Last week, Super Winter Storm Storm Elliott caused the US civil aviation industry to experience a "once-in-a-decade" paralysis during the Christmas holiday week.

More than 17000 flights were cancelled in the United States from last Wednesday to Monday (21-26), according to flight information tracker FlightAware.

Fortunately, after the extremely cold airstream passed, near Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the aviation companies have returned to more than 80% of the normal level.

Only Southwest Airlines is different: more and more flights are canceled, and the entire airline has been completely collapsed since five days before Christmas and remains completely paralyzed three days after Christmas.

Silicon Valley friends who have been to San Jose's SJC airport in recent days should be familiar with the following images: travelers filled the departure hall and even lined up the terminal; unclaimed luggage filled the baggage turntable area and there was chaos everywhere.

Some netizens on Little Red Book also took a video showing that the SJC queue was so exaggerated that the southwest line had not only lined up at the Alaskan gate of the same terminal, but even threw out at least hundreds of people later. What is even more exaggerated is that the car rental company is also crowded, "not a single car that can be rented" (because many people's flights have been cancelled and rented cars instead).

At Nashville International Airport in Tennessee, Southwest even "outsourced" customer service to local police:

A video released on the evening of December 27 shows a policeman threatening passengers with nowhere to go because of flight cancellation. "Southwest called us. You don't have a legal ticket. If you don't leave, I will arrest you."

It can be said that the "grand occasion" of local airports is entirely the "pot" of Southwest Airlines.

According to incomplete statistics, Southwest Airlines canceled 2500 or more flights a day from Monday to Wednesday and could not resume until the weekend. The data of the FlightAware platform shows:Since the Christmas weekend, the vast majority of cancelled flights in the United States have come from Southwest Airlines.Starting from Wednesday, only Southwest Airlines in the United States is still canceling flights.

This is not the first time Southwest Airlines has cancelled a large number of flights due to system-wide paralysis. In fact, just last October, the Southwest experienced a similar situation, but not as bad as it was last week.

Let customers down again and again, and during the Christmas holiday when all the people return home for reunion. What happened to Southwest Airlines?

Through the information disclosed by a number of people in the civil aviation industry and Southwest Airlines staff, we can restore the real reason behind the paralysis of the Southwest.

The culprit: the old and outdated scheduling system

There is no doubt that winter storm Elliot was the trigger for the paralysis.

On December 21, a historic temperate bomb cyclone formed over North America, and snowstorm warnings were issued in many parts of the United States and Canada. A number of major cities in North America have been hit by snowstorms since December 23. From the 21st to the 25th, more than 10,000 flights were delayed or cancelled on Christmas Day.

However, Southwest Airlines' outdated crew scheduling platform is the core reason for this paralysis.

A number of civil aviation workers, including Southwest Airlines, who posted anonymous posts on the Internet, say Southwest has been using an extremely old back-end system. In particular, its crew scheduling platform, the system is very old, the rules are also very "bullshit".

Specifically, airlines need to look at their real-time systems or FAA public data to know the current location of their pilots and flight attendants.

The logic is simple, but the southwest does not do so. The company uses a very outdated "pre-scheduling + manual bookkeeping" system:

• After the southwest shifts the crew, it will automatically move their position to the destination of the flight.

• If the flight is diverted, delayed or cancelled, the southwest system cannot automatically update the location of these crew members, but needs to manually confirm the specific conditions of the flight and then manually modify it on the scheduling platform.
  

• In the case of large-scale delays and cancellations caused by snowstorms, southwest employees need to carry out a large number of manual tracking + manual modifications. Finally, it leads to a shortage of manpower, unable to track the latest situation of flights and make corresponding changes.

Finally, the snowball got bigger and bigger.There are serious information errors in the scheduling platform, and almost none of them is accurate.The whole system is completely "out of order".

For example, for a flight from Los Angeles, tickets have been sold, a large number of passengers have checked in, their luggage has been collected, and crew members have been arranged in the southwest system-- as a result, flight attendants are still thousands of miles away in New York, Dallas and Denver, and only one captain, "Lightpole Commander," is in Los Angeles, which is impossible to fly.

What's even more outrageous is yet to come.

In an intercompany call yesterday, Southwest Airlines COO Andrew Watterson admitted the situation and revealed that the information error was so serious that the entire system was completely unusable-so the company had to urgently notify all crew members to report their current location manually.

What do you think the way of reporting should be? Let them log in to the system and submit information? Send an email? Texting? Fill out an online form?

Then you think too highly of Southwest Airlines.

The company's so-called manual reporting method allows all crew members to call the same hotline.

As a result, Southwest Airlines not only automatic scheduling platform garbage, manual scheduling staff reception capacity is also extremely limited.

Over there, passengers are queuing up at the airport. On this side, thousands of crew members across the country make the same phone call until the end of time.

Some employees even wait in line for as long as 23 hours.

The serious failure of the scheduling platform not only makes it impossible for the company to grasp the accurate situation of its employees, but also leads to "secondary disasters":

FAA, the US regulator, stipulates that civil aviation crew members must be forced to rest long enough before they can continue to fly after working for a certain period of time. Usually, the Aviation Department's system can automatically count the working hours of employees and automatically book hotel rooms at their current location after exceeding the limit.

