Originally Posted by
mfirst
I also wonder how much of this is related to the complex and probably unbendable rules that flight crew must live by thanks to the government regulations that people are not screaming that they want to see more of.
There's a number of issues and that does play into it as well.
Weather caused the disruption. I.T. and telco issues have prevented SWA from recovering as quickly as everyone else.
Machines fail in extreme cold. You don't know what will work and what won't or how long it will take to get them working. When temperatures are significantly colder than normal for an area the employees don't know how to deal with it so they are less efficient, don't know how to work the machine in the cold, and many of them can't or don't come to work. All of the airlines delt with these issue.
SWA's I.T. hasn't been updated to keep up with the airline as it has grown is size and complexity. I recently learned that the crew scheduling software apparently doesn't get real-time inputs (or enough inputs?) from the operations software which records delays, cancellations, out/in times, etc. When there are exceptions, they have to be input manually. That may work at a small airline but is unmanageable at this scale with widespread disruptions. This is how they "lost" their crews.
In the old days, it was relatively easy to figure out pilot legality. The new 14 CFR 117 rules for pilots are too complex. There are too many variables. You need a computer to reliably confirm legality. It also means that pilots and flight attendants are scheduled under different rules so you can't treat one full crew as a group.
Crewmembers can't contact the schedulers because the schedulers are overwhelmed. The only way I know to address this is through automation. The difference in the number of schedulers you need to work a wide-spread disruption, compared to what you need during normal ops, is significant. I don't know the multiple but 10x wouldn't surprise me at all. Maybe more. You need automation to take care of as much of the schedule repair as possible because it isn't possible to multiply your staff by 10x when a disruption event occurs. Other airlines have significantly more automation in these processes than SWA apparently has but they still don't have enough.