People freaking out about #Southwest and accusing them of wrongdoing need to understand that the mass cancellations they had are not a part of them being "too stingy" in how they run their operations, it's literally just a result of their business-as-usual operations model.
It's the point-to-point routing of their flights that results in big domino effects anytime a flight is delayed or cancelled. It's not short turnaround times or staffing issues. It's simply a flight from Airport A to Airport B in their schedule may be the only flight making that route that day. So if it cancels, all subsequent routes it was schedule to fly the rest of the day cancel too.
The whole thing sucks and I do wonder how much more of this SWA can endure, but it's not because they made some egregious bad moves for the holidays it's simply how their operations are structured.
@alyssam_infosec Everything has to go right at Southwest to get everyone everywhere, or...
"the situation got so bad that on December 22 that a Tampa to Denver flight returned to Tampa because there wouldn’t be sufficient ground staff to assist with the flight. The airline ended up operating a nearly four hour flight to nowhere. Ouch."
https://onemileatatime.com/news/southwest-airlines-meltdown-denver/
@jaysonmassey @alyssam_infosec I saw someone post that the ground crews in Denver were already understaffed and didn’t want to be pitching luggage in dangerous conditions. Instead of bonuses for the hard and dangerous work they were threatened with termination if they called out and didn’t have an in person (not tele visit) doctors note. It also said they couldn’t refuse mando overtime. May be true, may not but I could totally see that in the airports that were hit hardest
You can see a copy of the alleged memo here.
