Originally Posted by
carraher
Bizarre day at LAX. Started off with an announcement for another flight that "the airplane is broken" and the folks would have to wait for a replacement. Poor devils but oh well. Then the announcement came for us. Yep, flight 2505 to OAK would also be delayed because of a "broken airplane". Hey, .... happens, right? Finally, we lined up when a replacement was located. Noticed several folks with children hanging around the gate and asked the GA if they were family boarders since the kids appeared to be pre-teens rather than four and under. I asked her if that was an exception to the rule and she said yes. Then we were finally boarded about an hour later than schedule. We backed away from the gate and then suddenly the airplane stopped. The pilot shut down the engines and made this announcement. "The ground crew just noticed that one of the wheels has a flat tire and we will be delayed while it is fixed". One hour later we took off. I swear to God this is true. I miss the old SWA....
I am so sorry for your delays, but I am a bit puzzled by your last sentence. We had mechanicals way back in June of 1971 and flat tires too. And as for boarding, as little as nine years ago, you would have had to wait in line at the gate for a decent boarding pass and the gate only opened an hour before departure. If you were on a connecting flight, you always got the last boarding passes. And then after you waited in line at the gate, you had to go over and wait in one of the three boarding groups, if it was an airport with the boarding lanes. Families always preboarded in front of everyone else back then, even if the kids were 11 or 12. Yes we were smaller then and you may have had more interaction with Employees back then, but you had to because you couldn't check in online. I think it's easy to say anytime things are disrupted, I wish for the good old days, but consider this: When I started with Southwest 15 years ago, some folks were always telling me that things were better at the old SWA. Because we are bigger today and have more flights there is a greater chance you may have a mechanical or might run into an Employee having a bad day, but that doesn't mean our overally reliability or Customer Service has faltered. For the 15 years I have been with SWA, we consistently have one of the highest completed flight records in the industry. Back in the "good old days" we hoped to receive four good letters to every complaint letter. Most of the time we made that goal, but today we receive NINE good letters to every complaint. A greater chance of something going wrong is the downside of being bigger and offering more flights. But on the other hand, you would really miss the old SWA because we didn't fly to LAX until the mid 80s.
I don't say this to discount the pains of growing or the need to remain vigilant to our core values, but it bothers me when people try to dismiss problems by saying "the old SWA was different." Yes, it was. Both good and bad.