> The Southwest Airline Pilots Association (SWAPA), the union representing pilots at the airline, similarly denied there was a job action — official or otherwise.
I gotta admit, when I first heard these denials I assumed that the union was cautiously not confessing to a sick-out.
But instead it seems as if disinformation is spinning current events to change perception about the Executive's new policy. Sadly, even after it's fact-checked - people won't remember the fact that it was bogus nor will they count it as a strike against the source that reported it.
> if both management and the union say there wasn't a job action, there probably wasn't.
This is just making an uninformed opinion based on the apparent factional interests of an organization.
Both can have an interest of denying it. For example, management don't want to scare off investors and stocks to go down and it is not in the interest of the union legally to admit that it initiated such a collective action, especially while they are in court for a case relating vaccine mandates.
It is also fair to doubt what is officially said given deceptive claims that the weather caused them to stay grounded even if it didn't affect other airlines and that airliners fly above most adverse weather conditions.
Weather regularly grounds airlines - the problem is not weather in flight, the problem is weather at specific airports, and with how southwest flight graph is constructed the knock on effects can be huge (it's also why in hub-spoke setups you have huge investments into making hubs capable of dealing with extreme weather)
Which still doesn't explain why other airlines operating at these ports didn't experience this kind of large scale disruptions and why no weather maps were shown (as far as I know) to back up these claims.
Other airlines were disrupted, but not to the same level, due to different level of dependance on said stop. The second most affected airline IIRC had Jacksonville as minor stop, and out of all impacted, only Southwest used what they call "line flow" flight planning. Which results in Southwest being the only one to end up with stuck planes that were supposed to service a many routes way further away.
Most low-cost airlines operate on a sort of "distributed hub-and-spoke" (many small hubs instead of one/few big ones), with plane going bidirectionally on a route to non-hub airport before any route switching happens. This means that so long as the "hub" isn't severely impacted your disruption is somewhat contained and you still have access to a fleet of planes&crews that can be reassigned.
A pattern like this:
H->A->H->B->H->C->H ;; H = "Hub"; A,B,C - spoke airports
Disruption at A,B, or C doesn't block unrelated flights, only disruption at H.
Southwest instead flies like this
A->B->C->D->E->F->G
If B is in any way blocked, flights B->C, C->D, D->E, E->F, and F->G are all going to be disrupted, possibly without replacements plane/crew combinations available. If the disrupted airport has a lot of overlapping "lines" like that, the disruption quickly turns catastrophical.
Also, appears that at least some approaches were manually vectored recently at KJAX, which isn't fun if there's a shortage of controllers.
Because it was not just weather. It was combination of weather with low staffing of local ATC and disruptions to flight patterns. Weather is just one of the triggers.
I'm seeing on twitter a lot of reports of cancelled flights for American Airlines today (200+ cancelled, 500+ delayed).
I saw one explanation (no idea if it's true) that individuals were taking sick days because their banked PTO wouldn't get paid out if they're terminated on Dec 8 because of the mandate. So not a "sick out" that's organized, but possibly a lot of employees just taking their 'paid vacation' while they still can.
> I saw one explanation (no idea if it's true) that individuals were taking sick days
Good news! If you actually read the article, you get information like:
“Nothing like that is true,” Jordan said. “We didn’t see sick leave beyond normal. In fact, we saw our crews picking up open time to the extent that they could.”
RTFA: it’s better than random Twitter speculation. I mean, yeah, it’s about Southwest and not American, but it’s hard to see why pilot behavior would be different.
I think I misunderstood, but my main idea might still stand. Some companies treat vacation and sick days as the same thing, and put them in the same bucket called PTO. Some companies separate them. I'm not sure what Southwest does. If Southwest separates them, then labster's quote could be true while simultaneously a lot of employees are out on vacation days due to wanting to use them up before quitting.
It doesn't matter. What mattered is it sparked my curiosity in knowing more, above and below my immediate reply as well as the rest of the comments in this post, however true or false they are. Everyone goes somewhere and I (try to) go where they've been with some DYOR.
Some things I never knew until recently:
- PTO isn't federally and legally required yet most companies do it
- Some states have some influence on PTO policy
- Southwest Airlines is a Texas-headquartered company
- Because of claims that MSM are either incompetent or narrative-driven, secondary and tertiary conjectures leading to this headline should be considered as well
- Lastly, a visit to Wikipedia yielded this line:
> If PTO hours go unused, employees may sometimes call in sick near the end of the year so they can obtain the benefit of paid leave before it disappears. Employers may counter this tendency by paying employees for some or all of their unused days at year-end or upon retirement or resignation.[1]
PTO is a form of compensation. Every place I’ve worked at has paid me for unused, accrued PTO when I left. But I’ve also never been terminated, so don’t know if that matters.
Unused PTO must be paid out in many states and in states where it is not legally required it is generally still required if the business has historically done it. Beyond that, Southwest pilots are unionized. No sizable union would allow separation without PTO payout.
Unions are for people in the Union, aka the people still working there, not for those getting fired with cause (failure to get vaccinated). This sounds exactly like something a union wouldn't care about.
What are your credentials for telling us things that unions do and don’t care about? What unions are you in? What direct experience do you have with how unions decide what’s important to them?
>But instead it seems as if disinformation is spinning current events to change perception about the Executive's new policy. Sadly, even after it's fact-checked - people won't remember the fact that it was bogus nor will they count it as a strike against the source that reported it.
What might help us remember is to name and shame the people responsible. Ted Cruz claimed to have heard this from multiple people including the leader of the union who you quoted denying it.
Some politicians are bulletproof to "name and shame", their supporters will even blank out or excuse away that they did something shameful...
Because if those supporters admit (ultimately to themselves) that the people they voted for were cheap scammers, how does that look on their self-belief that they're intelligent people? They'd rather twist reality to not shatter said self-belief.
If you look at the polling for all these “bulletproof” politicians, most of their supporters recognize that they’re dishonest. It’s about tribal identity and pissing off the other side.
I will never understand the career of Willie Brown. Literally hundreds of fake mayor jobs, many of which were assigned to mistresses, massive theft of public funds, legendary and brazen corruption, and yet he's still a well-loved figure.
That Kamala was involved with him is remarkable only in that usually Willie was seen with a tall, leggy blonde, so she wasn't his type.
Most of his mistresses he would find government jobs for -- when he was speaker of the house, Willie had over 1000 full time "aides", but they weren't primarily mistresses, most were pure political patronage positions, to keep the power base growing. Brown was in absolute control of the Assembly,
"In many ways, the Speaker of the Assembly, in pure politics, may have more power than the Governor. . . . Willie has an awful lot of power, and none of the headaches of being governor.
Ed Meese
Chief of Staff to Governor Ronald Reagan, 1967–1975"
To understand how he ran things, just imagine a pyramid of patronage with Brown on top:
The party cost $250,000 to stage, but not a cent came out of Brown's pocket. Brown raised the money from corporations, trade groups, and others with business in the Legislature. The food and booze also came free of charge: California wineries delivered a truckload crammed with one hundred cases of wine. San Francisco's best eateries, the finest on earth, provided delicacies to match. "I am hell-bent on enjoying every minute of my life," Brown proclaimed in an interview with GQ magazine. "So I do not mistreat myself. I make very few sacrifices. I live my dreams."
Not everyone was impressed with Brown's stupendous excess. David Roberti peevishly stayed away, giving his ticket to a Burbank city council-woman. The prickly Senate leader was in a snit over Brown listing himself on the invitation as "Speaker of the Legislature." Roberti fulminated that the Legislature had two houses and Brown was Speaker of only one. "You should bill yourself accordingly," Roberti huffed in a letter to the Speaker.
Roberti was technically correct; Brown was the leader of only one house of one branch of state government. But nobody that night cared about Roberti's civics lesson, much less his pride. In the world of politics, there really was only one Speaker of the Legislature, and that was Willie Brown.
He was the most powerful politician in the Capitol, and arguably in the entire state. Willie Brown was more than that; he was the P.T. Barnum of California politics, the best show in a state that relentlessly produced bland, blow-dried political leaders.
Brown's flamboyance, however, hid another reality. The bashes were one more method for Brown to spin his web of power, tying other politicians, interests groups, campaign donors, and power brokers to himself. Lobbyists, corporate executives, and union officials paid for everything so that they could don a tuxedo or a formal gown and rub elbows with Brown and his friends.
Brown was allegedly "treating" them to his party, and everyone played along with the facade. The end result was the same. Those who wrote checks expected, and got, the attention of the Speaker and a place at the negotiating table when the party was over. Brown got their money and used it to fuel an election machine that kept his friends and allies elected to the Assembly. His friends, in turn, kept him elected Speaker.
The whole edifice was based on a simple principle: keeping Assembly members happy. As long as Brown could keep forty-one members happy, he could remain Speaker. As long as he was Speaker, the checks kept coming, and Assembly members remained happy.
"Don't ever misread me—ever," Brown once said in the middle of a challenge to his leadership. "I always have forty-one votes. Always." Few understood or appreciated how accurate he was.
After he was term limited out -- and that proposition was basically written against him (which is why it also reduced the number of "aides") -- he became mayor of San Francisco and got a reduced allotment of about 100 mayor appointed positions and that's where Kamala came into the picture, no doubt working it to get a position in the DAs office. But in fairness to her, it would be hard to get any valuable position in SF unless Willie signed off.
Look at any notable CA politician and they are one or at most two steps away from Willie and his machine. They all owe Willie something.
When it comes to playing politics, Brown’s protégés learned from the best. In Sacramento, opponents complained he routinely flouted conflict-of-interest laws, representing clients who had business in the capital, but FBI investigations went nowhere, earning him the nickname “Slick Willie,” a moniker Brown wore proudly. He also called himself the “ayatollah of Sacramento” — vote with him, and you were rewarded with perks. Cross him, and you were banished to a basement office. Brown’s escapades were so infamous that, after meeting Brown in 1992, future president Bill Clinton quipped, “Now I’ve met the real Slick Willie.”https://www.marinatimes.com/dpw-boss-mohammed-nuru-finally-s...
For a long time, almost nothing happened in California that he didn't have his hands in, and a good chunk of what did happen was used to either line his pocket or cement his power, and sometimes both. Brown would find a way to do both with remarkable ease.
The position of SF mayor was almost retirement for him, and it came at just the right time, when the city was booming with dot-com money, going on a building spree, and Willie set up a special power group consisting of the city's biggest tech companies that he would meet with -- something like the old Phoenix Forty, in order to keep the gravy train going. My guess is that a big reason why SF became popular with techies is because of Willie wrangled them to increase office space there. In the beginning, all the tech was in sunnyvale/MV, and didn't really go up to SF. SF was where the techies would drive to in order to party on weekends, but the office was a big campus in Santa Clara county. Willie played a big role in changing that, as well in remodelling the cap on city hall, emblazoning it with gold (probably brass, but the symbolism was clear - gold rush!).
Here is a pic of Brown and his Fundraiser (who became baby-mama in 1999):
But his current gf is Sonya Molodetskaya, however at this point I'm not sure she does more than keep him warm at night, like King David in his twilight years. Sonya became a fasion icon in SF and I think became an editor of some magazine, but not sure.
In dot-com 2.0, sniffing opportunity again, he also ended up on the boards or as a paid consultant for some of the ride-sharing outfits.
I remember seeing Willie a few times when he was mayor. He would spend a lot of time attending high class parties or driving down market street or some other notable street like Haight in his limo, with the Brioni suits, a cigar, and the current blonde. Music blasting, sometimes talking to people out of his limo. Also known for the hats. It was like a cartoon.
But the guy has a joie-de-vivre and fantastic political instincts. He knows the system better than anyone else, and played it like a fiddle. And the machine he set up is still going -- if you want to build something or bid on something, you better pass a white envelope to someone who owes Willie. That machine will keep going long after he's dead. Last I checked, he had his own column in the Chronicle, "Willie’s World", doing political commentary.
The FBI has tried multiple times to hit the machine. Once during the "shrimp boy" scandal, they got a wiretap and recorded some of the conversations by the officials:
But nothing ever happened except a few low-level officials. And after the election of 2020, no more indictments have been handed out. Willie Brown wins again.
