The SHOW: Airlines still a "good gig"??

[sevenhelmet]

Oops, I meant to type 777

I had an Airbus lose one while we were trundling from Philly to LA, and when they pulled it to idle we turned and started heading for Denver. When they shut it down, we skipped Denver and landed at the nearer airport of Colorado Springs, even though Denver was just up the road. That's what surprised me about this flight path.

Looking...it actually made the news. The internet remembers...

US Airways flight makes emergency landing in Colo.

US Airways flight makes emergency landing in Colo.

www.denverpost.com

Fuel load, urgency of the malfunction, location of maintenance support, and company policy all played a role there, I'm sure. If you have to dump down anyway, why rush it to land in London? In the big scheme of things, Paris really isn't that far, especially since I bet they had a lot of checklist items to complete, and gross weight to adjust.

Plus they'd have missed their chance to draw what I'm now referring to as the "crooked French sky penis".

 

[SynixMan]

Newer Boeings (read: 777 and newer, excluding 737 because Southwest management sucks and held everyone hostage in the 1960s) have Electronic Checklists and SOP is to go through all of those as prompted by the plane, as it's got a lot of monitoring you can't see. And then read all the notes again as you descend and approach. In general I've found them pretty straightforward and reliable.

As mentioned, lots of considerations on diverts given the urgency as opposed to the military philosophy of "don't pass a safe field". Uncontrolled fire is probably the only thing we "rush" for. Seeing that in the sim was eye opening. Two grown adults fully assholes and elbows trying to get it down quickly. Air France choosing to go back to Paris is about the least shocking thing I can imagine.

 

[taxi1]

"crooked French sky penis".

Drawing not to scale

 

[zippy]

Oops, I meant to type 777

I had an Airbus lose one while we were trundling from Philly to LA, and when they pulled it to idle we turned and started heading for Denver. When they shut it down, we skipped Denver and landed at the nearer airport of Colorado Springs, even though Denver was just up the road. That's what surprised me about this flight path.

Looking...it actually made the news. The internet remembers...

US Airways flight makes emergency landing in Colo.

US Airways flight makes emergency landing in Colo.

www.denverpost.com

Dispatching across mountainous terrain often has pre-planned responses in the event of engine failure prior to certain points, between certain points, and after certain points. This is called “Method 2” and is used when a single engine drift down along a route is insufficient to clear terrain and continue on the planned route (which is called “Method 1”).

Method 1 and 2

www.bluebrief.com

 

[taxi1]

Dispatching across mountainous terrain often has pre-planned responses in the event of engine failure prior to certain points, between certain points, and after certain points. This is called “Method 2” and is used when a single engine drift down along a route is insufficient to clear terrain and continue on the planned route (which is called “Method 1”).

Method 1 and 2

www.bluebrief.com

People were starting to get a low level freak on when we smelled a whiff of oil through the bleed air and they pulled one back. Then things tensed up to the next level when they shut it down and announced we were visiting Colorado Springs. The green trucks lined up along the runway added to the atmosphere. When we got to the terminal, we had to sit around while they found another plane. They mistakenly opened up the bar, that's when you found out who had been seriously scared.

 

[Flash]

So a question for those who don't have an inside perspective, what was the deal with Southwest's issues over the holidays? I saw a lot of news reporting about how the airline has not updated their crew scheduling for a while and that it can't handle snafus like the one that happened as well as the other airlines. So what is the deal with the scheduling system? Is it really that bad? Just curious more than anything to hear about it from folks who deal with it firsthand.

 

[taxi1]

So a question for those who don't have an inside perspective, what was the deal with Southwest's issues over the holidays? I saw a lot of news reporting about how the airline has not updated their crew scheduling for a while and that it can't handle snafus like the one that happened as well as the other airlines. So what is the deal with the scheduling system? Is it really that bad? Just curious more than anything to hear about it from folks who deal with it firsthand.

My theory is that Southwest has a highly coupled and optimized schedule with not a lot of margin for error, where problems in one node can propagate to others easily, making it ripe for cascading failures to bring the whole thing down. I don't think a scheduling system would matter, it's the schedule.

That's my view from the cheap seats...

 

[ChuckMK23]

My theory is that Southwest has a highly coupled and optimized schedule with not a lot of margin for error, where problems in one node can propagate to others easily, making it ripe for cascading failures to bring the whole thing down. I don't think a scheduling system would matter, it's the schedule.

That's my view from the cheap seats...

