...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?
Yeah complex systems running on a razor's edge NEVER fail! NOAA and all the other weather forecast/data providers are all in on the conspiracy! /s
But seriously, I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of my original comment. Thanks.