Ted Cruz won his last reelection campaign 50.9% to 48.3%. with the supposed mass influx of people from California I'd say he's anything but bulletproof.
The people moving from a blue state to a red state because they feel the people running the blue state screwed up are going to keep voting blue? I've never understood that logic.
Presumably there are people in the world with a finer-grained view of things than "blue" and "red", such as centrists, people sympathetic to progressive social views but not a fan of progressive economic views, people hurt by Prop 13 in particular, etc.
(It is certainly possible that such people are working to improve their home state and the only people actually moving have a dualistic view of politics, though.)
The politicians who had progressive social views but who were not in favor of progressive economics are long gone from the political scene. There are only red and blue left. Witness the demise of the Blue dog Democrats with one vilified exception.
Eh. I suspect besides housing prices, a significant amount of people also move to Texas because of political preferences. Also according to exit polling (as unreliable as it can be, so take it for what it's worth), Beto O'Rourke actually won the native Texan vote over Ted Cruz.
Can we name and shake the politician I’m the White House that said that vaccinated people can’t get Covid? While we are naming and shaming, let’s not forget the one that deserves shaming the most for spreading that ridiculous lie.
You cannot use an argument of whataboutism in politics (well, you can, but it doesn't have any effect). It isn't applicable in any way. It just establishes that one bad deed doesn't excuse another.
But in a political context when the topic is mutual standards of behavior, it can be justified because that overrides the determination if an action is ethical or not.
On the contrary it can be abused as a rhetorical trick to only let objections be permitted if the sender is flawless if the accuser takes the lead in pointing out mistakes.
One side effect of our toxic national discourse is that I don’t know who to believe. Disinformation abounds and lies or lies of omission should be expected from anyone in a position of power and influence.
> One side effect of our toxic national discourse is that I don’t know who to believe.
While I do think that things wrt 'discourse' have gotten worse, I don't think that traditional news agencies are untrustworthy. If they are, then they're as untrustworthy as they've ever been. As long as you avoid sources like opinion-shows-on-'news'-channels and stick to the dreaded "Mainstream Media" you should find trustworthy reporting.
“Polls in summer 2020 estimated that between 15 million and 26 million people had participated at some point in the demonstrations in the United States, making the protests the largest in U.S. history.”
Given the sheer scale of people protesting they were, by all reasonable definitions, mostly peaceful. When news reports prefer to show things like broken windows and trash cans on fire, but it’s impossible to show 15 to 26 million people spread across 50 states, emphasizing that the protests were mostly peaceful and the violent images are the outlier is responsible journalism.
> It’s totally fair to lose faith after seeing that.
Nah, not IMO. The video you linked to has the reporter claiming that the current state is "in stark contrast" to the day's earlier protests.
BTW, the term that I stated originally ("Mainstream media") may include CNN but it also includes AP, Reuters, and many more press agencies that are much more dignified. CNN used to be 'headline news' but has transformed into the same nonstop opinion shows in order to compete with Fox. So it's not the best source IMO.
But don't lose faith. Don't base things on the worst example. Instead judge Mainstream Media by the NYT, Washington Post, Reuters, NPR.
I’ve lost faith, it’s too late for that. Reuters and AP seem to play it straight. NPR I’d say is somewhat biased, not really at the facts level but in the way stories are framed. NYT is a hopeless lost cause. WaPo, I have no opinion on, I don’t really read them much.
It’s the MSM showing you a video of a burning building. Why does that cause you to lose faith in the MSM when they give you video evidence of what’s happening?
We had video evidence of those Convington kids and then found out the part shown was a section that didn't tell the story. Video has been shown and edited a bit too much lately. It's not the shown video but what isn't being shown that is often the problem.
They were showing the anomalous situation, and giving an overview for greater context.
Reporting only the former, or only the latter dissociates the two. This was clearly establishing and acknowledging context for the extreme outlier of the situation being pictured.
But you’ve already made up your mind, I suppose, and no amount of logic or reason will bring you back.
If you want me to believe protests are "mostly peaceful" then don't report in front of a fucking conflagration.
Furthermore - and there's no nice way to say this - why are people so dumb as to believe news outlets as if they're arbiters of the truth? As if they were the very Ancients themselves from the Stargate universe, descended down to enlighten us all with zero self-interest?
The New York Times COMPANY. A COMPANY. Owned by a trust-fund jackass who inherited it from his great-great-great-however-many-times-grandfather.
CNN, owned by Turner Broadcasting Company, owned by WarnerMedia, owned by AT&T... the same AT&T that's lied about bringing fiber to America after getting how many billions in tax dollars for the past 36-something years from Congress?
How deluded do you have to be to think any of these outlets are being even remotely objective about "The News"?
They pander to your goofy asses, and you consistently believe them. CNN is no better than Fox News is no better than MSNBC is no better than <insert here>.
EDIT: You're not goofy, guys... you're just honestly fucking gullible and dumb if you believe any of them. You're being sold a story - a worldview compatible with whatever bullshit you want to believe. It makes me sick that people can't or won't be honest about this.
Yes, optics matter and this was one of the worst among them.
But you didn't have to go all the way back in history though. In my opinion, CNN's trope of succession is largely forgotten today in this specific journalism-is-dead context but unless "hackers" have been living under a rock for the past few years, pointing this out is far more important than continuing to cherrypick out the headlines. Remember when HN was all about punk/hackers culture from two decades ago? Times have certainly changed.
I have seen more humanity in people than I would normally expose myself to but more about those caught in the crossfire. Two examples I can think of was the story of a Seattle security guard snatching away a rifle from a group of rioters whom freshly pillaged a police car and, an urban explorer vlogging his departure from Seattle as a result from the protests.
It’s the spin, the contrast between what’s on the screen and the commentary about it. It causes me to lose faith in CNN as an unbiased source. Doesn’t apply to all MSM, but it’s a data point.
That is fair and logical take. But if the protesters had been wearing red caps, people would be defending a fair and logical take in the press that they were cover for violent riots and looting.
I'd be more interested in data a few years from now to show if protesting really did anything? Obviously this is a right we must protect and embolden, however for certain causes protesting in this day and age seems to do little to elicit actual political action or change - sometimes it even does the opposite.
I couldn't agree more - I think the number of pervasive narratives accelerated by social media (with almost zero backing in data) are also a factor here. For instance, I support reducing emissions and fossil fuel use, but I find it a bit nuts when Gen Z claims "the world will end in 12 years" without offering any real path forward other than "fuck anyone who disagrees".
Sure a head count of all protests from the whole country buries the problem from view. Using this logic Jan 6th was peaceful.
The problem is they mentioned protests, not protestors. The more relevant way to look at it is how many protest events led to rioting as it progressed?
You are structuring your argument as if it was a one off and not a culminating crescendo for some people. News have been getting progressively worse over the past few decades. This just happened to be a very clear and visible sign, because it is just hard to find something so visibly wrong.
The other poster was framing it as an inflection point and I was questioning that.
Also the chyron wasn't truly wrong, it was summarizing a report about what transpired over 24 hours. The protests were "mostly peaceful" until they weren't. That was all discussed on screen while the chyron was displayed. The only way to be misled by the chyron was if you were watching the channel on mute or you just saw the screenshot flying around the internet being pushed by people who wanted you to think the media is lying.
The chyron said "Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting" and it probably should have said "Mostly peaceful protests after police shooting turn fiery after nightfall" but that is both longer and clunkier. So they went with a more condensed version without thinking of the awful visual it would create when screenshotted. If this is journalism's worst crime, then we are in fantastic shape.
It is not the worst crime. It just happens to be most visible, because it gives the appearance of consciously creating a narrative that fits specific needs ( in simple terms : BLM good / police bad ) and is then reinforced by semi subtle, but still clear signals ( if race is omitted in a shooting, you can at this point assume the shooter was/is black ).
That is the issue, it is not one clumsy comment. It is a series of million little moments. They do add up.
>it gives the appearance of consciously creating a narrative that fits specific needs
If this was the goal, why would they report the truth audibly while lying to you visually?
That is the point you are missing as it evidence that the chyron was clumsy rather than nefarious. You don't report two conflicting narrative if your objective is to get viewers to believe only one of the narratives. If the goal was to mislead, they did an awful job at it by telling the truth in the actual reporting. The people who want to mislead are the ones who took the chyron out of context of the report it was summarizing.
To respond to what I think you are saying. Maybe the senior lead thought reporter could do better job on his feet and gave him a shot. Live riot. You will need to take some chances and see how they play out. Poor guy was clearly not ready for prime time.
This is exactly my point. Why are you only looking at a picture? You should also watch the video. Remember CNN is a TV channel. Their primary product is video. They are working to convey information through video and not an out of context screenshot.
Do you think the reporting is misleading after watching that video? The reporter specifically mentions that the scene behind him is "in stark contrast" to the "largely peaceful demonstrations" from earlier in the day. The video is clear and truthful. The chyron tries to summarize that but doesn't do it properly resulting in the bizarre and dystopian screenshot. That screenshot is not an accurate representation of the report it accompanies. That is the failure. There is no reason to assume that failure is malicious rather than accidental.
>To respond to what I think you are saying. Maybe the senior lead thought reporter could do better job on his feet and gave him a shot. Live riot. You will need to take some chances and see how they play out. Poor guy was clearly not ready for prime time.
Also a quick side note, you seem to be suggesting that the reporter wrote his own chyron. It was almost assuredly written by some producer who was probably in some office hundreds or thousands of miles away. The reporter on the scene did a fine job.
Misleading can have an implied motive. I said that the chyron was clumsy in my first comment, so I agree it is bad and should have been clearer. However we have nothing to suggest that that was purposeful with an intent to mislead. It can just be someone making a careless mistake.
Also now that you recognize the video's message is clearer than the single screenshot, I would ask you to consider why you have primarily seen the screenshot. Is that maybe because the people sharing it are doing it based on their own biases and motives rather than the merit of the report itself?
Oh, there is zero doubt about that part. The moment this video showed up, it was like Christmas in July for the right side of the political spectrum in US. What you call careless mistake, I see as the problem with modern journalism. It does not even need a spin. You just show one frame and meme theory will take care of the rest.
The chyron combined with the reporting that night could have been inserted into a dystopian movie with little to no editing.
> The chyron said "Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting" and it probably should have said "Mostly peaceful protests after police shooting turn fiery after nightfall" but that is both longer and clunkier. So they went with a more condensed version without thinking of the awful visual it would create when screenshotted.
I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit. When your job is literally not creating awful visuals, you can't use that defense. There was a clear message being projected, and that was that the violence was good, and you really shouldn't pay attention.
>The chyron combined with the reporting that night could have been inserted into a dystopian movie with little to no editing.
What was inaccurate about the reporting that accompanied that chyron? They specifically said it was peaceful during the day until nightfall and that is when violence started. That is perfectly inline with the scene behind the reporter. The only problem was the chyron.
>I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit. When your job is literally not creating awful visuals, you can't use that defense. There was a clear message being projected, and that was that the violence was good, and you really shouldn't pay attention.
No one has ever made a mistake at their job especially when they are doing it live on television in a stressful high pressure environment? This is classic Hanlon's razor. And as I said in the other comment, there was not a "clear message projected" because the audio and text messages conflicted with each other.
The message of "violence is good" also aligns with the robotic use of "mostly peaceful" throughout the media and the strange empathy TV people had for Antifa. Your interpretation is an accurate read of the sympathy the news has for BLM and others.
A person can argue that World War II was mostly peaceful. At any point of geography, it's quite rare that artillery shells are falling or tanks rolling through. Usually it's a quiet garden spot.
The fact is, the BLM protests were mostly peaceful. They were almost entirely peaceful. But that's not how we expect the news to cover any event that includes rioting or looting. We expect the news to lock on to the most sensational parts, however insignificant, and talk endlessly about how terrible this is and how BLM organizers should feel some responsibility for this. That's what the news would've done in any other circumstance. That's what it would have done for BLM in decades past. That's what it would have done if BLM had endorsed Trump. But because of the weird and universal sympathy news producers have for BLM, the protests were covered differently.
Between cherrypicked statistics,
obvious and tremendous political bias (Both sides, but we all know which one benefits more),
a complete abandonment of balanced coverage,
and tinting the faces of politicians to make them appear less healthy (happened to Trump and Bernie), I'm just about done ever trusting any mainstream media source again.
