purpose!

A pretty fair analysis. On an unpaid leave, basically consider myself retired, but you never know, I am a CA at Southwest. It’s the holes in the Swiss cheese lining up scenario. A little bit of blame due to a good chunk of the company. Herb taught me a lot. His belief was to stay focused on taking care of your people, and everything else would take care of itself. If your people needed something, give it to them. It’s always been people under him wanting to make themselves look better on paper, that got in the way. Herb never defended things like us not having auto throttle for the longest time. It was another cog in a different cubicle who figured out that the fuel savings would provide a huge return on the investment. I always joke and say Iranian airlines had it before we did. 😂 A good and fair video Peter.

I know someone who works in the field of airline operations & scheduling software, and said they don't even WANT to have Southwest as a client due to how screwed up they've been on IT management.

Very interesting video, loved it! I'd like to see one about the NOTAM issues too :)

All businesses run on information. To neglect IT is to neglect the business

As an IT dev/architect its fascinating bc sounds like a software architecture design issue. If others also using Skysolver but only SW melted down, then sounds like the inability for real time calculation is the root cause. The 20min batch delay sounds like an integration point between old & new systems which introduces big risk when too many changes occur. My blind guess is there was probably a piece of Skysolver and a data migration effort that SW didn't want to pay for and elected to use a slow batch integration instead. Well, part of assessment is evaluating "the cost of doing nothing" and I guess now they know that number.

I was on one of the last Southwest flights (737 Max 8) out of Denver before Christmas... It was chaotic. After we boarded the plane it took 2 hours for them to finish loading baggage onto the plane and then once everything was loaded it took unusually long for anything further to progress. All while a massive storm was approaching fast. Another flight headed to the same destination as I was supposed to take off 3 hours before us, but was still on the ground when we left because it didn't have a flight crew.

Do you think you'll cover the leak of the TSA no-fly list? It's not really aviation related as far as technical details go but it's a funny case where you were actually cited in the story because of your excellent explainer videos.

That sounds like an IT manager's worst nightmare. From the way you explained it that would be like having a juggler juggling balls and just throwing more and more balls at him or her and somehow miraculously not dropping the 6 balls he or she was already juggling.

Scheduling is a really hard problem! for those that have kids in school are aware of. With the addition of crew time, closed airports, and the phase of the moon, I am actually impressed the program can cope with 1000 airplanes in 30 minutes!

This is technically the third time Southwest has had a technical issue. Everyone is forgetting about the first one on July 2016 and it took them 3 days to get back on track.

I am a Southwest ramp agent 17 years and counting, great video brother.

The problem was that SWA tried to sort things out as things were still moving. What it should have done is to announce that it would cancel ALL flights for 3 days starting Dec 24 when things were apparently completely out of control, instead of canceling 70% of flights randomly and announcing those day-to-day and leaving everyone on edge, the reset could have been done more professionally. With a 3-day advance cancelation, SWA would be able to clear the systems out completely and restart in fresh from 0. It can find out where each crew is, and then on Day 3, assign those in the out-station to fly empty planes back to the bases (i.e. where Day 4 operations will restart in the morning for each plane). Then on Day 4, everything should be back to normal. In such case, while there are still a massive number of passengers affected and need to be rescheduled or refunded, the scope is controlled from the beginning, and there would not be ongoing issue with missing luggage, etc. because no one is flying and making/missing connections in those 3 days. Everyone also know in advance then who will be affected and can start searching for alternatives, instead of everyone waiting until the last minute and hope their flights were not canceled. It is not just an IT failure. It is an operational failure that it seems that the COO was not able to understand the magnitude of the problem early and not willing to make a bold call on how to right the ship.

One of the greatest things and worst things about WN is their lack of a hub and spoke system. When you’re at outstations you have no spare crews to replace timing out crews and it becomes a domino effect. It works great when everything is on time and weather is great! They’re still a great airline but there is flaws to the method too.

The mentally of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is also why AV gas (for piston general aviation planes) still has lead in it, as well as NASA still used Fortran (an ancient computing language almost nobody still uses) when communicating with old equipment (including Hubble). But at least in NASA's case, it's hard to update systems of a satellite in orbit. Airlines' booking system is another thing that almost never gets updated because of the "if ain't break don't fix it"...

