"It is now obvious that in the 2022 holiday period that Southwest Airlines did have its very own "Perfect Storm." Many things converged to create it. One of the biggest issues was obsolete technology-most notably the crew scheduling system. A chorus of knowledgeable people confirmed this: Southwest executives, Lyn Montgomery (President of TWU Local 556, a union representing about 18,000 flight attendants), Robert Mann (an aviation analyst), and two members of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee blamed the meltdown on ...
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"It is now obvious that in the 2022 holiday period that Southwest Airlines did have its very own "Perfect Storm." Many things converged to create it. One of the biggest issues was obsolete technology-most notably the crew scheduling system. A chorus of knowledgeable people confirmed this: Southwest executives, Lyn Montgomery (President of TWU Local 556, a union representing about 18,000 flight attendants), Robert Mann (an aviation analyst), and two members of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee blamed the meltdown on Southwest's archaic internal scheduling system. Employee unions had complained for years about the scheduling system, and although the reservation system was upgraded in 2017, the software used for staff scheduling still had uncorrected problems. Andrew Watterson, Southwest's Chief Operating Officer clarified: "the software was not designed to solve something that was that large. And therefore, we had to revert back to manual mode for a lot of tasks." That's right. The backup system was volunteers who notified the crew of flight changes and also manually entered the latest information about crew locations and time remaining to fly within a period. However, a problem with the manual process was that Southwest flight attendants (at least those that weren't out sick with Covid, flu or RSV) were stuck on hold when trying to reach the scheduling desk. Not surprisingly, the manual backup system couldn't come close to handling massive flight cancellations"--
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