When Ben Shapiro's news website does a better job of admitting their own biases than any of the three-letter networks, we have a problem.
If you aren't looking at the traditional news with a skeptical eye, you are getting an extremely filtered and heavily slanted view of the world.
This whole mythos of journalism being unbiased is a recent fabrication. Look how many newspapers across the country had "Republic" or "Democrat" in their mast head. Bias was expected - and proudly advertised. Far more refreshing than the games currently being played by the "traditional news" organizations today.
The contents of reporting by the mainstream is largely accurate. Ask any seasoned journalist and they will tell you that story selection is a big answer for how bias makes its way into any publication especially the respected ones.
The only other caveat with the mainstream news is that they often behave like stenographers for “anonymous sources familiar with the matter” who often is an insider with some sort of agenda.
This is exactly the strategy adopted by the GOP in the runup to 2016 and onwards. The exhaustion is the point. Literally just lie and keep lying until most people tune out.
Thanks for sharing. I thought this wikipedia article was really interesting and it led me to this other article [1] by Bruce Schneier about how to combat the firehose, and one by RAND [2] (which IIUC is the genesis of this 'firehose' term).
Your unwillingness to see that the GOP is in another league than the Democrats on this front is showing. As someone sitting outside both camps, you can't really "both sides" this one.
True but trending that direction for a long while. I feel like one person in particular really gave them a leap forward and had been a blatant liar his entire life. Anyone care to guess who?
If we’re being honest, citizens want them to lie to some extent. The want a visionary president to say they’ll fix all the world problems in a way that is acceptable to their voters. The voters completely ignore than no one person can do much of anything. They will be at the mercy of the government process and the people within. All with competing objectives. But, when asked during a debate, what will you do during your first 100 days in office, you can say “it depends” which would be the honest answer.
That said, lying and weaponizing misinformation are two completely different things. Bill Clinton lied about cheating on his wife. Trump lied every single thing. This is the guy that drew over the Hurricane map because he knew better where the hurricane was heading. When you apply that alternate reality to things like questioning the election results and whatnot it’s quite a different level of dishonesty.
> One side effect of our toxic national discourse is that I don’t know who to believe
That, largely, is the intent. "Some people" know that the more they poison this well the more people like you will then throw up their hands. And, while I'm sure you aren't one of them, most of them will then take that as a license to believe the source they want to believe and not the one telling them the truth.
And the frustrating thing, of course, is that the disinformation is largely asymmetric. One "side" of sources is more consistently wrong or misleading, and one mostly gets it right with the occasional mistake. Also, one "side's" thought leaders tend to parrot disinformation[1] more than the other, where you tend to see the worst whoppers primarily among the ground troops only.
[1] Ted Cruz pushed this particular meme, for example.
You have this whole other side where it is obvious both sides are misleading because to have a side means you are determined to spread and grow that side.
This president is sharing as much disinformation as the last president as much as China and as much as European and Canadian prime ministers. If you are only seeing the other side doing this you may be too close to one side.
How can you look at Trump's former twitter feed and say that with a straight face? If your argument is quantity of disinformation, Trump spread more disinformation on twitter in an average month than Biden has done in the first 10 months of his presidency.
Which shows you everyone is lying to you no matter what side you are on. Better than the other guy means you are still being fooled. Rep and Dem are two sides of the same coin. It reminds me of a Simpsons halloween episode where the Rep and Dem candidates are replaced with two Aliens and when the truth is uncovered voters were stuck with a choice between an alien Rep or an alien Dem who would enslave all humans or voting for a human third party candidate. The ending scene shows humanity enslaved with Homer saying he voted for the other alien.
If this is your bar for dishonesty - which is basically lying by omission, mischaracterization or stretching the truth and not telling bold-faced lies - then this list doesn't even begin to compare to the former executive's near-constant deluge of outright falsehoods, told in explicitly bad faith.
That's a nice opinion piece you have there. Honestly that was just a whole gish gallop by someone with an extreme bias. I don't personally like Biden, but that was a terrible article.
The union says there's no strike, the airline says there's no strike, no other airlines experienced similar failures despite similar mandates, and there's an alternative explanation that fits all of the available the evidence (and there's a lot of public evidence since these are domestic commercial flights). Additionally, people who want to stir up FUD about vaccine mandates have an incentive to lie.
So, one possibility is that there's a fast conspiracy that involves NOAA, the FAA, Miami airport admin, air traffic controllers, Southwest, the pilot's union, etc.
The other possibility a few conservative commentators are talking out of their ass.
The union and airline say there's no strike or sick out (job action) because strikes and job actions are illegal under the Federal Railway Labor act. They are unsurprisingly denying doing anything illegal.
The union and company are merely denying that they have done anything illegal. Not surprising. Pilots strikes have to be approved by the National Mediation Board. Any job actions including sick outs are very illegal. The last time a major airline had a strike authorized it lasted for 24 minutes before they were ordered back to work by President Clinton.
The media have done an atrocious job covering this story. Gell-Mann amnesia is in full effect.
How can something be “very” illegal? Either it’s illegal or it’s not. Please note inserting qualitative modifiers like “very” indicates that the speaker has no actual evidence for their stance and subconsciously use words like very to build confidence.
As someone that has been involved in political events, sometimes this could be an agreement to avoid more damage to the company. The truth usually doesn’t come out unless there is a leak.
I personally know of several pilots who are using up their sick time in anticipation of a showdown over the vaccine mandates.
Southwest has been running with a pretty shallow pool of pilots for some time, and COVID made the problem a lot worse.
Furthermore pilots who opted (or were opted) to idle have to be re-certified before they can rejoin the pool of active pilots and training is overwhelmed and backed up.
Juan Browne does a much better job than my ham fisted attempt - and a WAY better job of going into detail than this superficial article too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO39nIcuPhQ
BTW he is an active commercial pilot so he knows a bit of which he speaks and isn't just scraping content from elsewhere and resummarizing.
From by the submission a few days ago, this comment linked a substack that claimed they couldn’t make it an official union action because it was about the vaccine mandates.
This source does not seem like a credible one. If someone who has some real stake to lose by reporting unsubstantiated claims makes this kind of a report, I would have an easier time believing it. But this is just some website that I didn't know existed before today.
It could just as easily be some bogus report on Blind or any other anonymous site and I would have just as much trouble believing it.
Think of a million other news reports you have heard where a union or CEO makes claim X/Y/Z and a news agency refers to a specific individual (or airs an interview with a disguised voice/appearance individual) who contradicts those claims.
Berenson rightly called the vaccine efficiency drop with actual data and was castigated for it. These outlets are more fixated on character assasination rather than hash out his arguments because that's so cool nowadays.
It’s not about being right. It’s about being right for the right reasons.
If you make a million predictions one of them is bound be true. Just because you’re the first to predict one thing doesn’t mean that everything you say is true, or that you shouldn’t be criticized for jumping to conclusions.
This is probably another recent example where a system that operates with very little slack can have massive failures due to localized perturbations in network dynamics.
> we need a global reckoning on the tradeoff between efficiency and resilience
Why?
Southwest operates on a thin operating margin. It passes that cost saving (and risk) on to its customers. If someone needs high certainty, there are other providers (and other fare classes), but you'll be paying up for that service and redundancy.
If we were talking about base utilities, I'd get the argument. But passenger airlines?
Passenger airlines aren’t just any other business.
First they deal with travel, which is a Constitutional Right (of course that’s a general right not a specific right travel by passenger airline, but still there is no constitutional right to “utilities”). To that end most passenger transportation services are public utilities and regulated as such.
Airlines for the most part operate on government owned property, a federal agency (TSA) does security checks on customers, a federal agency (FAA) regulates equipment/employees/operations, and undercover federal marshals often secure planes during travel.
Ironically CEOs from the airline industry have previously come out asking to be regulated as utilities specifically because competition makes the industry financially unviable. It is an industry that has received taxpayer bailouts.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to say a single airline having canceled flights infringes upon individual liberty. Not only is every other airline still functioning, but there are other modes of transport. Taking someone's passport without due process infringes upon liberty, but this is not that.
> they deal with travel, which is a Constitutional Right
No, it is not.
Air travel has been held up by zero courts as a Constitutional right, which is why the federal government can restrict it. Even interstate travel isn't a Constitutional right, which is why it, too, can be restricted with solely administrative procedures.
> that’s a general right not a specific right travel by passenger airline, but still there is no constitutional right to “utilities”
There is no Constitutional right to "utilities," either, which is why power and water companies can cut you off if you don't pay, just a variety of legal rights.
It would be nice if there was some way of educating the consumer.
But even if you did let people know that the Delta flight is $60 more and has a 40% less chance of being cancelled, people would still go with southwest.
Because for most consumers $60 is more valuable that 1% vs 0.6% cancellation rate [0], as it matters only once in 250 flights, which for an individual effectively means never.
[0] numbers pulled from thin air but consistent with your 40%.
It's not just the rate of exceptional events, but what happens when the exceptional event occurs.
1. Miss your flight? They will try to book you on another. That's why load factor is important -- to find that extra seat. Low cost airlines have higher load factors (more efficient) so they are less able to accomodate you.
2. Bigger problem? There are reciprocity agreements to fly with a different airline. Low cost airlines don't have the same coverage, so again less able to accomodate you.
It's just a general principle of efficiency versus robustness. With the low cost airline you are choosing the more efficient/less robust option. So when something goes wrong, it will be more painful.
That extra pain is more important than differences in the rate that things go wrong.
Other perks, like more value to frequent flyer miles, availability of first class, being able to pick your seat, etc, also play a role.
Yeah, when something goes wrong it will be more painful, but that's why it's cheaper and the odds of it happening are low. There are many times people travel where leaving a day late isn't a big deal.
It's an interesting thought, but I think the problem is that flight cancellations are, historically, pretty rare. Pulling from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics[1], for the 12 months from July 2020 to July 2021 (the most recent month with posted statistics), Southwest cancelled 1.5% of flights and Delta closer to 0.5%. Now, that does mean that you're 3x more likely to have your flight cancelled on Southwest, but 1.5% is pretty small to begin with.
People are pretty bad at assessing risk to begin with, so how do we judge how much that 1% reduced chance is worth? Is it actually worth $60? It's a value judgement, and I think you'd find that if you gave people the info, they'd still go with Southwest, but not because they're uneducated, but because it's hard to quantify what you're buying with another airline.
An economy ticket generally consists of two or more flights and is generally round trip, so that 1.5% could add up to a significant chance of being late. Add the chance of "mere" lateness to one airport resulting in missing another flight and you a significant chance of being delayed each trip.
Most cancelled flights are about weather, all money can buy is pilots more will to take risks. . As they say, 'there are old pilots and there are bold pilots; but there are no old and bold pilots'. So I'm happy with cheaper pilots and cancelled flights.
I didn't say "global" because I just wanted to talk about airlines. It's not even just about economics. It's about our entire global civilization where every time resilience comes up against some other value, usually but not always money, it gets pushed aside. It's a class of problem that manifests at almost every scale. Think about just-in-time inventory for manufacturing: way more efficient, but any hiccup in any supply chain might cause the whole thing to snarl, with more downstream effects. You'll start to see it everywhere.
People are bad at assessing the danger of rare events, so it's right for regulation to protect them (just like safety regulations). Flights may be a luxury in many cases but in other cases they can be vital.
Corporate limited liability is a privilege not a right, and it's time to stop handing it out like candy.
As someone whose Southwest flight was cancelled, there's one important thing to consider with Southwest besides risk of cancellation - Southwest does not have reciprocity with other airlines.
After my flight was cancelled, I was told they couldn't rebook me until two days later (when I was scheduled to return). They also offered a whopping $200 in Southwest credit, even though I ended up having to spend $600 to get to where I was going via United.
So don't just factor in risk - factor in the impact of cancellation, which is much, much worse with Southwest, particularly when they have large-scale failures like this where everyone is trying to rebook the same few flights.
Depends on the customer. An occasional (1/year) flyer? Probably not. A frequent flyer? Yes, by direct observation and indirect anecdotes. There are also very sophisticated customers, like large businesses. They definitely look at cancellations and delays when selecting an airline.