Thanks for the video, Petter! I was one of the many people who were caught up by this mess, I ended up having to rent a car to do an 8-ish hour drive home as I got stuck while trying to make a connection and they couldn't rebook me.

I'm kind of surprised that this doesn't happen MORE often now that I see how complex the scheduling system is to begin with.

I can’t say this for fact, but the final straw that caused their meltdown, had a lot to do with that memo they sent out. As the story goes, about 200 ramp personell walked off the job in Denver. That action caused a snowball effect throughout the rest of their flight schedule. And their handling of the cancellations didn’t help matters any. Even to the point where people were being forced out of the airports because their flights had been canceled. And it really got out of hand in Memphis.

I had tried scheduling Southwest the week after Christmas, but nothing was available. Then I got stuck in DFW after my AA connection had a cancellation. The baggage claim said they had a backlog of thousands of luggage to sort through due to the previous week. They said that even though Southwest flies into Love Field instead of DFW, the chaos at Love Field still had a domino effect on DFW.

I don't understand how mentor now has only 190K subscribers??? It's a really nice complimentary channel. Novelties, news, etc. I really like this approach for 2 channels. And always, the quality of the videos are impeccable! Thanks all the team 👍. Yeah the NOTAM issue we'll be nice to have some news about it. 👍😍 Is it also linked with old software? PS: I have a positive attitude hoodie. My favourite. I will buy the positive attitude Coffee cup next month.

I imagine it's hard for "outsiders" to imagine how difficult interconnected systems are to manage, even when the monster is happy. Throw in some unpalatible monster food and "hell hath no fury". Been there, done that. I'm retired from the game now, but I shuddered to think about what the various system admins and software architects were going through. Not fun at all.

In my experience as a software developer for the past decade, most companies will refuse investment into modernizing and scaling systems when the systems are "working fine" even when their developers are screaming from the rooftops about scalability issues. It takes something like this to finally get the people making the decisions to actually realize the unseen backbone of their entire business has atrophied. I really wish this wasn't the industry norm, but the mindset about posting quarterly profits makes me pretty pessimistic about real change occurring.

Unfortunately senior management at many large US (and possibly international but I can only speak for US) companies generally have little respect for IT, and see it as the first place to cut costs or not invest money to make other figures on a spreadsheet look good. I worked as an engineer at Intel for 4 years on bleeding edge high performance computing products, important to bottom line and to an extent with critical national security and industrial policy ramifications (supercomputers are enablers of countless key technologies). Yet our IT was outsourced to parasitic contracting companies that paid their contractors not much more than minimum wage. The result was horrible IT systems and support, and engineers troubleshooting or developing parallel IT and Dev-Ops systems themselves, taking time away from regular responsibilities. As a silly example, when my pc was stuck in an infinite fail loop installing a required update, one IT support guy literally said with a straight face it was because it was snowing heavily. And he sincerely believed it. He was a very nice and sincere guy and was forced have a second job at a gas station to make ends meet, but had little recent IT credentials or experience, and just wasn't fit for an IT job, but he was willing to work for horrible pay. This was the end result of years of squeezing and outsourcing every drop in a centrally important department: IT. My job before that was at a medium sized US company where in 2008 they issued me - a software developer who needs to heavily load his CPU to do his daily job - a desktop PC with just 4GB of RAM! This resulted in cumulatively at least 15 minutes a day of staring at a spinning egg-timer instead of a mouse pointer. At the time it cost just $25 for another 4GB RAM module (DIMM), and I spent hours making calls and filling forms to get my managers to approve another 4GB DIMM only to have the VP of IT (an MBA type with no IT background) angrily blanket-deny any upgrades due to the financial situation (2008). My hourly wage equivalent at the time was $60 (not including health insurance and other benefits I cost the company), so saving me 15 minutes a day would save the company at least $15, meaning the ROI on the new DIMM was less than two freaking DAYS. I made this clear to the VP of IT. But he said that if he made an exception for me word would get out and he'd have to start making exceptions for everyone, and policy was policy and 4GB met the minimum requirement so NO. He assumed I was just being a diva and clearly had zero knowledge of or desire to learn about the other side of the equation, which how much low RAM slows PCs and what that costs the company. That would take effort and curiosity, which werent rewarded traits at the VP level (as opposed to "saving the company immediate money in capital expenditures"). So I ended up buying the DIMM with my own money (for mental health purposes) and installing it secretly myself, even though that completely violated company policies. When IT is a stifling bottleneck for a company, rather than the critical enabler/accelerator of productivity that it should be, you know you have a problem (and you know you have too many MBAs in charge).

