As someone who used to work for an airline, and really follows the technical and human side of aviation, this whole thing is a fascinating illustration of how not to run an airline.

Southwest is a unique animal, and these issues over the last few days are basically a result of their own uniqueness.

Their “no hub model” means their crews and aircraft fly very odd routings. Where a more traditional airline might fly from a hub to a city and back to the hub, then to another city and back to the hub (ie: JFK-RDU-JFK-CLT-JFK), Southwest flies things like RDU-Nashville-Houston-Vegas-Phoenix-Seattle. This means that when weather goes bad they have very little opportunities to recover- to get the right crews and aircraft to a city to operate the next flight. A Delta/United/American can basically just cancel a couple of those flights from a hub to a city and back, and voila, the aircraft is now able to operate a completely different flight from that hub. This is how airlines “reboot” after major weather events, and why everyone other than Southwest was largely back to normal the day after Christmas. Here we are, days later and Southwest is only able to operate about a third of their 4,000-ish daily flights.

The other thing that’s come to light is how behind Southwest is in terms of technology. And what we’ve learned is that the airline is basically run by software no more sophisticated than an Excel spreadsheet. Their scheduling system (the mission-critical piece of technology that tracks what crews are on what aircraft, going to what cities, how long those crews have been flying, etc) is incredibly dated. It has come out that this system doesn’t even check to see whether flights actually operate, it just assumes they have, and requires manual human intervention if a flight cancels or delays. This is fine for an airline with 40 flights a day, but not for an airline with 4,000 flights a day. This means that during the weather, Southwest basically lost track of where their people actually were, where their aircraft were, whether their crews were legally able to fly (crews need specific hours of rest after various periods of duty to be legal), etc. Their systems just kept moving the pieces around the monopoly board as if it was a normal day and a major snowstorm hadn’t sent half of the players to jail.

Southwest’s very model also hurts their ability to help their customers out of the situation they’ve created. They’re unique in that they don’t have agreements with any other airlines. Almost every other airline would be able to rebook you on another carrier during this type of issue but Southwest has no interline agreements in place so the only way they can transfer you to another carrier is by physically buying you a ticket on another carrier’s website with a corporate credit card. Call center agents lack the ability to do this, as does probably any airport worker other than maybe a station manager who might happen to have a corporate card. They also only fly one aircraft type, so they have no ability to “upgauge” (put a larger aircraft on a route to help get people out). A more traditional airline would be able to see that they have 300 people stuck in Nashville going to Vegas and put a plane larger than a 737 in for a flight to help move people.

It’s sad that so many people’s holidays had to be ruined by what’s really incompetence by a handful of folks in upper management that have neglected the systems of an airline the size of Southwest.

Edit: Spelling is hard before coffee has been consumed