We vote for the one we prefer every time we buy something.
Supply chain resilience is incredibly expensive insurance for very rare and relatively short term disruptive events. Covid for instance is going to put things out of whack for two or three years, but is preventing that worth paying up for the redundancy and contingency plans over the previous 100 years?
Probably not. Over the long term, efficiency wins out.
> We vote for the one we prefer every time we buy something.
This is actually not true. As a consumer my choices are constrained by retailers and suppliers (and government due to regulations). They choose based on price what to offer. If all retailers in my area don't want to supply organic food, I can't buy it.
So I have limited power to alter the market. For extremely bad options, there's the choice not to buy, but for necessities, that option is precluded.
Which is why a healthcare "free market" (hint: it's anything but free right now) is a chimera: when you or your family is dying or suffering, you are willing to pay "value based pricing".
The real solution is to delink the "global" supply chain and build up local options. Resilience also increases jobs and tax base, but reduces megacorp profits. Since we actually live in an oligarchy, profits are all that are chased.
Your vote has limited power to alter the market because it's just one vote. America chose Wal-Mart over Main Street. It's tragic, but that's what American consumers chose.
I don't know if you recall the 90s, when WalMart was on a rampage, but there was considerable local resistance all over the place from groups who understood the hazards. The opportunity to be informed was there.
I also remember how bad those small town merchants they drove out were. And in the 90s they are still 'we buy American so you don't have to'. I'll take todays Walmart over what small towns had before, though they have gone downhill.
I remember periods when I made it a point to avoid Starbucks and get my coffee drinks at a small cart near work which appeared to be family-owned. They were nice, but the product was so inconsistent in quality -- and in general -- that I finally understood that part of it.
But the rest of the reality is that you need to consider the relationship. Buying from a local-owned store doesn't really count if you're just doing a transaction and walking away. I didn't feel like discussing the drink quality, or asking for a refund, would have been appreciated, so I stopped going there. Local stores that you can't develop a relationship with might as well be megachains. Local stores that you don't WANT to develop a relationship with, making yourself a little vulnerable in the process, are another matter. America didn't just want cheap and/or consistent goods, they didn't want to have to interact with the people they were buying them from. And that's the real sad part.
There should be a name for the fallacy of expecting people to "vote" with their dollars on every single issue all of the time.
It's like the opposite mistake that communists make. They expect a single centralized decision maker to balance all considerations to set a price, which is inevitably ineffective.
This vote with your dollar argument expects every individual to balance all considerations to set their own personal price. There is an assumption of information symmetry and unlimited ability to analyze on the part of the individuals behind the vote with your feet argument that is just not remotely true.
I run into this conflict. Many like to regard themselves as sovereign agents who can make informed decisions for themselves. This is the ideal, and I can argue on behalf of it.
Of course, reality doesn't check out that way and the record shows it. This doesn't stop people from getting upset should you imply that they are not equipped to sensibly make their own decisions.
We are strongly encouraged to make terrible decisions all the time, and there's a lot of money behind it, from many actors.
I don’t follow your logic here. Every paragraph has questionable claims, but the last one is most glaring to me.
You are hand-waving that delinking from global supply chains somehow magically fixes the issue (I don’t see how it’s relevant to the Southwest article) and that it only reduces megacorp profits.
Local doesn’t mean resilient. Local options must have theirentire supply chain local in order to be maximally resilient. But now you are talking about removing a fundamental feature of capitalism: comparative advantage.
It is 100x more expensive to run a labor-based factory on the San Francisco peninsula than it is in the cheaper parts of East Asia. Cost of living, local talent, building and labor codes, etc all vary and contribute to costs. When a widget is made in SFBA for 50x the cost of the same widget with comparable quality elsewhere in the world, the risk of those one-in-a-century events means that the consumer is paying 10x more for most of their costs for the 99/100 years they don’t need the risk mitigation.
Also, your plan to delink cuts across the de facto way things work, so now you have to invent a way to convince Americans to pay 10x more for some obscure risk issue they will have forgotten about in 4 years. Are you adding massive import taxes/tariffs, outlawing imports, or do you just expect voluntary compliance?
> We vote for the one we prefer every time we buy something.
Not really, no. We can probably count on more resilient products being more expensive, but we can't count on more expensive products being more resilient. It doesn't work that way. There is really no way for an average consumer to know which expensive products are expensive because they are sold by resilient companies, and which are expensive for innumerable other reasons. Most purchases are made by people who lack the knowledge, experience or training that would be required to evaluate the resilience of a business.
Voting for something without knowledge about that something is farcical. Ultimately this "voting" is little more than rhetoric used to push the blame onto those with the least insight into how the system works.
Delta is the airline that abandoned me for 40 hours in ATL of all places, while Southwest has never let me down. If you had asked me a week ago which of the two was more reliable, I would have told you Southwest and I would have meant it absolutely.
How would you have me judge them? I don't know anything about how to run an airline and I wouldn't even know where to start if you asked me to look up which of the two had a more resilient business model. You can't really expect any random air traveler to have an opinion on airlines better informed than their personal experiences. I think most people would struggle to tell you something so basic as what sort of plane they were even sitting in.
The best phrasing I've heard is something like this: the more closely adapted a system is to one environment, the less adapted it can be to other environments. So by being very closely adapted to the steady state environment, it cannot be adapted to disrupted environments.
You may be right, but airlines are either the canary in the coal mine or an exceptional case. They operate on incredibly, incredibly small margins so vulnerability to small disturbances is, at least in this industry, totally expected. I.e. not necessarily true for other trade sectors.
> They operate on incredibly, incredibly small margins
I've never understood how an industry so hard for competition to get into, so defensively positioned with regulatory capture, and so overpriced and gouge-happy from a consumer PoV, can somehow manage to be barely scraping by. What is going on at the airlines where they seemingly can't make ends meet despite a silver platter cornered market?
I think it's basically free to fly -- if you buy a $200 airline ticket, you are using $200 worth of fuel (total fuel / airplane capacity), aircraft depreciation, crew costs, etc. The airline can only make money because they figured out how to sell someone else a $300 ticket for their $200 worth of stuff. It's a precarious model, because if they sell you the $200 ticket but don't ever sell the $300 ticket, then they just lose money. Once the boarding door closes, there is no way to ever gain money on that flight.
The "gouging" is just to appeal to the truly cost sensitive; people with no brand loyalty, time constraints, etc. If you don't want a soda, a checked bag, a seat assignment, and the option to choose from 10 different times of day to leave... but do want $50 in cash... they have you covered. It rubs people the wrong way, but people "sort by lowest price first", not by "lowest hassle first", so they have to account for that somehow. (Tangent: I never really understood this. I feel like air travel would be way smoother if people checked their bags instead of fought each other for overhead bin space. They should charge for the bins, not for the cargo hold. But I guess that's too hard in practice.)
If you had an airline that just charged actual cost + desired profit for a certain load factor, the ticket would be $1000. Then someone else would show up and charge $999 because they can pay for a slightly less well-trained flight attendant. Then someone else comes along and puts the rows of seats 1" closer together. Eventually the price is what we pay today, because all that actually happened. I think the industry is so hyper-optimized that it's basically "free" to fly; you're just paying for transport at cost, or even less than cost if they have done their yield management correctly and you got the lowest fare on the flight. That's why the industry is so sensitive to disruptions -- it's balancing on a razor thin margin, because there are competitors ready to make $1 less to get your butt in their seat.
Anyway, I think your assertion about a silver platter cornered market is simply wrong. Flying is ridiculously inexpensive compared to the costs. As a comparison, get your ATP certification, buy a 737, and fly your friends around in it. Pretty expensive compared to a ticket on Southwest!
> Once the boarding door closes, there is no way to ever gain money on that flight.
What about in-flight food and alcohol? In-flight wifi/movies/media? Does Sky Mall pay a commission? I'd be curious how much all of those things add in revenue after the door closes.
It's not really that hard to get into the airline business. There are usually a couple of new (small) airlines every decade. Equipment is easy to lease, maintenance is easy to contract, staff is ok to find when you don't need a lot. You might not be able to get slots where you want, but there are a lot of airports, you can find slots somewhere, and you can do business with a handful of routes.
But there is a lot of competition; wikipedia lists 10 major (doing $1B annually) US 'mainline' passenger airlines, and three more major regionals (although one is a subsidiary of a mainline). It's hard to stay non-competitive with 11 other big companies doing the same things as you; especially when non-majors can compete too.
That's not to say there's no gouging, there is a lot of opaque pricing and nickle and diming. But, if your route is served by multiple carriers, there's probably not a lot of consistent profit there. If you're flying out of a small airport that does two flights a day and the nearest airport is a 4 hour drive, there may be some more profit there, but it depends on utilization.
They have been underpricing themselves to maintain position against other companies. Regulations keep costs increasing. Unions keeps labor prices increasing.
Did you expect your $200-300 cross-country flight to really give much of a profit to airlines after airport taxes, landing fees, fuel, maintance costs plus labor, insurances and everything else?
Those flights should cost 10x as much if you want the golden treatment fliers received in the 60s.
Warren Buffet has long since described the aviation industry as over competitive. This was decades ago, before the low cost airlines even entered the picture.
Airlines are a great example of competition driving prices down for consumers.
This is a little bit misleading. You have to look at the entire history of the industry. A lot of consolidation has happened to eliminate competition. And pretty much every legacy airline has declared bankruptcy except for coincidentally, Southwest. Largely due to their founders strategy of avoiding overly leveraging the company. So much so that at one point during the pandemic when other airlines were overleveraged, their stock price did not crash and they were the most valuable airline in the country by a considerable amount.
When I need to fly somewhere I look around and choose the cheapest way. Maybe they really are pinched and can't raise prices without loosing too many customers.
The problem is that capitalism (as it is currently configured) strongly incentivizes short term efficiency. Very few organizations plan for long tail events because it almost inevitably hurts short term expected value, even though long term expected value would potentially benefit.
This post is an excellent reminder that even HN is not immune to rampant conspiracy theorists and to take everything with a grain of salt. HNers are not uniquely intelligent nor capable.
First, allow me to say that just because something is a theory, conspiracy, or both, does not automatically make it untrue no matter how much that word association may have been tarnished. Being distrusting is a basic human condition honed by evolution. Only short lived and lucky people trusted lions not to eat them. Naturally, some individuals believe every single theory put forward, which is an issue, but it does not mean it is not valid to ask a simple question along the lines of:
United, Delta, American, Alaska all instituted the same mandate.
(The answer you seek is in the linked article, which literally has a section starting with the quote "The common question, then, is why Southwest was affected so much worse than other carriers.")
“The big issue is that Florida is roughly 15% of our trips, but on any given day, upwards of 50% of our aircraft lines flow through Florida,” Jordan told TPG. “You’ve got all those lines that just stopped in Florida, so you’ve got a lot of aircraft caught up in that,” he said.
Are you telling me that SW is so unique that it is the only airline with so much flow in Florida? I genuinely don't know. Do you happen to know?
> Jordan said it was particularly the line-flow system that Southwest uses as part of a point-to-point network that made it harder for Southwest to recover than other airlines with heavy exposure in Florida, such as American, which has a hub in Miami as part of its hub-and-spoke network.
Southwest is unusual in having this "line-flow" system.
I am learning a lot today, so I feel I should thank you.
The link you provided lists Allegiant Air as one of the other airlines that flies to/from FL ( and uses the same system ), but there is no report same issues as SW has/had.
For the record, I don't really care one way or another, but I am not that big on taking executives word at face value; even outgoing ones.
Geez, rather than concluding "Allegiant uses the same system, they have no problems, therefore the SW CEO must be lying" (a conclusion that probably pleases you because that's another win for your pet theory that CEOs can't be trusted), why not do your own investigation as to why Allegiant might have escaped this problem? A good scientist tries to disprove her own theories to make sure it's robust.
I saw several of your replies scrolling through this page, yeah, you need to learn a lot.
I am first to admit that there are a lot of things I simply do not know, but because of this I am also willing to accept evidence presented once presented.
Am I wrong to ask why two seemingly similar systemsrespond differently to an event that seemingly should affect them the same way? I do not think so. If the approach is wrong, then tell me that. I am not a scientist. I am just a guy on the interwebs, who sees flimsy excuse for an excuse and calls it out.
