solid! Did a 4 day that will pay north of 50. Blocked 9

 

You guys are hilarious. Keep up the entertainment. Damn I remember when guys paid for a type rating just to interview at SWA. What the hell happened to your group?

 

Things rocked at AT. Career destination type carrier that hired the best.

 

That’s right kids. Don’t stick around and turn into the Whackmaster.

 

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.

 

the sad part is that the “automated” crew scheduling system by pretty much any other carrier is some 3 decades old Sabre solution.

there simply isn’t enough money to be made to attract some serious innovation.

 

The Sabre CT suite has been continually updated by new owner CAE and runs plenty of operations around the country (and world) with no carrier in it’s history coming anywhere close to the catastrophic loss of crew visibility that has beset WN.

Other existing CMS options that run airlines today, also without such catastrophic failures in their history:
AIMS
Lufthansa Systems
Jeppesen CTE

New CMS suites that have been developed in the past 5 years:
NavBlue CMS
ELP CMS
CAE Crew Manager


There are off the shelf solutions available in the market that could have been implemented at relatively low cost in a 12-24 month project plan at any point over the past half decade. The decision to NOT make a move should be as scrutinized as Ed spending hundreds of millions in capital on stock buybacks and pushing pilots with time left on the clock out the door during the worst labor contraction potentially in our industry’s history.

 

PSA’s summer of hell 2018? Yup, CLT concourse E lost a window…,,

 

They can’t be bothered with low priority issues, when the DEI agenda is TOP priority for this goverment, thus corporate America.

 

Lol.

As if a multi billion dollar corporation with tens of thousands of employees can’t do both.

$$$$$ is the reason y’all have ancient processes, not DEI programs.