Have you seen (false) claims of Southwest Airlines pilots walking off the job? In the spirit of @JaneLytv's debunks, I'll try to break down what seems to be happening 🧵
There's NO evidence so far that a walkout (by ATC or pilots) is to blame for the widespread cancellations. The FAA already released a statement here:
Southwest Airlines' pilot union has also refuted this:
Naturally, Blue-checks and twitterati are already out in force claiming that the vaccine mandate (which several airlines already have) played a part. Again, there's no proof to this.
So what is happening? Let's deconstruct the FAA statement a bit + this email from Jacksonville Aviation Authority's COO Tony Cugno
The FAA requires anyone with an FAA medical certificate to refrain from flying (or controlling) for 48-hours after they get the COVID vaccine. These types of waiting periods are common for pilots, and we don't fly if we aren't fit to fly, even if it's just a head cold.
So what does that FAA statement mean? Jacksonville Center (JAX) is an ATC facility that controls traffic transiting Northern Florida and the Southern coast. Because of COVID, ATC nationwide has been at reduced staffing. With travel increasing, ATC is often stretched thin.
If a Center goes down, which JAX has a few times this year, it can mean aircraft reroutes, flight delays and cancellations, and general inefficiency. news4jax.com/news/local/202…
Airlines have finite #s of crews and aircraft, which means that a plane stuck in Tampa can cause a delay or cancellation of its next leg, and crews commuting on that flight might cause a cascading cancellation or delay for the flights they're supposed to staff.
So take a few planes stuck Florida, crews unable to commute to their flying legs, and add in the management issues that Southwest has been having for a while now, and you've got a recipe for cascading disaster. This already happened with Spirit Airlines: businessinsider.com/spirit-america…
"But David, what about this 'pilot sickout?'" Well, SWA itself isn't seeing any abnormal spike in fatigue or sick callouts, and SWA has had staffing, dispatch, and routing issues for a while. Add to that logistical failures and stuck airplanes/crews, and this is what you get.
TLDR don't listen to the grifters and the disinfluencers, mass transit infrastructure is complex. Pilots, in general, are very open to vaccination because our livelihoods depend on not getting a life-long debilitating illness that could end our careers (#longCOVID)
And if you're a vax-hesitant pilot: I got both shots and am happier knowing I'm protecting my students and passengers, and that I'm less likely to end up with chronic COVID issues that could revoke my medical. Happy to talk if you have questions, my DMs are open.
1/ A few quick thoughts on reporting that equates clickbait farms with foreign troll farms seeking to manipulate public debate ahead of an election. The pages referenced here, based on our own 2019 research, are financially motivated spammers, not overt influence ops. 🧵
2/ Both of these are serious challenges, but they’re different. Conflating them doesn’t help anyone and plays into the hands of IO actors seeking to appear like they’re everywhere. You also can’t stop spammers w/defenses designed to counter overt IO, and vice-versa.
3/ We — and others across industry and research community — have built systems to tackle both of these issues. There is more to do, but there’s been important progress since this internal report.
1/ Today, we shared an enforcement under a new protocol designed to extend our network disruptions to new types of adversarial groups. We still have a lot of work to do, but this is a first step into a new space about.fb.com/news/2021/09/r… 🧵
2/ We built our disruptions strategy on the idea that enforcement against tightly coordinated, highly adversarial groups could be more effective if we worked to identify and disrupt the network’s entire presence on our platform. A type of digital deterrence, if you will.
3/ We’ve used this strategy against 150+ CIB networks since 2017, and against sophisticated cyber-espionage actors. And it’s had results: we see some of these networks move off Facebook for less aggressive havens and their ops have less success on FB. about.fb.com/news/2021/05/i…
1/ Today we shared our IO Threat Report, an analytical paper that dives into the 150+ CIB takedowns across 50+ countries that FB’s Threat Intel team discovered over the past 3 years. The report IDs adversary TTPs, trends, and provides recs for tackling IO: about.fb.com/wp-content/upl…
2/ We also released a summary dataset of all of our takedowns since 2017 alongside the report itself. Check that out here (at the end of the report) about.fb.com/wp-content/upl…
3/ We’ve reported on every CIB takedown since the advent of the CIB policy in 2017, but those reports tend to focus on the individual operations’ behavior and attribution. We felt it was important to also provide a strategic look at the ecosystem of IO uncovered between 2017-2020
These are some great suggestions for much-needed reform to the tech pipeline in government. I’d add just a few more from my 6 yrs in civil service -> reform the background check process, find ways to incentivize & compete for talent, abandon outdated performance models
We lose tons of candidates with vital tech and language proficiency in the multi-year wait for clearances. It suppresses diverse talent born overseas, people who have lived abroad, and weakens the federal talent pool. You won’t hire away from tech with 2yr waits for jobs
Gov is also unlikely to ever compete directly w/ private sctr on comp, but makes up for it with mission impact. That said: folks need to eat. Decouple tech from the GS scale or scale comp to enable new tech talent to pay rent, car payment, student loans, and save for retirement
@KembaWalden created and lead The Law of Election Security, a roundtable of cyber and elections lawyers from the private sector, and state and federal governments to think creatively on how to improve laws around elections - most recently focused on legislating digital forgeries.