Southwest had the most cancelled flights, Allegiant had the second most, and Spirit had the third most. I googled “Allegiant cancelled flights” and got dozens of news stories.
The FAA problem was in Jacksonville. Wikipedia lists Allegiant’s top Florida destinations as Orlando, St Pete, and Ft Myers. Also, according to Wikipedia, Jacksonville is a minor city for Allegiant.
> I am also willing to accept evidence presented once presented
I think what rankles a bit is you are coming up with these pet theories that force others to present easily obtainable (including from TFA) information. So no, you're not wrong to ask the question, you're wrong to have demonstrated contrarianism rather than curiosity.
How about you start reading the actual article, rather than pushing a conspiracy theory by Just Asking Questions, that are answered in the article that is being discussed.
I mean the answer is easy here. Weather affects all airlines equally. The possibility of a sick out only affects those airlines whose pilots were able to organize.
The claim it's the weather is the one that needs extraordinary evidence because the claim is that weather that day only affected Southwest, whereas the claim Southwest pilots were the only ones to organize makes more sense.
The Florida explanation doesn't make sense because my parents also had issues going from CA to Oregon.
Occam's Razor doesn't obviate bad priors. In this case a major area with big impact for Southwest got grounded, with knock on effects on flight scheduling as machines and crews couldn't get to next stop in time.
Nah. Storms are often highly localized, and different airlines have different cities they fly a lot through. A nasty storm cloud over Miami might not interrupt flights over Fort Lauderdale.
Weather over Chicago is gonna screw up ops for United. Weather over Atlanta will fuck up Delta.
> The Florida explanation doesn't make sense because my parents also had issues going from CA to Oregon. Occam’s razor.
Unfortunately, the simplest Occam’s Razor explanation is ignorance here.
Here’s an example Southwest flight. Tampa to St. Louis to LAX to San Jose.
Look at the airlines operations. SW is different than many of the full price airlines in that they run the leanest of operations almost everywhere. Isolated weather can easily disrupt SW while more capable operations with more robust networks continue just fine.
HN has a healthy number of conspiracy theorists and flat out liars. There was a post about Apple keeping the 30% cut on refunded apps last year that is a good example.
HN is getting it wrong because everyone else is. The real story is that pilots unions are never allowed to strike and sick outs are illegal. If the company or union admitted to doing so they would be in breach of the Railway Labor Act.
Or... you want the idea of a walkout by pilots over a vaccine mandate to be true, and like most conspiratorial thinkers, to be "in" on this truth, to have seen through the lies that the sheeple cannot.
I highly doubt any real number of airline pilots are walking out over a vaccine mandate - because they've probably been vaccinated for months now.
You accuse me of being a conspiratorial thinker? Please do not resort to ad hominem when I have provided you ample evidence.
The NMB wikipedia article describes the process airline pilots unions must follow before being allowed to strike. The legal basis for this is found in the Railway Labor Act.
>NMB programs provide an integrated dispute resolution process to meet the statutory objective of minimizing strikes and other work stoppages in the airline and railroad industries.
A few key points from the video: The last time a major airline was allowed by the NMB to strike it lasted for 24 minutes before they were ordered back to work by President Clinton. It is the NMB's mission statement to prevent strikes and labor disruption in the airline and rail industries. Job actions (including sick outs) are not allowed. When Pilots did a slow down by following FAA regulations precisely a Judge stopped them.
I am not a Southwest employee so I cannot tell you how many pilots walked out. What I can say however is that if the union claimed to be involved with job actions that would be an admission of a crime.
"Even" HN? HN is massively prone to conspiracy theories and misinformation. Just to pick one example of many, I have seen more Covid denialism on HN than any other milieu I'm part of.
The problem is that it takes far more effort to dispel and debunk BS than it does to create and spread it in the first place. By the time anyone has the chance to conclusively debunk this tripe, the creators are already miles away on their next grift.
How much do you want to bet that this goes from conspiracy theory to probably true in the coming months, like so many other things have over the course of the past year?
Until we know the truth (which we do now), all reasonable options are on the table. Discussing them while the verdict is still out doesn’t make you a conspiracy theorist.
What motives does the CEO, union, FAA have in all this?
Obviously, they all desire a "return to normalcy". The CEO wants a better bottom line. The union wants to avoid fines and penalties. The FAA has political stakeholders that don't want any rumors of anyone against their mandates.
They all desire the same outcome. I would factor that in to whether their being 100% truthful about everything.
> Murray told the Dallas Morning News that the data showed that pilot sick rates during the heavy cancellation days were "exactly in line with where they were all summer with the same kind of operational disasters."
Actual data on sick leave seems more useful that an individual anecdote or two.
I meant the pilots who were there. Should be easy to clear up if the CEO just lets the pilots speak on how happy they are with the jab and how they totally didn't walk out.
For some reason we've only seen union leaders, the CEO, and others come out. If they really wanted to dispel things they'd let the pilots speak.
> A SW pilot that was supposed to be working that day.
A single pilot claiming to have gone to work would be sufficient to disprove the sick-out? 1,000 out of about 3,000 flights got canceled on Sunday. I presume the remaining 2,000 were piloted; I don't know that an interview is necessary to demonstrate that.
A single pilot claiming to have done a sick-out doesn't prove anything much, either. I can find a doctor that claims demon sperm causes gynecological issues (https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/report-texas-doctor-who-wen...), but that doesn't really lend it credence.
The sick leave data seems a lot more compelling than digging up one interview, in either direction.
Are you implying that a picture of an airplane cockpit window with a Don't Tread on me Flag hanging out of it is evidence of a walkout? Then I have another tweet you might enjoy:
Sure maybe someone staged it in another similar cockpit around the same time, or did it preemptively and waited for this event. Or maybe it's a fake rendering.
Interviewing the pilots of that day would help, but the media doesn't seem interested in that.
Pilot strikes have to be approved by the NMB and any job actions including sick outs are illegal. The union and company are merely denying that they did anything illegal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Mediation_Board
Yeah it happened but only at exactly one airline and for exactly one day AND ended without any capitulation and also no one who walked off made any public demands!
Sounds like a similar tactic to blaming the Texas blackout on renewable energy. An event that irritates the general public is fertile ground for opportunists to be first to press with something from ideology rather than information.
This is the unfortunate consequence of a significant portion of the US electorate not punishing, and even rewarding, politicians for simply lying, as long as it's lies that they agree with.
You now have a group of politicians who will use any scenario where there is raised attention and tension to claim their particular issues are the cause for it because their supporters have absolutely no care for the truth value of what they are saying.
Flight scheduling is not very different from a complex manufacturing supply chain. Low-cost carriers like Southwest heavily optimize their routes to have as little leeway in the system as possible, and thus a simple disruption can have massive consequences. On one hand you can undercut all your competitors by $10, on the other 50% of your operation is reliant on Florida.
These were the bits I found the most interesting which led to issues.
> “Flight delays and cancellations occurred for a few hours Friday afternoon due to widespread severe weather, military training, and limited staffing in one area of the Jacksonville Air Route Traffic Control Center,”
> “The big issue is that Florida is roughly 15% of our trips, but on any given day, upwards of 50% of our aircraft lines flow through Florida,” Jordan told TPG. “You’ve got all those lines that just stopped in Florida, so you’ve got a lot of aircraft caught up in that,”
> “We’re not hub and spoke, and we do very little out-and-back,” Jordan said. “So when you stop a line, you’re stopping a line where the aircraft is attempting to flow across the country.”
There's another forum where a Jacksonville ARTCC controller echoed they had 15 people call out (not due to some anti vax movement) and had weather looming on top of the military who takes over half their airspace and doesn't give it back promptly (or the FAA gets the word but doesn't pass it along). Combined with constant understaffing and the fact that JAX can't stop departures from places like Atlanta (but other centers can) doesn't help.
> “We’re not hub and spoke, and we do very little out-and-back,” Jordan said. “So when you stop a line, you’re stopping a line where the aircraft is attempting to flow across the country.”
I routinely get flights delayed on Southwest like no other airline, even the budget ones. Now I understand why.
Well that plus they have very little slack in their schedule. They have a goal of 20 minute turnarounds. That leaves no room for error. Most airlines won't turnaround a plane in less than an hour.
Setting all the recent issues aside, I remember a time when I would always check Southwest Airlines for flight options before any other airline and they’d often win my business. For the last ~5 years I don’t even bother. Their prices are at best the same as all the other major airlines (just as likely to be more expensive) and their flight schedules are just okay. I don’t understand how Southwest is maintaining market share (perhaps it’s not).
For me, they happen to have direct flights to my preferred airports and their cancellation policy provides a great peace of mind having the option of canceling a flight 10 minutes prior to departure and just rescheduling for later.
They win (won) my business chiefly because of checked bag policy. Even with 2 free checked bags, their prices are competitive. I do hope they recover from this mess.
They have an incredible loyal customer base despite some of the recent bad publicity. Also seems like if the price and schedule are the same, generally Southwest provides a better experience.
> I routinely get flights delayed on Southwest like no other airline, even the budget ones. Now I understand why.
Sure, but Southwest has always been the kind of airline that rewards people who play the game.
Let’s say you are flying from Chicago to Boston. Southwest has a flight every hour, sometimes even more frequently. You can pretty easily find out where your plane is coming from, and where the planes on the next few flights are coming from. You can pretty easily find out if those planes are taking off on time. If they do, they’re going to land in Chicago on time and turn around to Boston on time. If not, just walk over to the desk and ask to be moved to the one that is going to get you to Boston soonest. If there is a seat available, it’s yours. You’ll have your new boarding pass in 2 minutes or less and they wont charge you a dime.
There really isn’t a way to do that — airline operations are based around renting “slots” from airports that give takeoff and landing rights at specified times. Slots are expensive, so you build your operations and maintenance plans around them. You just don’t have an option to build unused backstop routes and the logistics around them, so either you’re bumping folks onto other carriers or having them wait for your congestion issues to ease.
There is always a way to do anything, you just have to be willing to pay for it. They decided this wasn't a failure mode to prepare for (read: spend money against) so they now deal with the consequences.
It's not just some money it's insane amounts of money and even then you can't always do it, for example because you cannot own slots for flights you don't actually operate. Those revert back to the airport and get sold to someone else.
There is always a way but never enough political and actual capital to do this. You could build your own airports, buy other airlines but you run the risk of losing the spot if you don't actually use it.
The cost would be so high tickets could double if it was even possible.
That's ridiculous. Yes, airlines have slots, but schedule changes, weather delays, mechanical delays, happen all the time. It's not like if you miss a slot you're just SOL. If you're flying from A to B to C to D to E to F and there's a bottleneck at B, you can deadhead the plane from A to C (or even take the pax who were going from A to C anyway) and pick up all the downstream connections.
There are weather delays all the time. There are ATC problems all the time. But having either one of those turn into this kind of a mess is unprecedented, so there has to be something else in play here, and that "something else" is almost certainly SW screwing something up.
"Spirit Airlines and American Airlines canceled hundreds of flights on Tuesday after several days of disruptions, frustrating passengers across the country."
"By midafternoon, Spirit had scrapped more than half its scheduled flights for the day, according to FlightAware, an aviation data firm. The airline canceled more than 40 percent of its flights on Monday and 19 percent on Sunday. Spirit attributed those disruptions to “a series of weather and operational challenges.”"
"American had canceled about 300 flights by the middle of the afternoon on Tuesday, about a tenth of Tuesday’s scheduled trips. The airline canceled about 18 percent of its flights on Monday and 9 percent the day before. American pinned the blame on a weekend storm that hit Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, its large hub airport."
Yes, a one-day disruption is not uncommon when bad weather hits a hub, even occasionally extending into a second day. But 1) Southwest has been cancelling flights for four days, 2) Southwest specifically said that it doesn't do hub-and-spoke (they blamed the problem in part on that) and 3) the weather in Florida has not been abnormal in the past few days. The Miani area had half an inch of rain on Friday according to weather.gov. That's nothing.
"This appears not to be an aviation problem so much as a Southwest problem; other airlines were able to carry on with minimal cancellations after Friday’s disruptions."
