Apparently things snowballed and canceled and they can't catch up, and the plan is to just wipe the current slate of flights off and start from scratch.
So glad I decided not to go anywhere this holiday season. I always take Southwest to Nebraska because they're the only ones who fly where I'm going without using the "regional" affiliates.
Wild this is just Southwest. Saw on Flyertalk that yesterday 66% of Southwest flights were cancelled and 0% of American (despite also having a large Texas presence and not being especially reliable the way Delta is).
Everyone has been trying to whittle efficiency down to the bone, and most of the time it's ok, but eventually understaffed companies will melt down.
Despite the freeze not hitting California, a ton of flights were being cancelled yesterday, including intra-state, I assume because many are legs of multistate trips.
Also glad I decided not to go anywhere.
Although the tweets I saw yesterday may not have been in realization that something specific to Southwest was going on.
The flyertalk people seem to be saying the big issue is that Southwests "point to point" model is much less robust than a hub and spoke. In a hub and spoke when things go wrong most of your planes and staff are still at the hubs and you can get things running, with p2p the plans and staff are all randomly strewn about the country and not where they're needed.
The other problem is that Southwest refuses to join any interline agreements (where airlines can rebook passengers for very cheap on open space on other airlines, which is did once we I got diverted to Houston instead of Dallas on American due to tornados). But given that it's Christmas week it's not clear how much that would help, not a lot of open seats on other airlines.
4: Every flight out of San Diego after 1pm yesterday was cancelled!? They're just in complete meltdown. They office scheduling staff seems to have completely broken down.
Decided this year that traveling in the summer is infinitely better than traveling for Christmas. Between snow and covid and airplane problems just better to do it a different time of year.
From 9: "This shitstorm is because the crew scheduling software went belly up and it almost all has to be unraveled over the phone with crew members calling scheduling."
V interesting
I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth,
But crashed from lies of bad scheduling.
Apparently that Southwest employee has deleted their reddit account and the main post is gone. But some key comments echoing 10:
"Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson told employees Sunday night that the airline's crew-scheduling systems were "overmatched in situations of this scale." Automated systems for crew scheduling couldn't handle the volume, requiring manual workarounds that overwhelmed the staff, he wrote."
"We have plenty of FAs/pilots ready to work flights but unable to add them to the flight as a working crew member because it requires a call to crew scheduling and being on hold for 4+ hours."
"There were 2 specific problems, the software for scheduling is woefully antiquated by at least 20 years. No app/internet options, all manual entry and it has settings that you DO NOT CHANGE for fear of crashing it. Those settings create the automated flow as a crewmember is moving about their day, it doesn't know you flew the leg DAL-MCO it just assumes it and moves your piece forward. In the event of a disruption you call scheduling and they manually adjust you. It does work, it just works for an airline 1/3 the size of SWA. So the storm came and it impacted ground ops so bad that many many crews were now "unaccounted" for and the system in place couldn't keep up. Then it happened for several more days. By Xmas evening the CS department had essentially reached the inability to do anything but simple, one off assignments. And to make matters worse, the phone system was updated not too long ago and it was not working well. Last nite they did a web form and had planned to get the system up as much as possible with what communication they could muster, however it was too much to keep up on and ultimately the method for tracking crews failed again. This 100% is at the feet of all management who refused to invest in technology updates because it is the southwest way to be stuck in 1993."
I really wonder if "web form" meant they were trying to run the whole thing on google sheets...
1993 was so very much better though.
I was watching this unfold at the Denver airport, and it was wild. Am grateful our flight eventually took off and that our bags made it, too.
The Denver airport does not have any edibles for sale. Fucking bastards.
15: Edibles giveaway for all stranded Southwest passengers! What a great idea!
I have four Southwest drink coupons, so I hope they don't go bankrupt.
I think I have enough miles for a trip too.
I'm flying back to Alaska tomorrow. Not on Southwest, but they're the dominant carrier in Albuquerque so hopefully their troubles haven't rippled out too far toward the other airlines.
If you fly with a small child on Southwest and you are a man without a woman in the same row, the flight attendants will skip you when they tell the parents of small children to put their own mask on before masking the kid.
Southwest decided a while back that they not only needed to fly to Hawaii, but also to fly interisland in competition with Hawaiian Airlines, which has owned the interisland market since Aloha Airlines went under ~ 15 years ago. They've been struggling to break in and it's not obvious why they want to, because it's a pretty nice market for one carrier but a bloodbath for two. And now apparently they've canceled their entire interisland schedule for the next several days, thereby pissing away whatever good will they've built up in many months of selling crazy-cheap tickets. Seems likely maybe they would have been better off spending what they've spent in Hawaii on updating their crew scheduling system to track where there people actually are instead of where they were supposed to be before they canceled all the flights.
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Supreme Court rules that Title 42 must stay in effect. God damn.
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We're supposed to fly from San Francisco to DC Saturday morning. Alaska Airlines, so there's a chance everything will be fine, but who knows. I'm glad we have two days before we actually go back to work and school.
The bar is out of Jameson and Tullamore. Joe Biden hates the Irish.
And it's the Prrrrotestant whiskey.
A protestant convinced me that Jameson tastes better by making me do a comparison.
Honestly, I didn't ask her religion but she had a protestant last name.
