For Southwest Hawaii fans and others, this will be a fascinating week as the carrier testifies following their 16K flight, 1M passenger, $800M meltdown.
For Southwest Hawaii fans and others, this will be a fascinating week as the carrier testifies following their 16K flight, 1M passenger, $800M meltdown.
What am I missing here? How can Jordon say with a straight face that the technology is fine but the problems were as a result of bad weather? Are they a fair weather only airline and can only handle so much bad weather before being overwhelmed?? Here in Hawaii they operate the inter island flights with minimal support. Wonder what else they are scrimping on.
Southwest is and has a history of being Southworst. In pending lawsuits against the airline, expect another semantic bait n switch as SWA CEO appropriated in his alternate defense of recent failures, that SWA issues were due to weather and their cascading effects, not outdated SWA technologies. Expect another sematic word play cleverly stating, you get what you pay for, in essence, blaming the victims.
Buyer Beware, you book with a cattle carrier, expect to be treated like cattle.
I’m mostly a database guy – spent a decade working at Oracle, and decades working with other database companies. A long time ago we understood that that when “cheap” companies asked us to help them implement projects they would always under-specify computer performance requirements. Then when things went wrong they would blame us – even though we met their “cheap” performance specifications. So Larry Ellison himself required that any big contract test the system being rolled out until it failed, so that we could tell the customer when the system would fail and why, and then it would be their decision. So I’ve seen this all before – cost-cutting has real-world consequences.
Larry Ellison owns 98% of the island of Lanai. How’s that for State of Hawaii selling its soul to corporate interests, eh? Sorry, nothing to do with Southwest Airlines’ shenanigans, but I just felt the need to vent. Carry-on…
For a few years I tried being “management” instead of just being a technical guy. I was part of a PM team responsible for recommending things for Larry to be “interested” in doing or donating money to. For example, our research showed that CEOs routinely read Sailing magazines – thus Larry became interested in Sailing in order to be interesting to other CEOs – he wanted anybody to accept his phone call so that he could sell Oracle products. He didn’t set foot on a boat until the press noticed that he was never on the water. He isn’t really interested in all the things people think – it is based on our evaluation of “inches” of media coverage worldwide and the readership of that media.
I work in technology as well. We have a saying, cheap, fast, right, pick any two.
My wife and I are researching and planing a move to Oahu a year from
now to retire. Paying cash for housing and living modestly
seem to be key. Any suggestion from those that have recently made
the relocation to Hawaii? Thank You for your comments.
Ride a bike, not a car.
Live in a walkable neighborhood.
Modify your mainland expectations: things take longer and cost more here.
Costco.
Aloha; SWA is engaged in the oldest marketing scam in the books. “If you don’t like what is being said, change the conversation”. They stole thousands of family hawaiian vacations during the Holidays because of their greed for profits over good customer care. SWA is now promoting “free” 25,000 miles, a low fare “sale”, new “family” seating policy. They won’t answer questions about refunds, saying that they are considering “reasonable” requests. The CEO won’t testify I congress. They are hoping that passengers will forget and come back and fly again. Time will tell.
The issue of why southwest does not schedule Hawaii flights further east than Phoenix is based on a policy decision that nowhere in the entire southwest system would there be red eye flights.
“Clearly, Southwest did not. It took some three days into the disaster before Jordan commented on the situation.”
It even took that long to communicate with FA’s while we were stranded and left with no help at all when this meltdown started.
Both pilots and FA’s have a right to be Fed Up!
Is Southwest using the old Eastern Airlines “System One” automation in place since the late 1960s/1970s?. This antiquated system has been a source of problems previously.
It would sure be great if this sorry excuse for an airline went bankrupt and out of business. Horrible business model, airplanes and all around service
It’s the only profitable airline so your wish is unlikely to be fulfilled. We have saved many tens of thousands of dollars using this sorry excuse for an airline.
Reminds me of Churchill on democracy. Worst system of government ever except for all the others.
Think you ought to check your facts closer! Southwest lost money! Alaska and Delta are profitable. Suggest you research!
FYI Bob – When your IT infrastructure becomes so overwhelmed that it can’t respond, its definitely a “technology event”.
Robert K – Retired Program Manager Dell/EMC.