That matches up with all my points. The other airlines mostly don’t have half of their flights transit Florida like Southwest does. That’s unique to SW.
Well, yeah, obviously it's not just Southwest's incompetence at play here, otherwise they'd be cancelling flights all the time. The weather contributed, but it was just a trigger. The house of cards had been built by SW management long before the weather rolled in.
"Southwest has generally struggled with coordinating its operations as of late; it had the highest percentage of cancellations and worst on-time performance among the country’s four major airlines in June and July. The Southwest pilots union further blamed the company’s technical systems and processes for reassigning pilots when disruptions occur, claiming that these are long-standing problems that executives have failed to fix for years. The airline has struggled with rerouting pilots partly because it uses a “point-to-point” system, which focuses on flying passengers directly to their destinations. This is opposed to the “hub-and-spoke” model that American Airlines uses, in which passengers are often first routed to a main base of operations before departing for their final destination. While the point-to-point system has the advantage of reducing travel times and the number of connecting flights, it can be difficult to adapt to unexpected situations. Southwest’s point-to-point network also covers an unusually large geographic area, which makes reassigning pilots even more complicated."
Diversions mid-flight are pretty rare, usually they will choose to skip B before taking off. That said there are some interesting instances where airlines can "tanker" fuel by fueling up more than they need to in a city where prices are cheaper
Perhaps, though this is probably hard given airports, take off slots and such.
Sometimes the backup plan is occasional failure. Resiliency is expensive. We don't tend to own up to our decisions when we (companies, individuals, etc.) opt to pay for for limited resilience. But besides our irrational denials, it's often a rational trade off.
Take the recent FB downtime for example. FB's bigness means that FB downtime had some significance but FB is not critical infrastructure. Thousands of decisions, trade offs and compromises reflect that. If there's trade off between costs or speed of software development and resilience... FB will/should not always choose resilience. That's rational.
Being stranded for a day because airlines is something that happens n% of the time. Cost of the mode.
Emergent behavior doesn't need to be organized. There doesn't need to be a union nor a secret clubhouse nor an email chain for people who believe they will soon lose their jobs to make use of their accumulated sick leave, especially if it cannot be converted into vacation days, which are paid out when employment is terminated. I don't know what's in the employment contact at SWA but everywhere I've worked paid out unused vacation days but never paid out for unused sick leave. Similar people in similar situations often make similar decisions without coordination.
If pilots being sick caused cancellations they would be on the hook paying for refunds and hotel rooms. If the reason is weather, they aren't. Their incentives here are somewhat obvious.
Is that true if there is a weather problem anywhere in the chain of events? It would seem reasonable to treat travelers differently if weather is the direct cause of a problem versus one of the dominoes in a long chain of events.
I flew Southwest yesterday (in California, not Florida). My flight was delayed 30 minutes, but I heard other Southwest flights at the same airport had been canceled.
This morning, Southwest sent me a customer satisfaction survey email with questions specific to flight delays. Seems like they are testing how much their brand was impacted by these problems, perhaps anticipating the delays will continue from worker action (that every denies)? If the problems truly were caused by some temporary issues that have been resolved, why would they bother surveying customers about it?
What ratio of customers got survey requests in the year(s) leading up to yours? We need a baseline before we can determine whether or not your survey was initiated atypically.
The airline could send custom surveys based on your specific flight/seat. If you sit in first class, "How did you enjoy the first class experience?". If you ordered food, "Did you enjoy your meal?". If your flight is delayed, "Did the delay impact your plans?"
I think we both have zero evidence to back our claims so I wouldn't read too much into it.
> If the problems truly were caused by some temporary issues that have been resolved, why would they bother surveying customers about it?
Two reasons come to mind:
1) This weekend's delays might get sorted, but the underlying cause is still there. It's just not a pilot walkout, but an overall lack of resilience in their workforce and infrastructure.
2) The holiday season is coming. Southwest is already stretched thin and is probably trying to gauge what kind of reckoning is waiting for them if they have to cancel thousands of flights during the busiest travel period of the year (and one where snow delays are a real possibility for much of the country).
And surveys are just ubiquitous these days for every hopefully routine transaction because everyone wants to be able to be "data-driven." Which in principle is not a bad thing but there are so many of them that I pretty much ignore surveys at this point.
I don't think I can remember taking a flight in the last 5 years where I didn't receive a survey email during/after the flight. And I used to fly a lot.
That includes cancelled flights, which I had a lot of because I used to do at least weekly hops between two east coast cities (surprisingly staffing issues were almost as common as weather, but usually it was a combo -- eg weather causing delays in pilots arriving and then once the pilot arrives the weather is bad enough we can't take off.)
Always a survey, even if cancelled, 100% of the time.
Please educate me on this: if there was a “sick-out", wouldn't it be in the interest of the management to admit it to shame/pressure those participating? What's the interest in hiding it (if it's true)?
Because a lot of customers are on "the other side" and are against mandates. If you ostracize those customers, you could be doing long term damage still.
Shaming doesn't seem like it would work well when people believe they are right. However CEOs sweeping problems under the rug is more or less expected (good ones solve them, bad ones make temporary problems permanent trying to solve them and don't fix solvable ones). Things "going wrong" makes them look bad so that is more or less what the selectors want - wisely or otherwise.
Well it's a bit too late for that I think. For years when I've flown, I fly with Southwest without a second thought about it (except when flying in the PNW, then I prefer Alaskan.)
Well over the past few days I've been working with family to make plans for this Christmas and I found myself thinking that it might be prudent to look at other airlines this time. I'm not completely confident that Southwest won't collapse completely and upset my plans. I don't know what's happening in that company but things smell rotten and I've lost my confidence about their future. Maybe this isn't a realistic concern, but if I'm thinking it I wager I'm not the only one.
Millionaires and Execs arent too popular these days. That could just as easily backfire.
It does appear as if a lot of companies are going to be dealing with a bit of "brain drain" int he near future....especially ones unwilling to be more accepting of WFH...
The theory being spread around is that pilots had a sick-out because they oppose Southwest's vaccine mandate, based on fears about blood clots + flying.
Because when the public hears about other reasonable people showing hesitancy, it shows that the media narrative isn't as true as it is made to be.
I imagine it is to the advantage of both pilots and SW to not admit it is about the vaccine, because the media would take advantage of that fact otherwise.
Also the pilots can't admit to a sick-out one way or another to avoid legal repercussions.
Not saying this issue is because of the vaccine mandate, but it would make sense with the way this story is playing out.
Why are you using the painfully obvious propaganda term "hesitancy"? There is very little "hesitancy" at this point. There are people saying, "I am the sovereign of my body and you will not force your unnecessary medical interventions on me, period. This is the hill i die on." That is not hesitancy.
Wouldn't the union then take credit to try to give an example of people showing hesitancy? The union president is denying its a walkout, official or un-official
Because the executives at Southwest can't just make that accusation without enormous evidence that it's true. It's legally dangerous ground for a lot of reasons, because the pilots are federally prohibited from pulling sick-outs.
Falsely accusing someone of breaking a federal law, a law that is very important to their job and industry, can come back on you in an epic way given the stakes here. That would be an opening for a giant lawsuit and that's the best case scenario for Southwest if they did something that stupid.
> saying that other people are breaking the law is not a crime.
You do not want that claim to be false - you do not want to be wrong and or unable to prove your out-on-a-ledge position - if you go around making very substantial accusations like that (eg stating the pilots are pulling a sick-out), which can directly threaten the livelihoods/careers of the pilots. If you're wrong or otherwise can't back up your claims, you just made a mistake that will cost shareholders an expensive legal settlement and possibly get you fired.
> Because the executives at Southwest can't just make that accusation without enormous evidence that it's true.
Of course they can. Executives and unions make accusations of illegal labor relations conduct on the other side on flimsy evidence all the time. And especially when it is nonspecific as to individuals (e.g., alleging a sick-out is occurring without alleging any particular employees sick leave was abused), it is safer, legally, than many of the accusations routinely made between labor and management.
(There might be good political and labor relations reasons for declining to characterize it that way with, or even with, strong evidence that it is true, but that's a different issue than legal reasons.)
> You do not want that claim to be false
Honestly, false or true, it would be suicide for a union President to say it, unless it was part of an internal factional fight in the Union and the faction doing it was already irrevocably opposed to the union president. And even then, its basically admitting that that faction has the power to bring the firm to its knees and you can't constrain them...
I've heard that airlines don't face penalties for weather related delays/cancellations. It would make business sense to try and attribute it to inclement weather as to avoid paying fines and related fees.
Not weird. Southwest famously doesn't do hub-and-spoke routing, so they're much less resilient to events like this; cancelled flights in one region cause cascading failures on other legs of the routes they're on.
I don't know if it applies in this specific instance, but I've heard in other cases that employees are not allowed to participate in official strikes without approval from their union first.
If it's not an "official" strike then no union negotiation is needed.
They'd have to issue a denial even if it were true. A sick-out would contravene federal labour relations law, and it would expose the pilot's association to legal penalties.
The denial by Southwest management is more interesting, since they don't have that kind of legal incentive.
It was not a sick out. The article clearly states:
“The sick call rate over the weekend was no different than it has been since June and the pilots actually picked up open flying as well,” Amy Robinson, a spokesperson for SWAPA, told TPG on Monday.
Southwest management doesn't have a legal incentive, but they have a business interest: they wouldn't want to scare away potential customers worried their flights will get canceled.
If there is a sick-out but management and the union both deny it, how do they actually negotiate an agreement?
The denial by Southwest isn’t based on the same legal issues facing the union. The CEO has an incentive to deny it because he doesn’t want to risk losing the massive amounts of federal money Southwest receives.
Unless it wasn't of interest to the management. Sometimes people just go crazy an make bad decisions. Sometimes people just go crazy and make bad decisions.
And American Airlines is also mass-cancelling and delaying an unusual percentage of flights. Damn, the asymptomatic weather is getting worse and worse.
Well, can't get any of this from the "free" press, so how else do we reconcile reality on the ground with its side effects. Maybe if the press actually worked on reporting news rather than pushing narratives we wouldn't have to resort to pictures from the ground. Or maybe not. Just don't be surprised if your flight gets canceled, store shelves are empty, or if you go to the hospital and nurses are on strike. "Weather" can be quite severe this time of year.
The smugness and assuredness with which you deliver these predictions is pretty on-brand for the kinds of marks who think they're in some special club, who are "in" on what "the media"(the part that disagrees with you) doesn't want you to see. The "reality on the ground" - as told by the right wing social media grift-o-sphere. Their track record is literally on par with a broken clock being right twice a day.
Some empty shelves in some stores somewhere are not evidence that you are right about Biden's hidden communist agenda. Just like there is not about to be a walkout of major airline pilots. This particular incident just lines up with the anti-mandate media blitz in the circles you engross yourself in, and will be forgotten as soon as it doesn't pan out - just like virtually every other political bludgeon the fox news cinematic universe conjures forth.
FYI, the weather is about to get worse in Chicago as well: https://twitter.com/wqad/status/1448469294061342722. I heard similar things from Seattle, too. And you won't find anything about it in the "free" press. It's like that scene in "V for Vendetta" where V blows up a building and talking heads on TV are like "it was controlled demolition", and everyone knows it's fake.
Childish, hyperbolic statements from a hardline ideologue. Like virtually everything the, er, "non free press"(?) clutches pearls over, this is going nowhere.
You aren't in on something. You haven't seen beyond the veil. You're the mark.
It is easy to put right wing grift media consumers in a box. The outlets - OAN, Fox, Drudge, Breitbart, Newsmax. The pseudointellectual talking heads - Don Bongino, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Dave Rubin, Trump & his entourage of sycophants.
They all align very well.
It is not so easy to put those who disagree with the above in a box. I think there should be no corporate tax rate and as open borders as possible. Where do you think that puts me? Reason magazine, Vox, The Atlantic, maybe.
Here's a litmus test for you: into which "boxes" would you put someone like Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi? Of the outlets and people you mentioned I do listen to Carlson and Rubin from time to time - they are saying things I view as reasonable. I agree with nearly everything Greenwald and Taibbi have to say, even though they're liberals and I'm not. We're more alike than dissimilar. We have common enemy - the Uniparty. Except the Uniparty has somehow managed to brainwash the liberal intelligentsia into believing that it gives a slightest shit about them and that abundant gibs would issue if liberals just sustain its rotting carcass for another decade. Protip: you and I both aren't members of the club.
