THE ART OF ROUTE-CUTTING.

Going into last weekend, Southwest Airlines had what looked like an inordinate number of flight cancellations that couldn't be laid off on the weather or holiday traffic, as competing carriers were handling the Columbus Day or Canadian Thanksgiving crowds or coping with local bad weather.  Perhaps it's as simple as their route-cutting approach wasn't robust.  "Southwest Airlines stretched itself too thin and bad circumstances threw off its entire operation."

The problem with operating a transportation company is that sometimes crews and equipment wind up in the wrong place.  It's expensive to maintain spares or stock the extra board with people who might be laying over away from home for who knows how long.  Precision Scheduled Railroading, for all its flaws, is an attempt to cope with those challenges by having the motive power and the crews set up to go on to another destination, or to return home.

Although airplanes can cover distance more quickly, the crews do want some home time, and part of the art of route-cutting is to ensure that the aircraft return to a maintenance base in time for a mandatory inspection.  There's more than one way to cover both of those requirements.

Southwest does not have a hub-and-spoke route network like United or Delta or American. When you book a flight on United, for example, from Boston to Seattle, you might have a connection through Chicago O’Hare since that’s a major hub for United between those two destinations. From your point of view, it’s a flight from Boston to Seattle with a layover in Chicago. From United’s point of view, it’s one flight from Boston to Chicago and a second flight from Chicago to Seattle. That you happen to be on both flights is incidental to United for scheduling purposes. Further, if there’s bad weather in Boston and the flight can’t leave, it’s a problem for you, but it’s not a huge problem for United. There will be dozens of other planes at O’Hare, and schedulers will have other options to keep the network running. The Chicago-to-Seattle flight is completely unaffected since that was a totally different flight from United’s point of view anyway.

Southwest does not work this way. It mostly flies point-to-point between cities. Its planes fly long, sometimes convoluted routes across the country. So, for example, you might book a Southwest flight direct from Atlanta to Denver. That’s all you see. But from Southwest’s point of view, it’s a flight from Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta to Denver to Las Vegas to Houston. You just happen to be on the Atlanta-to-Denver leg. Someone else might be on the Fort Lauderdale-to-Atlanta-to-Denver leg. Someone else might be on the Las Vegas-to-Houston leg. With these long routes, cancellations can cascade into major disruptions since people in four or five different cities can be dependent on the same flight, and there’s no hub to pull other planes from.

The hub-and-spoke airlines don't have as many continuing passengers staying on, but elapsed time from origin to destination airport might be longer thanks to the mandatory change of planes at the hub.  On the other hand, when one of those legs is affected by weather, it's harder to work out a flex to cover the subsequent jumps the plane makes before it's due for servicing.

What happened to Southwest this weekend was that its point-to-point network was faced with a hub-and-spoke problem. Southwest’s network is not centralized on any one airport, but it is heavily concentrated in the state of Florida. Many people want to fly to Florida, and Florida has four (Orlando, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Tampa) of the top-25 busiest airports in the country, the most of any single state. There was bad weather in Florida this past weekend, and “close to half of Southwest’s planes fly through Florida on any given day, so disruptions there can ripple out to the rest of the country,” reports the Wall Street Journal. So your hypothetical Southwest flight from Atlanta to Denver could be canceled because the plane that was supposed to fly it is stuck in Fort Lauderdale.

You’re probably thinking, “Okay, but bad weather in Florida is pretty common, and this level of cancellations doesn’t happen all the time.” You’re right, and Southwest’s more-distributed flight network often makes it more resilient to bad weather in one place than hub-and-spoke airlines. This time, however, Southwest stretched itself very thin. The air-travel market came back much faster than many airlines expected after the pandemic, and they had a tough time meeting demand.

Some of that, dear reader, might be because downsizing is a false economy.

Southwest encouraged many of its employees to retire early. The Wall Street Journal reports, “Southwest had about 5,000 employees leave permanently and 11,000 go on extended leaves. Once demand shifted, the airline struggled to call them back and retrain them quickly enough, Southwest executives have said.” Southwest was running more flights than its competitors with fewer workers than it thought it would have. The airline offered more overtime pay, but it still wasn’t enough. With very little slack in its operations, ordinary disruptions became major problems."

Dominic Pino concludes by noting the dog that didn't bark. "You’ll notice that vaccine mandates never came up as a factor in explaining Southwest’s problems."

That's at National Review, and perhaps officially, explicit disregard of company policy or aviation regulations being frowned upon.  Unofficially, though?  Might be more than "not enough" overtime pay.

Southwest probably saw a 20 percent increase in flights, and relied on the goodwill of pilots to fly those extra trips.

The way Southwest schedules these flights these days, he said, is they rely on a significant number of pilots to pick up an extra trip for time and a half overtime pay. That time and a half pay is usually enough of a enticement to draw the needed number of pilots to fly those trips, he said.

After the vaccine mandate, however, Southwest shouldn’t have expected any pilots to sign up for those extra flights, he said.

The same was true for the pilots who called in sick.

“Let’s say I was supposed to work this past weekend after this vaccine mandate, and you know what, I’m going to lose my sick days in a month or 45 days, so I might as well just use them now and stay at home and help potty-train my two year old, you know what I mean?” the pilot said. “These are my sick days, and I own them, they’re mine.”

He continued: “So you have some people calling in sick, and then you have this extra 20 percent of flights that they’re relying on people to come out there and cover,” the pilot explained.  “And people like me are saying, a week ago, you mandated me to do something I’m not comfortable doing—so these are the dominos beginning to fall.

Southwest runs that tight schedule, and then they try to get people to do overtime, and they’re relying on the goodwill of their staff to do that, and it’s not going to happen right now. There’s no good will right now at that company,” he said.

Just a difficult weekend, or is something more going on?  There's no news of airline disruption as of this posting.