The conveyor belt stayed perfectly still. From the moment I walked into Terminal B at Boston Logan Airport, I didn’t see the suitcase conveyor belt move once. The line to check in bags curved around the walls of the terminal to keep it from going outside. After entering my flight confirmation code into the auto-check-in machine and seeing that my flight was canceled, I knew something was up.
My first thought was that my flight to the Midwest was canceled due to a big blizzard that had been plaguing much of New York State. That idea however wasn’t good enough. It didn’t explain why not a single person was having their bag checked in and put on the conveyor belt. I gazed upon the families of people interacting with the people at the various check-in booths. Even though I couldn’t see their faces clearly enough to make out emotions, their body language was erratic. I wondered if the families were upset, but what was most telling was that again and again I saw a pattern of how these families would leave the check-in desks. They would pause for a good 10 seconds, shoulders hanging down like dumbbells, then they’d take a deep breath, grab their suitcase and slowly walk off, dazed.
I then got a notification on my phone. I was notified that the Wall Street Journal had just updated an article they made that day titled “Southwest Airlines Cancellations Continue”. It was at that moment I knew that the cancellation of our flight was not ordinary.
When I finally reached the check-in desk, the woman working there informed me, “there are no flights available for the next 3 days”.
And so, knowing I needed to be back to Boston in 4 days, I sadly accepted I wasn’t going to get to see my family in the Midwest this winter break. After speaking with others in line who were trapped in Boston and needed desperately to get home, I would’ve felt terrible clawing my way towards an airplane seat just to know I would be taking it from someone who needed it more. Thus, I waited for my uber back from the airport while sitting in a corner of the check in room, with my big 30 pound hardbody suitcase and my school backpack. While sitting there I watched the security line from afar. A few people trickled into the line, but for the most part it was barren, empty, sad. Finally my Uber had arrived. As I went to get up to go out to greet my Uber driver I saw the wide doors to get into the rest of the terminal, past security, closing. It was 3:00 pm.
What happened to me was not unique. All over the United States, over the holidays, plane cancellations ran rampant, particularly for SouthWest Airlines. This begs the question: Why?
Well I was partially correct. Large winter storms did play a role in why my flight, along with so many others’ flights were canceled. But what really put the nail in the coffin for Southwest Airlines was a failure in one of their technological systems: SkySolver. Basically, Skysolver is a tool that helps reassign people who were supposed to be helping on one flight, to another, if the original flight they were supposed to be on is canceled. The issue with SkySolver this holiday season was that, because of the unusually large number of concurrent winter storms and cancellations, SkySolver was overwhelmed and stopped properly assigning crews to man flights. This meant that human crew schedulers had to sort through air records by hand, which you may imagine, takes A LOT longer. ‘
Why specifically could SkySolver not be relied on? Well it was responsible for a number of issues. First off, it caused crews and planes to be out of place. For example, SkySolver may have booked Pilot X to be the pilot for Plane 100 for a 5:00pm takeoff. But because Pilot X was in Boston at 4:00pm and Plane 100 was in Chicago at 4:00pm, there was no feasible way that Pilot X would be able to make it in time to fly the plane, especially with the winter storms preventing Pilot X from flying anywhere in the first place. Also, due to the large number of pilots and flight attendants that were stranded due to SkySolver, the volume of calls into the scheduling department for the airline was huge. So huge, that most phone lines were jammed up, meaning most pilots and flight attendants were stranded, unable to call anyone within the airline for help on getting to where they were supposed to be.
After a week or so, Southwest had fixed its system and was back online and operational. However, this recovery was not without permanent losses. Firstly, Southwest’s stock plummeted at the end of 2022, dropping over 10% in just over a week as news about
Southwest’s failure spread across the country.
What makes this failure on behalf of Southwest interesting is that it actually was somewhat predictable. While no-one could predict that the SkySolver program would fail, Southwest’s air-travel strategy is categorically different from other airlines’ in some sense. This is because, unlike their rivals, Southwest’s planes generally hop from one city to another, rather than circling a major hub. This approach allows Southwest to maximize the utility of each plane and crew member, but it also makes them more dependent on each plane and crew member being present. In other words, Southwest’s business strategy is to sacrifice the possibility of a risky event shutting down their operations in order to maximize their efficiency of flights and resources. This may even explain why southwest flights are often cheaper than their competitors’.
What does this mean for Southwest? Well, maybe they need to make their business strategy less risky, or maybe they just need to make sure their technological systems like SkySolver don’t break? Regardless, one thing is for certain: this holiday season gave us all a wake-up call that maybe our air-travel isn’t as perfectly reliable as we may have once thought. That said, Southwest is only one airline, and this whole story might be weightless in the grand scheme of air travel. Hopefully that's true. I certainly don’t plan to let this stop me from flying again and neither should you!
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