The union is denying there is an official action... and my understanding is it would be illegal for the union members to organize a walkout like this since it jeopardizes the public.
Individuals deciding to do something on their own though... can't be stopped.
The Union denies it was an official or unofficial action. Both the pilots union and SWA management also confirm there was not an unusually high number of sick calls. Again, what incentive would they have to lie? Further why would a generally conservative-leaning private company and public union go to such great lengths to defend a mandate they have nothing to do with? It sounds like a conspiracy theory.
SWA is attempting to manage the damage to their brand. It's pretty obvious.
And again, the Union has to deny everything. Any organized walk-out, or something they knew would happen and did nothing to stop ("official or unofficial") is illegal.
What we do know is SWA cancelled over 2,000 flights in a single day, and continues to cancel flights up through today... and no other airline is impacted... and the weather issues they claim don't exist... and the ATC issues they claim also don't exist.
Seems pretty obvious something else is going on. Sick out, walk out, sit-in, just refuse to fly, whatever... but the official story can't even carry its own water.
If the company has a uniquely weak flight network I’m willing to buy that a single company was uniquely affected because their flight network is uniquely weak. I’m struggling to speculate on a sickout when there isn’t any claimed evidence I can find besides “the given reason doesn’t seem right”. I’m not a flight industry person, why do I think I know better than all the flight industry heads talking about it? But I do know graphs, and I know chokepoints will fuck over a whole network.
If you'll forgive me for latching onto one piece of information here:
> and no other airline is impacted
Yeah, so... why is that? Other airlines have similar mandates. Is Southwest just uniquely anti-mandate? Did they have a particularly large population of pilots who weren't vaccinated before the mandate even took effect?
If anything, I'd say that the uniqueness of Southwest's problems is evidence against a sick-out and points to a problem in Southwest's business model or logistics.
>You are putting a lot of stock into a PR piece...
No, I believe that absent contrary evidence, the simplest explanation is usually the most likely. I've seen virtually every other US carrier experience a cascading failure due to weather or computer failures at least once over the past 10 years. I've also seen how quickly certain politicians, who stand to benefit personally from casting doubt on vaccine mandates, have jumped on this event.
It’s could be against the Wagner Act for airline workers to strike in this manner. It would certainly invite the intervention and mediation of the NLRB in the matter. By keeping it undeclared and unofficial they head off labor litigation which would ruin the company and create an immediate crisis that required federal intervention. The union also could not sanction such a probably illegal strike. Even organizing such a sick in could be considered illegal given the separate treatment of infrastructure labor under the Wagner Act plus amendments and the Railway Labor Act which does cover airline workers.
Such a strike would likely be illegal and could lead to the dissolution and decertification of the union. Corporate, labor, and the feds all have good reason to run FUD on this in the hopes that it can be settled before it kerplodes into infinity hours of legal bills.
They are denying that they violated the Railway Labor Act because they don't want to go to prison. Pilots's unions aren't allowed to strike or participate in job actions (sick outs). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Mediation_Board
If it would be prudent to do so, and if there is enough reasonable doubt that they could get away with it.
Edit: This is the rationale for telling lies, twisting truths, or otherwise being dishonest. I'm not actually claiming they were indeed lying, just giving a cynically Machiavellian answer.
It was not a sick out. The article clearly states:
“The sick call rate over the weekend was no different than it has been since June and the pilots actually picked up open flying as well,” Amy Robinson, a spokesperson for SWAPA, told TPG on Monday.
But the whole point of a sick out is to send a message. I've never heard of a sick out that didn't at least have employees going "oh yeah I'm real 'sick' <wink wink>".
SWA continues to try to push this weather excuse and ATC excuse... but it doesn't make any sense.
Weather in Florida impacted flights in Las Vegas and San Diego? The pilots and crews flying those routes aren't the same ones flying the Florida routes, which definitely do not make up 30%+ of all SWA flights.
Despite the weather in Florida and ATC issues revolving around the Naval exercises, all other airlines are making their flights and not cancelling anything near the number SWA is...
I don't know if this means it's a covid vaccine mandate thing or something else - it seems it would be illegal for pilots to walk-out in an organized manner, which might be why the union also claims it is not an organized walkout.
Whatever the problem is, it would not surprise me if SWA is blowing smoke here...
>Weather in Florida impacted flights in Las Vegas and San Diego?
The article addresses this point. Up to 50% of Southwest's lines pass through Florida:
“The big issue is that Florida is roughly 15% of our trips, but on any given day, upwards of 50% of our aircraft lines flow through Florida,” Jordan told TPG. “You’ve got all those lines that just stopped in Florida, so you’ve got a lot of aircraft caught up in that,” he said.
Again, no other airline was impacted by this? Only 1 of 11 SWA hubs are in Florida[1], there is no way 50% of their aircraft go through Florida on any given day.
Again, the article clearly addresses this. What is the incentive for both Southwest management and the Pilot's Union to lie?
“Flight delays and cancellations occurred for a few hours Friday afternoon due to widespread severe weather, military training, and limited staffing in one area of the Jacksonville Air Route Traffic Control Center,”
“The big issue is that Florida is roughly 15% of our trips, but on any given day, upwards of 50% of our aircraft lines flow through Florida,” Jordan told TPG. “You’ve got all those lines that just stopped in Florida, so you’ve got a lot of aircraft caught up in that,”
“We’re not hub and spoke, and we do very little out-and-back,” Jordan said. “So when you stop a line, you’re stopping a line where the aircraft is attempting to flow across the country.”
"Flight delays & cancellations occurred for a few hours Friday PM due to widespread severe weather, military training, & limited staffing in one area of the Jacksonville en route center."
"To be clear: None of the information from Southwest, its pilots union, or the FAA indicates that this weekend’s cancellations were related to vaccine mandates."
They just don't want to be blamed for the cascading failure that took days to resolve.
Other airlines like Delta fly hub and spoke. For example, when I want to fly somewhere on Delta I take a short flight to ATL and then go from there. That flight from my town to ATL happens 5-6x/day. If my town has bad weather, it's mostly only that flight that is impacted.
SW does point to point flows. A SW flight might only leave from my town once/day on its way to the next stop and then another. If we have bad weather, all the stops down the line are impacted.
Planes are also not the only issue. Crews have strict rules about how much downtime they have to have, so any delays can mean crews run out of flight time.
Southwest has a unique scheduling model where most of the flights are on multi-hop trips, as opposed to other airlines where most or at least many flights are to/from a hub.
If you're doing mostly east/west multi-hop trips, it doesn't seem unreasonable for a lot of those to touch Florida. It's a popular destination.
It's not suprising that an airline with unique routing faces unique challenges.
Folks, hub-spoke, multi-hops, Florida hub, whatever - none of it matters when a simple 30 minute flight between Los Angeles and San Jose are being cancelled too[1].
Perhaps this LAX -> SJC flight happens to pass through Florida too? Come on... the crews flying these regional routes are the same crews that do it all day every day. Why are these flights impacted too?
I mean... which specific LAX -> SJC flight did you have in mind?
Flight 3027[1] does LAX -> SJC, but first it does TPA (Tampa) -> STL (St Louis), and STL -> LAX.
There may be some back and forth flights, but if that plane goes back to LAX right away, it's probably flight 2497 [2], which goes to BWI (Baltimore) after LAX.
If that plane can't leave Florida in the morning, there goes your noon flight to SJC, and your early afternoon flight to LAX. Plus, the plane may not have made it to Baltimore and the schedule is messed up the next day too.
You really have no idea how airline scheduling works. A typical trip pairing for a cockpit crew is for 4 or 5 days going all over the country. Start in Atlanta, fly to Miami, back to Atlanta, then to Vegas, sleep there, next morning back to Atlanta, then on to Phoenix, and back to Atlanta again, on to Houston and sleep there. Etc etc for 4 days in a row. So a problem in Miami could easily cause delays and cancellations on a flight that to you looks totally unrelated.
The only reason you have less impact in a traditional hub and spoke system is that there are extra aircraft and reserve crews in the hubs (some are at the airport, some at home at a few hours notice) and every other flight passes through the hub. So if the Atlanta to Miami and back thing goes really wrong, another crew and aircraft will fly the Atlanta to Vegas flight and sometimes the rest of the trip.
Doesn't happen for a simple delay, but if the delay pushes the crew over their duty time limits on the outbound flight for example the return to hub would be cancelled and a reserve crew would pick up the next flights starting from the hub. The timed-out crew would go to be hotel and fly back as a passenger with the next days flight.
> Perhaps this LAX -> SJC flight happens to pass through Florida too?
The route, no. The aircraft, very possibly. An aircraft that flew from MIA to LAX last night might be the one intended to fly the LAX to SJC flight today. The flight crew aren't glued to the plane.
I live in South Florida and the weather has been exceptionally normal the past couple months. This past week, absolutely no medium or heavy storming or winds occurred in South Florida. Also, no other airlines based out of Florida had these issues.
Anecdotal but I've heard from friends about scheduling (and other) issues with SWA. And when I flew SWA two months ago they had to put me in a hotel for a night due to a 6 hour late flight making me miss my connection. So yeah I'm guessing it's really what they say it is.
> Jordan said it was particularly the line-flow system that Southwest uses as part of a point-to-point network that made it harder for Southwest to recover than other airlines with heavy exposure in Florida, such as American, which has a hub in Miami as part of its hub-and-spoke network.
> “We’re not hub and spoke, and we do very little out-and-back,” Jordan said. “So when you stop a line, you’re stopping a line where the aircraft is attempting to flow across the country.”
Southwest is notable for being different; they use a single aircraft type, point-to-point routing over hubs, and started the low-cost airline trend.
The same argument applies to the vaccine hypothesis, incidentally. If it was the mandates, the other airlines who instituted mandates should've been similarly affected.
Bad weather in some regions can certainly affect flights in others. If planes in Florida are needed on the west coast and cant leave because of the weather that affects the flights on the west coast.
Still makes me nose-exhale a bit when I hear "Biden made me do it! I had to, to follow the law! After all, it's an executive order."
There's no standing executive order mandating anyone other than federal employees to be vaccinated, and there likely won't be. This CEO trying to brush off responsibility for the results of his poor choice is really annoying to see.
This might be some sort of fallacy, but when FoxNews quickly and swiftly points out that this is a vaccine mandate related case, that's a good barometer for me that it isn't.
As a correlation, when it's being touted as the most shocking news ever on OANN, newsmax and the washington times, in addition to fox news, you can be absolutely sure it's absurd.
I think it’s fair to say, the pilots might just be using up vacation time before they’re fired. Essentially, an uncoordinated sit in where pilots just don’t want to deal with it any more. I can’t blame them.
Since the orders under discussion stipulate inoculation or weekly testing, seems really unlikely the principal issue involved here is backlash from the substance of federal direction.
I've now seen two pictures from far-right grifter personalities showing Gadsen flags draped from planes.
There's probably a greater chance of a feedback effect between a minority of pilots thinking and these personalities than there is with pilots, of all professions, collectively walking out over vaccine mandates.
The State's prohibition affected city and county policies which had to be changed. It was noticeable in school districts of large cities, so clearly not performative.
Abbott just issued a new order which applies to private businesses, not just cities and counties.
That one is arguably performative, since OSHA and HHS are federal agencies and their requirements will override Texas law under the supremacy clause of the constitution.
Religious accommodations must be upheld (multiple federal judges are allowing this). Religious accommodations are really just an objection based on moral grounds.
Saying “my body is my temple and I won’t put anything in it unless there are years of research” is valid by that standard. And thus far the courts have supported that.
The Texas gov basically said you have to allow for objections under the law. Which in the US is very robust and prohibits things like discrimination.
I view both mandates as not contradicting each other.
Anecdotally I don't know a single licensed pilot who is antivaccine. They generally all have a high degree of respect for science and engineering. The idea that masses of southwest pilots suddenly decided to "sick out" to protest a vaccine mandate is laughable. I would bet good money that the vaccination rate among Southwest pilots is probably 85%+.