However:

• Because the backstage system in the southwest is seriously paralyzed, the crew scattered all over the country are not only unable to rework, but also unable to open hotel rooms.

• If the room is not booked, there is no way to calculate the forced "rest" time of these employees, and there is no way to rework.

According to people familiar with the matter, employees in Southwest have completely abandoned the company's system in the past two days, and many crew members have paid for hotel rooms themselves, although there is no guarantee that the company will be reimbursed in time.

You see, another snowball is rolling.

In addition to system reasons, Southwest Airlines angered a large number of ordinary employees just days before the crash. This bad posture in front of employees also exacerbated the severity of paralysis to some extent.

Since December, the United States has faced a "triple epidemic" (Tripledemic): COVID-19, influenza, RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) pandemic at the same time, many people have reported illness at home, and Southwest Airlines has not been spared

Chris Johnson, vice president of Southwest Airlines, released at Denver Airport on December 21, according to an internal email.Operational state of emergency (State of Operational Emergency).

The executive claimed that because too many people took sick and personal leave, resulting in a shortage of staff, the company had to temporarily revise the leave policy for staff at Denver airport:

• Personnel who call in sick must issue a request for leave after rework, and they must see a doctor offline. Remote consultation does not count, or they will be fired directly.

• Reject the approved personal leave, all employees who ask for leave will automatically return to their posts, and those who fail to arrive on time will be directly dismissed.

• As the number of voluntary overtime is not enough, the company starts a compulsory overtime system, and employees who do not work overtime are also fired.

It's okay if this email is not sent. As soon as it is sent out, the staff will blow it up directly.

Denver employees who had previously called in sick and personal leave did not come directly behind. And there are rumors that at least 100 Southwest Airlines ground staff resigned at Denver Airport on Wednesday and Thursday.

Considering that Denver is the largest distribution center for Southwest Airlines, the consequences of angering ground staff can be imagined.

At present, the most outrageous flight is the following flight: from Tampa to Denver, because the Denver ground crew went on strike, and finally arrived at the destination and had to turn around and return to Tampa.

Restart and start again.

The already very difficult resumption process of Southwest Airlines has been dealt a heavy blow again and again.

In the end, all efforts had to come to naught.

The current plans of Southwest Airlines are:Cancel all flights completely and have a "hard restart"

Because backstage systems like them have no choice but to restart and come again.

That's why Southwest Airlines has had more and more flight cancellations and a growing backlog of passengers and luggage since Monday.

The "splendor" seen by Silicon Valley friends on SJC is actually just a drop in the bucket. After all, among Southwest Airlines' largest airports in the United States, SJC is not even in the top 10.

On Monday, in the (unofficial) Southwest Airlines section of Reddit, an anonymous user who identified himself as an employee posted an "unofficial" version of the situation, giving people a better understanding of what is going on inside Southwest Airlines and how to make travel plans next.

This post has been deleted so far, but the original text reads as follows:

1) the major paralysis was indeed triggered by a winter storm, but it was entirely caused by Southwest Airlines itself that it was able to paralyze to such a serious extent. If the southwest customer service also tells you that it is because of the storm, it is that they are lying (actually arranged by the company)

2) the core reason for the paralysis is that the crew scheduling software is completely out of order, and phone scheduling does not work. "if we had better technology and didn't have to make phone calls, the problem would have been solved by now."

3) if the passenger is trapped and there are other modes of transportation to choose from-the best choice is to go directly, don't hesitate.

4) never tow your luggage without checking it, because no one can guarantee where your luggage will end up. The current situation of checked baggage can be described as a disaster. If any checked baggage is lost, it may take at least a month or even more to be found.

5) Don't wait for Southwest to recover, don't try your luck: flights will be cancelled in the next 3 days; 4-7 days are "possible" to comply with the plan; 7 days later should be able to return to normal.

In addition, on Reddit, some netizens have come up with an idea:

"there's nothing to do at the airport? Go to the baggage turntable, look for unclaimed luggage, see if there is a phone number on it, and tell the owner where the luggage is. "

After learning the inside story of the crash, many netizens said that they did not know much about the technical level of the civil aviation industry, and they did not expect that a 21st century airline could have a system-wide paralysis because the scheduling system was so old.

But what makes netizens even more angry is that the southwest has gone wrong again and again for the same reason, and finally asked ordinary employees to know the truth by posting privately and anonymously.

In an interview with the US media, Southwest Airlines' COO Andrew Watterson also had to admit that their system was too old:

"We have enough planes, but there is something wrong with the scheduling software. With our current technical level, we are unable to match the crew and flights in an accurate and timely manner. "

Watterson describes Southwest's backstage system as a house of cards-the slightest problem in any small place can cause the whole house to collapse in an instant.

"when we were about to solve the problem, there was a new problem. Finally, we had to reset the entire system. "

The collapse prevented millions of people across the country from returning to their families in time for Christmas and humiliated Southwest Airlines executives.

They kept saying that "the problem of the system should be solved". However, at Southwest Airlines, their words are the same as "here comes the wolf".

"We have been experiencing these problems for the past year and a half," CaseyMurray, president of the Southwest Airlines pilots union, told CNN. Collapses of different sizes occur more and more frequently within the company, but in fact, as long as the IT system, the process can be solved. "

According to his understanding, the backstage system of Southwest Airlines has not changed much since the 1990s.