An Aristotelian Approach To The Southwest Meltdown

As I've said here now and then, I'm an Aristotelian, which means I look for causes. What caused the Southwest meltdown? Legally, the proximate cause in this case is probably also Aristotle's efficient cause, which is what appears to be a badly botched management decision in Denver on December 21. A YouTube aviation commentator, Juan Browne, explains it best:

At about 1:40, he begins,

. . . but it was an incident at Denver's airport back on 21 . . . from the 21st of December through about the 24th of December that ignited, that started, this meltdown before the IT failed. As we all know, Southwest Airlines is a point-to-point airline system, but it does operate through other airlines' major hubs, and over here at the major hub of Denver, Colorado, as this bomb cyclone storm began to hit, on or about the 21st of December, an operational emergency was declared by management there specifically regarding the ramp agents, as the temperatures plunged and ramp agents were, of course have to work outside with the aircraft, were having a more and more difficult time of dealing with the aircraft in these freezing temperatures, a strongly worded memo went out from management to the ramp agents declaring that there was too many people calling in sick, and that they were going to have to declare an emergency, and if anybody is sick, they're going to have to have a letter from their doctor the day that they return to work, uh, everybody is going to have to work mandatory overtime, and anybody that is calling in sick and doesn't have a doctor's letter by the time that they show back up for work, they will be terminated.

As this word got around to the ramp agents at Denver, apparently (this has not been verified), upwards of 200 ramp agents quit, and these are jobs that pay about $20 to $28 per hour working with the aircraft out in the weather. Once that hit Denver, the aircraft began to stack up, getting parked, they couldn't get the aircraft into the gates. If, when you cannot get the aircraft into the gates, especially in this kind of weather, you have to start canceling flights, so that started a rolling cancellation of flights from Denver, Colorado. Soon those cancellations of flights ended up shutting down the entire Southwest operation, first at Denver, and that was followed by Dallas, St Louis, Nashville, and Chicago's Midway Airport. The entire Southwest operation was shut down. Now, with this many aircraft being parked, this is when the IT problems began with the SkySolver software thnat Southwest Airlines uses. This software is circa 1990s vintage, 40 year old software that they use to schedule pilots. flight attendants, crews, and marry them up with the aircraft and form the scheduling sequence. This 1990s software is capable of handling about 300 changes. We're talking changes in the thousands now, and the software was simply overwhelmed, and so all the automation for scheduling apparently failed, forcing schedulers to revert to manual scheduling, an extremely complicated job, completely overwhelming the system, thus forcing the airline to do a complete reset. . . and start all over[.]

UPDATE: Review of Twitter posts suggests that as of December 21, ramp agents were leaving work due to frostbite, which I would imagine constitutes unsafe conditions, and the memo may have provoked he walkout in response.

It's been more than a decade since I last flew Southwest, and I was shocked to see that it's now the largest US air carrier. The economy can't be exposed to this sort of calamity. The mass walkout in Denver appears to be confirmed, with the only question being just how many quit -- Juan Browne's version is 200 or so while the tweet below says 120:

Guys… this is why Denver canceled so many. They got this letter and 120 ramp agents walked out pic.twitter.com/uicHcPL3VT

— Overheard At Southwest (@AtSouthwest) December 24, 2022

I see someone named Chris Johnson, Vice President of Ground Operations, is the author of the memo, and this says to me that Johnson himself and at least one of his bosses need to be escorted out. Clearly the most indulgent policy over sick leave would have left a better result than what occurred, and we must recognize that it was Johnson's call to make.

Another version of Southwest's problem is the idea that the airline went downhill after its founder's retirement:

Southwest's problem is that its leadership, after legendary founder Herb Kelleher retired, were financial guys, not operations specialists. Southwest's unions are right in pointing to the airline's low-tech crew-scheduling software called SkySolver as the culprit in the December breakdown. It was also at fault in a smaller but still devastating Southwest breakdown last year linked to an unexpected air traffic control (ATC) outage in the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Jacksonville control center.

This is more like what Aristotle might call the formal cause, the management culture from which the efficient cause arose. In this context, though, the SkySolver software problem is one of several cascading results from the efficient cause, not the origin of the meltdown. I've seen various opinions that say the current CEO, Bob Jordan is more of an operational type than a financial type, and that he'd been trying to turn things around, but apparently to no avail after just 10 months on the job. This video gives me the impression of a corporate pretty boy who speaks in glib generalities:

I assume the Southwest board is already contacting an outside law firm for a thorough investigation. I would hope there would be at least two areas of focus, what the simmering issue was behind the mass walkout in Denver that triggered the meltdown -- at best, Chris Johnson should already be on administrative leave -- and who authorized the situation in Nashville where the police were enlisted to tell passengers their flights had been canceled and clear them out. That person also needs to be fired. (It sounds as though there was a serious sitdown in Denver between the airport authority and Southwest; something like that needs to happen in Nashville and probably elsewhere, too.)

I would imagine, though, that the board is going to have to decide fairly soon that Mr Jordan isn't what they need to turn the company around.