Originally Posted by arbalist1

So I've been through two meltdowns the last few years. One at a AA WO regional, and now at SWA. It's tough to describe the difference. In the AA system, we were genuinely very cautious about wearing our uniform in the airport. Pax were so upset, harassing crew members, calling us liars. One guy just put his middle finger in my face as I walked by. Customer service doing little to nothing other than threatening to call the police if anyone got too frustrated with them. I was nervous about the same thing this week.

SWA was a lot different though. I think it was the way customers could see all the frontline employees genuinely trying to fix the problems. Most of us still try to provide a good product. Customers could see that we knew we had failed and that we felt bad for it. We had a lot of people like zap doing whatever was in our power to help each other out and move metal when we could.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all puppy dogs and rainbows. A lot of people are royally ****ed about everything and they have a right to be. But I'd rather be working at SWA during an epic meltdown than an AA epic meltdown. I feel less likely to get punched in the face in the terminal.

I also agree that this entire thing was preventable. We need a whole new system in the NOC. I wasn't in the building so I won't speak to how leadership handled the mess during the meltdown, but I can say that our lack of re-investment in the company directly caused this. We can't do 5,000 departures a day and still rely on crew scheduling to manually look at crew legality.