Thread by @martysg

I’ve gotten dozens of asks for my view on the meltdown and here it goes. (This post is a good start but I don’t pretend that this is exhaustive) 1/

https://twitter.com/trungtphan/status/1607896018930270208

To start, and I can’t stress this enough, this crew scheduling issue is well known, and it is why you pre-cancel when a storm comes. Also why pop-up thunderstorms are so hard because you can’t cancel with enough notice (also why sometimes you get canceled but TS don’t come 2/

And again, why the best solution is to Shut👏It👏Down👏 when you’re at risk of losing the plot. Canceling 200 legs before a storm and 100 more on the way out sucks, but beats canceling 600-800 during the recovery (and scale those numbers up for WN, biggest airline in the USA) 3/

The complexity of crew scheduling software itself (not the rostering, the trip creation) is immense. When we ran the WOPR (deep cut; #IYKYK) at JetBlue it could take up to 6 hours to give us a solution 4/

Now look at WN: a nodal (versus pure hub and spoke) airline with, my guess is 12-14 crew bases, and 4000 dept a day vs 1000 at JetBlue. I bet the crew pairing optimizer takes 10-12 hours 5/

And during those 10 hours, the baseline is shifting, so the solution is 30% obsolete when the optimizer spits out the answer. 6/

Add into that, the phone systems are not sized to handle either all crews or all customers calling at once. Plus I bet a lot of the best reservations agents/crew schedulers left during covid and were replaced by junior, less experienced folks 7/

AND, let’s also note that while the crews are on hold waiting for assignment they are legally on duty, and will eventually hit their FAA (unwaivable) daily duty time limits. IOW once your 8 hour call w scheduling is over, you have to go into a rest period and can’t fly 8/

PLUS that WN is basically a fair weather airline, with the Texas and California being half of the airline (but with DEN MDW as the bad weather challenges)

Usually snow events move across the system. SLC, then DEN the next day, MDW the next day, then the northeast. Spaced out 9/

This storm/cold snap hit the whole country at once. (And don’t forget, bitter cold is bad too. Ground crews need to come in to warm up, and equipment moves slower) 10/

WN can be a bit insular. A good number of lifers who have never seen this confluence of events. They are never really exposed to this breadth of badness 11/

To paraphrase the great F Scott Fitzgerald, an operation falls apart gradually and then all at once. When it gets away from you, you are just riding a careening toboggan not driving it 12/

And the reason this is even bigger news is that WN has a fantastic brand. People’s and employees’ expectations are much much higher so you have much further to fall 13/

I could go on with more root causes but I won’t. You get the idea. 14/

I’m pulling for all my friends at WN and equally for their customers. I have many friends and a few very close friends at WN and they are very smart folks. Hang in there! 15/

I lived this exact meltdown in 2007 at JetBlue and it sucks. But I can assure my friends (and their customers), WN will recover. It will mean a lot of work, a lot of IT and a lot of soul searching but it will recover 16/

I kinda mentored a current senior leader at WN. I hired her out of b-school but she quit after 9/11 but later came back to aviation. We recently talked and she said “I remember you said to me, ‘why quit when you just went through hell? It will only get better from here!” 17/

So, to her and my other WN friends, it will only get better from here. This is fixable and you can fix it! 18/

And for my friends at LATAM, we are extremely lucky that we rarely face severe weather (which is why we are generally in the top 5 worldwide in on time performance) #HumbleBrag 19/

To close…one of my kids expresses interest in working in aviation. Not sure how I feel about that.

It’s a crappy business when this stuff happens.

But as Ed Acker (former Pan Am ceo) once said, “Once you get hooked on the airline business it’s worse than dope” 20/20

PS EXTREMELY on brand for me to properly quote Ed Acker but misattribute a Hemingway quote to Fitzgerald. Oops! (h/t @Jazzap for that fact)

@threadreaderapp unroll

Not in any way shocked that Southwest's operation is back to normal tomorrow..and knowing the folks who I know and love there, they will make sure it doesn't happen again. Now they have to rebuild customer trust but that will come

the good news for JetBlue is that they are no longer the poster child for Icarus-as-airline