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.
