[Aces4]

Originally Posted by CoachKandSportsguy

Sure, you have a very complex system of moving pieces, passengers, support staff, and crew. The system was forced to a staggered stop. Now, to restart the system from the current state, there are various options:

1 - pick a start time, and move everything back into position to start at that time
2 - pick a time to restart which has the closest configuration of pieces, support staff and crew to minimize expensive piece and people relocations
3 - confounding constraints :
a - FAA crew rest time constraints. . with documentation.
b - supporting staff constraints / luggage / fueling / supplies
c - Passenger rebooking to start time pieces with the future open seats

Now its a huge operational research schedule program to get everything lined up to get ready to go, especially with the stranded passengers and luggage trying to reschedule in a system that may not be designed to handle that much traffic at once.

However, the more manual data inputs are needed, and manual communications needed for data inputs, the higher human staffing needed and time to update and reconfigure the system before even reticketing the stranded passengers. The longer the outage, the more difficult the restart due to the backlog of rebookings and openings. . .

So if the system isn't totally digitized with automated feeds and reschedule optimization algorithms built, one gets the result which SWA recently exhibited.

Doesn't mean that the weather and operational system design weren't the initiating factors to the shut down. What it means that the restart probably took longer than other airlines due to the amount of manual input required and old algorithms to run to restart the system.

operations guy

Did you catch on the news tonight how some of the other big airlines were selling tickets for missed SW flights for thousands of dollars a piece?