Christmas last year was just total chaos in North America flights-wise. Canada was also a mess from YVR shutting down. I narrowly missed that

The bottom line for my experience going through this event was that my lost luggage was returned to me in about a week, I got a $200 voucher for that then I also got an apology $300 ticket on the future flight with them. And my canceled flight was refunded and anything I spent on due to the canceled flight was also Reimbursed, including the replacement flight 2 days later on a different airline. Although a shitty experience, the end result turned out fairly OK, and came out kind of ahead. I hope that I wasn’t just lucky and that my experience was more common.

GREAT analysis and explanation! Juan Browne at the Blancolirio channel did a good one as well, but his was early on shortly after the crisis. Yours is more detailed of course and hats off to both of you for tackling this complicated subject!

Thanks for yet another great video, Petter! Looking forward to a video on the NOTAM incident. Gotta say, as frustrating as IT problems are, when aviation makes news I'm glad when it's not due to a plane crash. Keep up the great work.

This is very similar to the Valentine's day crash back when nearly all calls on ATT failed to "trunk busy". A bad software update caused cycling of major routing boxes nationwide.

You’re facts are absolutely correct! This is the first commentary I’ve seen and heard who knows exactly what actually happened, and better yet, knows how the system works. You did your homework, and I appreciate it. I’m now a subscriber!

I was flying on Delta that day from MKE to ATL, and the lines in MKE for the southwest check in kiosks stretched down the whole terminal. Even some of the delta flights were affected, though we managed to get out with only an hour delay. It seemed like a lot of the airport staff had to deal with those issues, I only hope they didn’t have any unruly passengers…

I have friends at Southwest and they have been telling the higher ups for years this software was going to cause a major meltdown. They didn’t listen obviously and even tried to blame the crews for this issue

When you look into the NOTAM system, be sure to also research the numerous failed attempts by the FAA to upgrade some of their other systems over the years. There have been a number or attempts at the same thing because previous attempts have gotten seriously behind in schedule and way over budget. There has been a lot of finger pointing at the contractors involved but the reality is that the FAA has been equally culpable in that they present incomplete and ever changing requirements for the project.

Would love to see a video about the NOTAM issues! Also great work on this one. I was looking forward to seeing your video on what's going on with Southwest's domino effect nightmare lol

I read that the reason why so many were calling out, especially the ground crew, is because they wanted them (management) to work, no ifs, ands, or butts, yet even the weather was making this impossible in certain conditions to the point where people were essentially trapped in their homes. It got so bad in some areas that even in some emergency situations, fire, medical, and LEOs couldn't reach some people.

Working in software engineering makes the story of how Southwest neglected their IT and software infrastructure until it was no longer able to cope is depressing familiar, as is the apparent attitude of management that they could bully their employees into work (and I don't know about you, but I'm not super-keen on the idea of people people with something potentially contagious having to spend hours on end at a major transport hub, putting aside how crappy that kind of treatment of your workers really is!)

The eighties and a bit into the nineties many but the largest of businesses where switching from manual systems to computerized ones. IT failures were more common as the wrinkles were being worked out, but the people using them were much more used to doing the work manually and benefited from years of manual systems being refined and made more efficient. I worked for a small company that was developing it's own software with a couple of computer enthusiast, and I can't tell you how many times I spent hours reentering our inventory because we crashed the database. So there were more tools to help out during crashes, such as spreadsheets with pricing information to help out with manually producing invoices, which took the place of the old knowledge of how to do the work by hand. As crashes became rarer, the backup systems such as these spreadsheets were updated less often, until they were pretty much forgotten about and so outdated to be useless.

I have three times during the 1990s been involved in putting together bids to supply scheduling systems for different airlines. Each time the outline design, upon which the bid was based, complied with the principles of safety-critical software. That is software which cannot be allowed to fail. Each time the airlines involved turned down the bids on the grounds that they were too expensive and went for non safety-critical software.

