![]() ![]() Many of our people have been forced to work 16 or 18 hour days during this holiday season. The human factor also has to be a consideration. ![]() “When you’re dealing with sub-zero temperatures, driving winds and ice storms you can’t expect to schedule planes as if every day is a sunny day with moderate temperatures and a gentle breeze. If airline managers had planned better, the meltdown we’ve witnessed in recent days could have been lessened or averted. “When Southwest’s model changed” (from point-to-point), “preparation needed to change. The ground workers at Southwest Airlines are represented by Transport Workers Union (TWU). The Union is not willing to have their people blamed. If this part of the supply chain is not working, the snowball starts rolling and the whole chain breaks down. Ramp employees help planes park and handle the luggage. Ground operations in Denver were hampered by an unusually high number of absences among ramp employees. That led to the snowball effect that crippled operations.īut it was more than that. Southwest’s system, it turns out, could not keep track of where its crew members and pilots were after so many flights were canceled. But with the other models, bad things happening in one place can ripple through the system and lead to a cascading set of cancellations.Īs soon as I heard how much worse Southwest was performing than their competitors, I knew there had to be an IT problem. If there is a plane flying between Richmond Virginia and Cincinnati Ohio – and something goes wrong – only the passengers on that route are affected. When it comes to resilience – recovering from something bad that happens – the simplicity of point-to-point beats hub-and-spoke or point-to point-to-point. The many potential different origin-destination pairings – along with a model that must consider how many can fly on a plane, distance, speed, union rules, federal regulations, airline policies, staff availability, and other constraints as well – makes for a very, very complex routing problem.īut the point of all those options is to maximize profitability, not resilience. If “flexibility” is defined in terms of routing optionality, this is true. Thus, airlines operating in this model could recover more quickly. Several outlets reported that hub-and-spoke models are more flexible. So many flights go in and out of these airports, that flights going through these cities are really operating in a hub-and-spoke model, they just don’t call it that. Louis (STL) are the airline’s major connecting airports. Then it stays there overnight, and the next day the plane might fly to Dallas.Īnd while Southwest says they are point-to-point, Atlanta (ATL), Baltimore/Washington (BWI), Chicago Midway (MDW), Denver (DEN), Houston Hobby (HOU), Nashville (BNA), Oakland (OAK), Phoenix (PHX) and St. A plane starting in Richmond Virginia might fly to Chicago, where most passengers get off. Southwest actually flies a point-to-point-to-point model. Other large carriers like United and American rely on a ‘hub-and-spoke’ model in which planes typically fly from smaller cities to a hub airport where passengers change planes.” “Point-to-point flights cut travel times by eliminating the intermediate stop - typically a big advantage for travelers who are not flying from major metro areas. The origin and destination are connected via a single non-stop flight. Here is some coverage from the New York Times, “Southwest uses a ‘point-to-point’ route model…” In the point-to-point model, each flight is a single journey. ![]() The press has done a good job of reporting the impact on passengers, but they have done a bad job on reporting why Southwest performed so badly. A week after severe winter weather wreaked havoc on holiday air travel across the United States, other major carriers were back up and running. In all, Southwest has canceled about 15,700 flights since winter weather began disrupting air travel on December 22, far more than other airlines. In late 2021, other low-fare carriers, including Allegiant Air, Spirit Airlines, JetBlue Airways and Frontier, were to blame for 60% or more of their own total cancelations, according to GAO.Passenger searches for her luggage inside the Southwest terminal at Los Angeles International Airport In 2019, Hawaiian Airlines and Alaska Airlines were the worst offenders, responsible for more than half of their respective cancelations. From October through December 2021, airlines caused 60% or more of cancelations - higher that at any time in 2018 or 2019.ĭelays and cancelations happened at both smaller airlines and large carriers. The GAO said that weather was the leading cause of cancelations in the two years before the pandemic, but the percentage of airline-caused cancelations began increasing in early 2021. ![]()
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