Originally Posted by
dordal
Does anybody have a good sense of why this is so bad for SWA? I mean beyond the obvious of 'planes out of position; crew out of position, blah blah'.
The overall national airspace system, the airports, the aircraft, the various vendors (fuel delivery, catering, etc.) are all working. (Yes a few minor exceptions but nothing widespread). The planes clearly didn't all go mech at the same time. They originally had enough crew scheduled to operate a full schedule yesterday, today and tomorrow, so there should be people there to operate the ramp, the planes, ops, etc. From what I can tell reading the WSJ article it is something with crew scheduling -- the planes are there and the crew may be there, but they're not able to match people to positions quickly enough, so pilots, FAs, GAs etc. are just sitting around waiting to be given an assignment, which never comes, and the eventually run out of hours.
But curious if anybody has more detailed context...?
No one probably has the big picture to fully answer that at this point, including WN. No doubt a bunch of factors came together at once. I am sure once they get through the immediate mess, WN will be taking a detailed look at what went wrong to learn from it. Whether they will make that public, who knows.