Waiting for this video! I was not able to begin to comprehend what was going on

Another big issue with Southwest that no one is talking about, is they don't have a hub and spoke system. So when there is disruptions or cancelations, there are less options to rebook passengers and reassign crews. So it's a lot harder for Southwest to recover then it is for other airlines.

I love when the House or Senate holds hearings to deal with "debacles". There needs to be a hearing on them... they are a sitting debacle. :D

I'd just like to point out the absolute insanity of requiring a doctor's note verifying you were sick and thus unable to work. It is even more egregious to not accept notes from tele-health doctors, considering the fact that most doctors are booked weeks or months into the future, so it is impossible to be seen on as as-needed basis (for example, when you are sick) anywhere other than an emergency room (or urgent care facility if there is one near you that accepts your insurance). That doesn't even begin to discuss the ridiculousness of requiring a doctor's note to excuse an absence when doctor's offices (and urgent care facilities) aren't open (for example, a night shift worker). Southwest effectively said to its employees "If you're really sick, you need to go to a hospital emergency room and pay at least $500 (most likely $1,000 or more) in order to obtain a note from a doctor proving you were sick or you're fired". This policy is proof that the people who run Southwest don't actually care about safety (employee safety or public safety) and explicitly require people to work even when they are sick.

17k hrs, 33yrs in the Seat. You've got excellent source info, and great delivery. Thanks for the videos.

You made this issue so easy to understand, and I think you were really fair to Southwest. They fucked up in some regards, but in many ways there were nothing they could've done different. So thank you for educating us on this, and everything else you put your time towards explaining. And I'd love a video on the NOTAM problem, some day in the future. Sounds interesting, and I have no clue why it happened. Keep doing what you're doing, you make me feel proud to say I'm Swedish! :)

As one that was involved in Transportation in another industry for over 50 years - both in IT and Operations - change is scary. Change that is not done CORRECTLY is even more dangerous than a overloaded legacy system. Systems being asked to do things they were NEVER designed for will fail - ALWAYS.

I also got caught up in this on December 22nd. In fairness, I had booked SouthWest after my planned United flight was cancelled due to weather in Denver and Chicago. I'm very glad I found out about the SouthWest cancellation before I got to the airport, got an easy refund since it had been less than 24 hours since booking, and was able to rent a car and make the 10 hour drive to get home. What a mess for the people that weren't so lucky.

Stuff like this is why America needs to invest in more alternative travel modes than just flying and driving.

This is why I wait for your videos so I can understand incidents of all kinds. Perfect breakdown! 👍

What a mess. Great video explanation, Petter.

I just watched an snl sketch about that issue and it was 1st time I've heard about it. Thank you for spelling it out!

They fired 15% of their staff for not getting vaccinated. They also fly point-to-point as opposed to the spoke & wheel system other airlines use. The combination of these two factors - having a self-inflicted shortage of employees and a point-to-point system where you can't easily replace employees who didn't arrive at their destination (due to a major storm) were the actual causes of the problem.

I thought this would be sort of boring, but not; as usual it was a great & interesting analysis. I heard so much about their "hub-less" system being a a major component of this issue, but you didn't mention it---in fact you called Denver one of their hubs. Not actually part of the problem? Also, seems to me that, for a basically successful airline such as SW, 2020/pandemic would have been the perfect time for an IT upgrade; fewer flights & workers, easier to re-shuffle things. Well, clearly not, eh? Once again, nice work!

We had our vacation extended by Southwest. It's interesting to hear what happened, though it doesn't make it less frustrating. That said, they compensated us with a reimbursement for our American Airlines flight and 50k bonus miles.

The system could be looked at as a collection of queues feeding other queues. Such systems can be fine in normal conditions, but they can become horribly unstable at extremes.

Nah, I completely forgot this ever happened after the FAA NOTAM meltdown just two weeks later

as a southwest pilot, this was a better and more accurate explainantion than our CEO or COO have given. great content!

I read a news story today about a Seattle high-school basketball team that was stuck in Las Vegas for days and whose coach ended up chartering a bus to get them home. The coach personally spent thousands of dollars for hotel rooms and food; a local businessman from their area ended up paying $15,000 to charter a bus to get them home.

Your explanations are so concise and informative. I always look forward to more videos. Thank you!