Science is about waiting for the long term studies, taking in new information and asking questions & running experiments to proof theories. Shutting down other opinions is anti-science. The word science is being used when political should be.
Is it that laughable? Aren’t many pilots former military pilots? Perhaps they just respect civil liberties and view bodily autonomy as a fundamental right that is being unconstitutionally eroded by executive order after executive order. The ACLU felt vaccine mandates were both a violation of civil liberties and unconstitutional until only very recently, when they shifted positions due to their growing partisanship.
Your point cuts the other way - anyone who has joined the military showed they are accepting of vaccine mandates and are okay with giving up their bodily autonomy in this sphere. The military mandates service members receive between 9 and 17 different vaccines before COVID had ever been heard of. https://www.yahoo.com/now/17-vaccines-mandated-us-military-1...
My point is slightly different. I’m making the claim that those who serve vow to defend the constitution, and regardless of their personal choice, they are likely to dislike authoritarian mandates that go against civil liberty and the constitution.
Perhaps, but there's an FDA EUA for an adenovirus-based vaccine (Johnson and Johnson) if one is simply scared of the mRNA technology.
An adenovirus-based vaccine was already submitted for approval in 2019 for Ebola, and approved midway through 2020 after years of trials, so we know the technology wasn't rushed because of COVID.
There's plenty of highly educated people that respect both science and engineering, but do not support mandatory COVID vaccines for a plethora of reasons.
Your appeal to authority reminded me of when "Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth" managed to sucker me into believing their conspiracy theories when I was in undergrad.
The name of that organization reminds me of the covid19 conspiracy theorists/antivaxxers at "America's Frontline Doctors". Turns out you can just name an organization anything you want to make it appear legit. Time to sign up for some horse paste ordered via internet!
Do you realize that the "horse paste" meme was launched directy after Joe Rogan got Covid and cured himself by taking Ivermectine? Makes you think, doesn't it?
One, I think your timeline is wrong (Rogan got it early Sept. [1] but even the FDA was making "you're not a horse" jokes in late August [2]), and two, just because Rogan took it and got better doesn't mean it's what cured him (I believe he took multiple medications/treatments and most people his age recover from COVID regardless)
Nothing in that link contradicts anything the OP said. It has no statistics for pilot vaccination rates, and OP never said anything about mandatory vaccines, commenting only on the likely number of pilots who had already received a vaccine.
There are two different issues at play here: whether someone has gotten the vaccine themselves, and whether someone supports making it mandatory. The person you replied to was talking about the former, you appear to have misunderstood it as the latter.
OP > Anecdotally I don't know a single licensed pilot who is antivaccine. They generally all have a high degree of respect for science and engineering. The idea that masses of southwest pilots suddenly decided to "sick out" to protest a vaccine mandate is laughable
My link shows this simply is untrue. The pilot's own union was seeking to block the mandate - just because you are a pilot doesn't mean you're down with mandating vaccines for employment.
I somewhat doubt a large scale sickout occurred, but being anti-COVID vaccine and anti-COVID vaccine mandate for continued employment are two separate issues.
Not the person you're replying to, but if everyone gets a shot then the restrictions can go away. There a lot of articles[1] that say vaccinated can get Covid, but the chances of a bad sickness or death is much much lower. If everyone is vaccinated then Covid will really just be a flu.
For example Portugal with 98% vaccination rate and no idiots screaming "oppression!" has dropped mask mandates.
Sometimes I do wish the governments would just drop restrictions and let the unvaccinated deal with it, but luckily for them, governments still have a duty to care even for the belligerent, even providing them with hospital care when they get the virus.
[1] which the antivaxxer can just dismiss as propaganda or fake news!
Go ask Israel. They are on their thirdrequired booster shot. Are you so naive that you think the government will give up this power after it has successfully forced the masses to inject a vaccine with no long terms studies?
In my view you and the other conspiracy-minded are the ones who think/act like children and that the world is an Avengers movie with a baddie that has a complicated scheme to rule the world.
Why would government/the global elite need to use a virus or a vaccine to control us, they already do so by indoctrinating us since first grade to be devoted to money. Yeah yeah, I've read the arguments, "mask mandate/forced lockdowns/quarantines -> injection with 'scary unknown substance' mandate -> ... -> gas chambers". But why, what good would it be to kill us all?
If they really want to poison us all, why do they need a "subplot" of introducing some fancy mRNA vaccine, and needing a to include a character who's been working on mRNA for 30 years? Why not just introduce some medication that doesn't work and tout it as the cure. Oh wait, do hydroblahblahquine or Ivermectin work..?
"15 days to slow the spread", I googled it, that was March 2020, before scientists knew the virus and before Delta.
Also, this pandemic has now been in 2 administrations. So, was Trump in on it and Biden is continuing it? Or is it the secret elite cabal working above them? Trump for one doesn't bear the thought of losing the presidency, and the pandemic killed his reelection chances, why isn't he raving about this secret plan to control/kill the world? Probably even he thinks that theory is too nutjobsy.
You're missing the point. Its not the virus, or about "poisoning us", its the precedent that is being set by the government essentially forcing a new substance injected into the masses.
Any sane person would conceit that a medical decision is to be made by doctors and their patients, not mandated by the government, as every single case and patient is different.
The fact that the government is mandating this (after Biden explicitly said he wouldn't put a mandate in place the way)is extremely dangerous. If they can do this successfully, only time will tell what they'll try next.
Even Texas has vaccination mandates for children (PDF): https://dshs.state.tx.us/immunize/school/pdf/6-14-2021-2022-... so "medical decision between doctor and patient" is horseshit. Or to be more polite, irrelevant, because that decision is still there, i.e. a doctor can give you an exemption after determining you're unable to have the vaccine.
And the only difference between what I wrote and what you're painting is the timeline. Your comment means to me: maybe the government means no harm with their mandate, but what if they get away with it and exploit this compliance in the future? So my argument from the grandparent comment applies: what will their goal be in this scary future? If it's a dubious reason, I'll be there to fight it. But I guess you have a head start there, against this "evil Biden regime" that wants a compliant population to control!
You're comparing a school requirement for children, with extensively studied and venerable vaccines (which are not RNA based) to a government mandate on all federal workers, and soon to include the private sector as well (ie get it or get fired)? Seriously?
I can home school my child, but cutting off peoples livelihood is not the same.
If you cannot see that, then there is no reasoning with you.
You seem to be upset (ie cursing etc), you should perhaps consider that your anger is clouding your judgement.
Since this is Hacker News, here's the founder of PowerDNS on reverse engineering the mRNA vaccines: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source... . You'll find what it all does and why it should be safe, and then my guess is you'll dismiss it because you know that you know better.
Not having a vaccine mandate for children is dangerous because making it optional mean many can be infected, be sick and die. The same logic seems to be being applied to society in general. "No vaccine = not welcome in school" is now "no vaccine = not welcome to parcitipate in large parts of society". Sure it's brutal, but hah there's a brutal pandemic going on.
And your judgement seems to be clouded by your preconception that the government is bad and is out to harm you and many others. A few weeks ago I asked myself "Why do I even put emotional energy into trying to convince people (random strangers on the Internet) who I shouldn't give a shit about if they want to be stupid and ignorant?", but yeah, here I am back at being upset at not being able to get through thickheaded people. I went through your comment history and you have plenty of dead comments due to your bigotry, so I wonder whose head is screwed on correctly. But well, idiots never know they're idiots, right, and that applies to me too.
> To be considered fully vaccinated in Israel people must meet one of the following criteria: be 12 or older and have received a booster shot at least a week ago; be within six months of having received a second vaccination shot; or be within six months of having tested positive for Covid-19.
> if everyone gets a shot then the restrictions can go away.
That's really hard to believe after "15 days to slow the spread" turned into unprecedented vaccine mandates. And yes, they are unprecedented because needing a vaccine to work basically anywhere is unprecedented, especially for vaccines that are less tested than those that usually get mandated.
In other words, we have been lied to enough about when restrictions would end that I don't think they will end.
People who've had the disease have no reason to get vaccinated, denying that is simply denying data&science.
In any case, the pandemic won't end when everyone's vaccinated, but instead when everyone stops being afraid of it; the virus cannot be stopped (at least not with the current version of the vaccines) so the only change possible is the society's reaction to it.
You're correct, but presumably in the wrong direction given your comment history.
Any time a complex system fails, smart folks dig into precipitating and root causes while ideological idiots dream of conspiracy.
I've actually seen this is professional contexts, where idiots blamed a series of hardware failures on employee sabotage. Turns out there was a component with a 1-in-10,000,000[^1] failure rate that was failing almost exactly 1-in-10,000,000 times and the distribution of the failures was clustered by pure accident.
[^1]: Or something like that. It was a decade ago.
Except you don't have to trust the experts on this one.
Either the experts are presenting an incredibly reasonable and almost certainly true description of precipitating causes, or else NOAA, FAA, and everyone who collects their real-time datastreams are all in on a vast conspiracy to falsify data.
Benny Johnson is another run-of-the-mill far right grifter, nothing to see here. One pilot does not a walk-out make. The anti-vax and anti-mandate crowd are desperate for an real "walkout" to occur beyond the handfuls of people who made a lot of noise on social media about doing so, so naturally they flock to this one hoping it's the real deal. It isn't.
...which kinda damns the idea that it's a vaccine mandate problem, no? If pilots were protesting vaccine mandates, I would not expect the problem to be isolated to Southwest.
...right, because of southwest's routes and the location of their planes when airspace became unavailable. Which, again, is a claim that you don't need to take the CEO's word on. The data can be scraped for free or purchased for cheap. Is the FAA in on it too?
And not just the FAA. That's real-time data that thousands or perhaps millions of people download and keep local copies of for at least sliding windows of time. So every single private company and individual who downloaded and stored that data in the hours leading up to the disruption would have to also go back and modify their local copies. Thousands, maybe millions, of people.
To believe weather and airspace closures didn't play a major role you have to believe that those closures didn't happen or that Southwest is not truthful about where its planes were. But either of those means either completely disregarding objective evidence or believing in a MASSIVE conspiracy to modify that data. A conspiracy involving literally millions of people. Almost all of whom have literally no incentive to lie and would have had to take an active role in deleting historical data and replacing it with fabricated data. Just... what?!
Also, this observation cuts both ways: why only and exactly southwest's pilots and for only one day?
I can't see your original comment because it's flagged, but I'll assume it's some sort of anti-vax flag hanging from a Southwest plane.
So... so what? The explanation from Southwest's CEO makes sense and matches up against a ton of publicly available data.
On the other hand there's evidence of at least one pissed off pilot (who, none-the-less, showed up to work?)
But, again, all that other data still exists.
So. Either there's a vast conspiracy that involves NOAA, the FAA, airport admin, air traffic controllers, Southwest, the pilot's union, etc. Or else one dude flew a flag and also there was a massive scheduling failure and the two are unrelated.
I genuinely couldn't have asked for a better exemplar of my original post: seeing a ton of verifiable data vs. a single anecdote and choosing to implicitly believe in a vast conspiracy because the anecdote touches one's feels the right way.
> We trust the CEO on his word, but a Gadsden flag hanging out of a window must be either a fake rendering or someone else must have snuck onto an airport runway and hung it there in an unrelated event and waited for this event to post it.
um... the post you're replying to says:
>> Or else one dude flew a flag and also there was a massive scheduling failure and the two are unrelated.
and also
>> Either there's a vast conspiracy that involves NOAA, the FAA, airport admin, air traffic controllers, Southwest, the pilot's union, etc.
So...
1. I'm not just trusting the CEO.
2. I never claimed the picture is doctored (because even if it's not... who cares? What is that evidence of? One person. I don't need to check the veracity of the picture because it doesn't prove anything substantive... it's an anecdote, and a poor one at that.)
Sure it could have just been "one dude" but a walkout by one pilot is still a walkout and not a weather event. One pilot can delay a whole airline if they only have a couple planes.
The other strange thing about the weather claim is it only affected SW for some reason.
I gotta admit, when I first heard these denials I assumed that the union was cautiously not confessing to a sick-out.
But instead it seems as if disinformation is spinning current events to change perception about the Executive's new policy. Sadly, even after it's fact-checked - people won't remember the fact that it was bogus nor will they count it as a strike against the source that reported it.