Also, Jameson isn't even made in Cork anymore. My first female ancestor in America was a Collins from Cork.
It's the second largest city in Ireland, you know. A thriving metropolis.
I probably shouldn't be drinking maskless in a bar wondering how closely I'm related to people killed in the Irish War, but here we are. I switched to Jim Beam because I can't remember if I like Ezra Brooks or Evan Williams.
But I've told the story here of my non-Irish father bringing a county Clare bar to a dead silence in the late sixties by asking why they didn't carry Bushmills, right? After a long pause, the bartender answered with 27.
32: Right, but I meant the county. The town was Ballyhooly.
I figure they were probably just messing with the American boy Teesha had brought home. Scared the heck out of him, though.
34: Yes, but anything that gets in my mind as a pair, I will confuse the two regardless of how many times it comes up.
Ballyhooly, less of a metropolis.
The town I grew up in was founded by a Fenian, a prominent one, yet they named a street 'Londonderry.' The Midwest is actively hostile to historical accuracy.
It took barely sixty years to forget any details.
But, even without history, Jameson tastes better. Not that you can buy if easily in my hometown.
I was aware that Bushmills came from the North, but had not put together that it was protestant. This is the problem with learning about whisky mostly from Germans. ("My name is Luening, Horst Luening, and I am the master taster of whisky.com.")
I don't think I dislike Scotch because of Protestants. I think it's because I'm afraid of accidentally ordering something that costs $25 a glass and tastes like a grass fire.
If you tell me which Scotch whiskies they have I can tell you which ones you don't have to worry about those issues with.
It's not really a big issue in this particular bar. The have Dewar's, various Johnny Walkers, and Glenfedich (sp?).
Horst on Bushmills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amwxnJR_gco
Yeah, Glenfiddich 12 is solid. Unpeated and affordable, and solid for its low price.
I can't watch any videos before I watch the one heebie posted.
You won't want any of the Johnnie Walkers, which will be either peated (Black), disgusting (Red), or sticker shocking (Blue). (If they have green it's lest peaty than Black and less sticker shocking than Blue, but probably still too peated and too sticker shocking for you.)
22: I hadn't been following the various cases around Title 42 and found this very helpful (not short, but clarified what
a complicated situation): https://stevevladeck.substack.com/p/7-title-42
Weirdly I've never had Dewars, but the internet says it's kinda smokey. So yeah, Glenfiddich.
something that costs $25 a glass and tastes like a grass fire
You say that like it's a bad thing. Which I suppose the $25/glass is. Better to buy by the bottle.
On topic, it's amusing to see that Southwest's Culture involves Weird Capitalization in their Internal Communications.
I don't get why burning peat is a thing. It's better than a burning urethra but nobody mentions that.
Let's rank all the things that could burn from best to worst.
Jesus https://twitter.com/bradbatt/status/1607973979934834690?s=46&t=H1xfxzwe_r25EDJtGJpURA
You can't rank because context matters for the Mona Lisa.
Ray Bradbury wrote about burning books, but it turns out my memory was mistaken and he disposed of Mona Lisa in a different fashion.
I'm now in Phoenix. I got the last seat on the direct flight to Anchorage so I won't have to go through Seattle.
Also if you want to go to the lost and found and check for Ace's beloved Mean Girls hoodie, you could reverse the fortune of a very bereft child. (Although we did call and they didn't have it.) (Ace really did sob plaintively for an hour and keeps getting choked up.)
Teo has an obligation to locate the hoodie. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
61: FUCK ME RAY BRADBURY. THE GREATEST SCI-FI WRITER IN HISTORY!
"I'm aware of his work."
59 reminds me of a Short Story "The Great Moveway Jam" by James Keefauver, apparently published in Omni in 1979 where I must have read it. There is massive traffic jam which eludes disentanglement. Ultimately leading to helicopters shooting people who leave their cars, and in the end the whole thing being paved over.
The cement is creeping over the roof of my car now. I am now sitting in it. It feels most disagreeable. I stand up. I write while holding my Notebook to my chest. it is the only thing I have left. "
69 is great.
Heebie has been dropping the ball on the check-in posts because she secretly hates me so I'm going to drop this hear. I had that knee surgery for my destroyed PCL, and damaged PHMM, meniscus and other shit and man, I've been in constant pain ever since. Surgery was on the 4th, and apparently a success, I'm expected to make a complete recovery but the constant low level pain for weeks now has been getting to me. It's not the knee that is painful, it's my shin and calf. The surgeon had me undergo an ultrasound in case of a blood clot but none was detected, I'm still wondering if he should have just prescribed blood clot meds anyway. The PT, especially the massage therapy helps some but it's been driving me mad.
Have you tried OTC blood thinners?
Like I can get a lot of stuff OTC here that I couldn't in the US so any names of drugs would be helpful
All I have left is some Jameson.
Teo has an obligation to locate the hoodie. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sadly, I'm already back in Anchorage. The Phoenix airport is huge so I'm not surprised a hoodie could go missing in it. I had to switch from American to Alaska, which meant taking a train to a different terminal and going through security again.
I bet you could fit at least six hoodies in that airport.
75: Isn't that how you got injured in the fist place?
69: I read that story in Omni when I was eight, and memories of it have been giving me the creeps ever since.