Two Legacies

www.swapa.org

 

[wink]

Two Legacies

www.swapa.org

Good piece. Not a SWA bubba, but a guy with several SWA buddies and who sat on SWA jumpseats nearly a 1000 times from 1989 to 2022, I have observed and heard a lot. From the article above, I'd say this is the root of much of the problem.

Herb Kelleher once said that his greatest mistake was not embracing and investing in technology. This was a prescient warning to his successor, but it was one that his successor chose to essentially ignore for 20 years in his obsessive quest to maximize ROIC. Twenty years when the importance of technological infrastructure was going from “nice-to-have” to “must-have.” A fantastic accountant, Gary Kelly’s lack of strategic vision beyond a singular focus on increasing revenue at all costs has come to result in the grievous injury our Company is suffering through today.

From the days of plastic re-usable boarding passes and cockpit crew manually calculating take off data from a piece of paper pulled up on string from the ground crew, to the present state of technology, SWA was always one or two steps behind the big three or four. I was getting take off data from an ICARs printer in a B 727 and agents were rebooking people from any gate or counter agent while SWA guys were using pen and paper to calculate performance on a brand new B 737-300 and the agents could not help a passenger unless they went to the agent at their gate (usually one hapless guy) or call rez and wait on hold.

SWA is still a great company. But even in Herb's day, lack of certain technologies made them more vulnerable to upset then the big legacy airlines, hence Herb's reported regret. Today whatever technology they have in the cockpit, dispatch and operations control, it is still a step behind most of the other carriers. SWA is a huge modern operation playing in the Bigs with management in a Minor league mind set.

 

[webmaster]

Really depends on the type of schedule the airline is running. Is it hub to spoke. Spoke to spoke. Is it a banked operation where all the flights to a hub are arriving within certain banked windows of time to maximize customer connecting options. Then what about aircraft routing and utilization. Is it a peak period and a smaller percentage of planes are available as backups and how many legs does that aircraft responsible for throughout the day? If it’s late the first leg it has cascading effects. Is this compounded with flow through a station. Ie is there a lot of reliance on crew and planes between a city pair based on how the schedule was built with the aircraft plan and crew schedule? Those are all just internal factors. Throw in weather, ATC flow control in the northeast and the Jax ATC meltdown that crippled the southeast during the holidays and an operation regionally can implode if the aircraft timing is really low (time spent at the gate) and utilization is high (legs per day).

It’s not just been SWA. There have been a couple other meltdowns (not as dramatic) but similar where the airlines have lost situational awareness on where the crews are at. To some degree that the crews give up and just catch a ride home on another airline. COVID reduced manpower in maintenance and crew scheduling support operations. So you literally don’t have enough manpower to help rebuild the operation and crews on hold for some insane amount of time.

And then you have the technology available in place to run the operation. There’s a lot of antiquated technology out there. And initiatives to upgrade it at the majors. Each have their issues and hurdles. Previously a lot of reliance was on a larger team of crew schedulers to help rebuild. Airlines have reduced their manning there and some have been working on software to rebuild and stitch together an operation after weather events or what’s called IROPSs. Irregular operations.

And the majority of the narrow body domestic schedules have been running hot with a lot of pilots retiring, pilots in training to keep up, so manpower is down while the flying schedule has rebounded aggressively. So you have each of the airlines in their own way incentivizing pilots or fly more than scheduled. And not just pilots also the flight attendants. So everything running at max with little room for slack in the system to help recover.

Random thoughts. Not a SWA guy but I deal with scheduling analysis.

 

[webmaster]

And speak of the devil …. Who forgot to reboot the NOTAMs server?

 

[Flash]

And speak of the devil …. Who forgot to reboot the NOTAMs server?

"The tower, the tower! Rapunzel, Rapunzel!"

 

[webmaster]

A bunch of memes today.

 

[taxi1]

From a WaPo article...

Although the system has been largely effective for years, critics of the FAA often point to a 2017 incident to underscore a view that NOTAMs are “garbage.”

As Air Canada Flight 759 tried to land in San Francisco in July 2017, the plane nearly crashed into four other airliners. The pilots of Flight 759 were able to avoid disaster after trying to land on a taxiway that was misidentified as a runway. The runway the pilots were looking for had been closed — and that information was buried in a NOTAM they had received, according to investigators.

The National Transportation Safety Board found at the conclusion of its investigation in 2018 that NOTAMs were ignored by pilots since they were unintelligible. Robert Sumwalt, then the chairman of the NTSB, described NOTAMs as “a bunch of garbage that nobody pays any attention to,” according to Reuters.

 

[wink]

And speak of the devil …. Who forgot to reboot the NOTAMs server?

Of course the media ignorantly misrepresented the role NOTAMs play in operations.