As I've heard today on a podcast - "every company is an IT company these days". Perhaps the bigIT layoffs enable the airlines to obtain some top talent, moving their IT towards distributed architecture, microservices and similar systems. I would enjoy the load/stress test of such systems :)

Nobody explains aviation like the Memtour! Thank you!

Another thing that I learned watching this video was Southwest Airlines' unique situation vis-a-vis having its entire fleet of over 750 aircraft as Boeing 737's. I find it incredibly interesting, but completely human, that the people behind the decision making process at Southwest Airlines, would defer investing in the necessary IT infrastructure required to try and bring under control the scheduling problems that the early 2000's meltdown made abundantly clear. As Petter mentioned in this video, when that meltdown occurred, Southwest owned approximately one fourth as many planes as they did in December of 2022. Which, in turn, required one fourth as many people per plane to keep those planes flying as profitably as possible. One thing that my father taught me was the value of having the best tools possible for whatever a job might require. And, that less expensive tools, especially ones with shorter lifespans, *always* cost the workman exponentially more in the long run than investing in the best at the beginning. From the perspective of the CEO of an airline like Southwest's; having to continually invest in new IT software & hardware to try and stay abreast of the worst case scheduling requirements for a growing fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft; must seem like pouring an endless stream of hundreds of millions of dollars into a black hole from which there will never be any relief.

One of my favorite books " If it's not broke, break it". It's about understanding how thing's work.

The Senators that will be involved with their investigation would do well to watch this video first.

As a software person, I just want to say.... in my view, the breakdown of the scheduling system of that nature cannot be described as anything but utter negligence, and responsibility for this negligence goes right to the top. Sadly, I'm doubtful those responsible for this negligence will every truly be held to account, besides perhaps some stock losing a little value.

Thank you for covering this. Really good video. Once again.. 🙂✈

as a software/network guy, this sounds like what's called an "NP-hard" issue, which are extremely complicated and computationally difficult to solve. It's easy to say "spend more money" but that's not always a solution

great vid on this tricky subject !

👍👍🎯 Peter - again an excellent topic - and a truly scary one - is the beast becoming too big to feed ? (globally - not only Southwest..) P.S. IT side being equally important as pilots, cabin crew, ATC, maintenance, handlers, cooks, cleaners etc. (even bins for safe disposal and signs at ramp and airport entrance..) - is really nothing new in aviation .. (and even aircraft manufacturers maybe ..? - ouch - that was baaaad on my side - sorry, but couldn't resist ..) When I started in much simpler times - it was constantly banged in to our heads that - securing last loose nut and washer and clean windshield (could be related to - all those pesky components of "cost" column) - is equally important as being able to handle most complex and exciting piece of equipment .. (profit column .. 😉) Can we ever reach the balance ? Who will explain to "excel guys" (shareholders "bean counters") - that ".. 5% growth is stagnation.." - can only go to certain extent .. (depending on resources ..) ?

Definitely look forward to a video on the NOTAM meltdown. Thanks for all the work you do Peter.

I feel for the customer service people at the airport. I KNOW they were getting screamed at and cussed out over some BS that was out of their control. I couldn’t do that job.

Hi Petter, Thanks for the detailed explanation! I think SWA’s point-to-point model of operation (against a hub-spoke model) was also a key contributing factor in this.

Love your video's! Keep up the good work.

I wonder how many thousands of flyers have a calendar reminder come October to not use SWA (again or the first time)? 🤔

Super Thanks. This video was highly informative. Gave me a different perspective of the airline industry than I would ever have thought of before.

Awesome summary and detailed documentary. Well done sir!

A very interesting insight into behind the scene workings of an airline. Thank you for sharing this.

11:30 your slight smirk brightened my day, Ihank you petter for the wonderful content you give us.

Thanks a lot for your videos!

Thanks Mentour,always informative & interesting! Aren't SW also being implicated with the MAX/MCAS investigation ? l could be mistaken. More pertinent to this vid, yes (l would agree) all technology needs to be aligned within the industry.

That SW bullcrap stranded me in Detroit for a day. Just could not book a flight. Ended up having to buy a first class ticket to get home. From an airport that has direct flights to my hometown. And i didn't even get a direct flight! The hub and spoke model works the best.