Originally Posted by
irene49
Except pilots and flight attendants have different contracts and different legalities. So if they flew from point A to B to C and now one group goes illegal, that ends the day for both groups in city C. And say city C is not a city in which that the airline has a hotel contract. Crews layover in specific cities where hotel contracts have been negotiated. It can take hours for hotel rooms to be approved in a city without a hotel contract. And if city C is not a base for pilots and/or flight attendants, then that airplane is now stuck until both groups get hotels authorized, transportation set up, legal crew rest and are available to fly again. And there could be a further problem that some of the crew were only legal for one day and are stuck overnight in city C. Or are only legal for 2 days and must return to city A. And I can come up with multiple other problems with your solution. This is why crew schedulers exist. They track crew legalities. And why crews contact crew scheduling with any irregular operation.
I understand all that.
Don't over think it.
Fly them to the rules of the most constrained crew member.
There are very few cities to which WN flies that they do not have crew hotel contracts negotiated.
The objective is to get the most planes moving with the most passengers moving through the system, at a time in which almost no passengers are doing so. This is how you do it. Delta had a similar meltdown a few years ago although with a hub network they managed to isolate the issues a bit - and management was literally walking through crew rooms at the hubs assembling crews this way and calling them into crew scheduling for verification.
I have a lot of experience in operations management and scheduling, though not at an airline. The principles are the same but the constraints are different (though all industries have constraints that must be accounted for). In this case, the only way out of this is to break it down to it's most basic and get some operations moving again.