Can't seem to find my prior thread but another one on our underappreciated Secretary of Transportation
Yeah, well some dude in bfe had his baggage sent to Chicago instead of Houston. Impeach Biden immediately!
The outcome seems to be what we want. I’m not sure how we can elucidate the cause. Is this a result of better governance? Or better work by the airlines? Or fewer natural perturbations to flights?
I have not delved into it, but the DOT started a concerted campaign to hold airlines accountable for avoidable delays, which is the most likely explanation. It was a signature initiative American Airlines Most of the delays occurred at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. The tarmac delays affected a total of 5,821 passengers. The $4.1 million fine is the largest civil penalty that the Department has ever assessed for violating the DOT's tarmac delay rule.Aug 28, 2023 DOT Penalizes Southwest Airlines $140 Million for 2022 ... Department of Transportation (.gov) https://www.transportation.gov › briefing-room › dot-... Dec 18, 2023 — The majority of the penalty will go towards compensating future Southwest passengers affected by cancellations or significant delays caused by ...
If you recall there was a severe storm that swept across the country late December 2022 which caused huge delays and cancellations. This year there was no such storm during the peak travel season.
That does make sense. Though I am always wary of specific benchmark incentives. Airlines probably did shoot for this specific metric due to the potential fines, but possibly at the expense of some other equally or more distributive outcome for passengers.
It was Southwest scheduling system not the storm. The storm happened to all airlines. This year's low, isnt because of less storms, but instead is a reaction to the stiff penalties Biden has enacted. President Biden is all world Presidenting. Southwest Airlines software meltdown a warning for manufacturers During Christmas and New Year’s, Southwest Airlines canceled almost 17,000 flights and stranded hundreds of thousands of people in airports across the U.S. The cost to the company’s reputation may be immeasurable, but Southwest estimated its immediate cost at a staggering $825 million. Many factors contributed to the meltdown, but in the end, it boils down to poor software infrastructure. Flight scheduling is complicated generally, but particularly so for Southwest. Other airlines favor a hub-and-spoke model, bringing flights into major hubs like Detroit and then connecting to smaller airports on the spokes. In contrast, Southwest favors point-to-point flights, minimizing layovers. Crew members required to fly aircraft are dispersed across the country, and without a large hub, canceled flights are far more likely to strand personnel. A canceled flight in Dallas might mean that another flight in Los Angeles doesn’t have a pilot, and that might mean yet another flight in Las Vegas doesn’t have flight attendants. One canceled flight follows another like a row of dominoes. When poor weather slammed airports across the country during the week of Christmas, the entire house of cards came tumbling down. One would think that Southwest’s scheduling systems could handle personnel management for canceled flights, but that isn’t the case. Instead, stranded crew must call a hotline to report where they are, arrange hotel accommodations, and reschedule manually. These service calls are ordinarily bad, with reported hold times measured in hours and call disconnects common. It’s bad enough that the Union of Southwest Airlines Flight Attendants recently prioritized upgraded scheduling and communication tools even above increased pay.
Thank you for proving my point, there was no major storm during the peak travel season. There was no storm to either strain the software system at Southwest which has not yet been fully upgraded or cause other airlines to cancel flights this year.
Edit: My concerns are embodied within Goodhart’s law, which says “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Ha, well that’s a good point too, but I dont yet see an alternative to having humans involved in stuff.
this popped up today on a travel site I follow. DOT Sec. Pete Buttigieg tells TPG why air travel worked better in 2023 - The Points Guy "We've put more and more pressure on the airlines to prove the realism of their schedules, the level of staffing, anything else that could have led to controllable delays, and I think that work has really paid off," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told TPG in a phone interview on Thursday. "I think that reflects the response of the airlines to the pressure that we put on them," he added, "as well as some work that we've been doing within the [DOT]," such as opening up new routings for aircraft to fly up and down the East Coast and working with the military to mitigate the impact of routine flight operations in Florida. Buttigieg pointed to the record $140 million fine the DOT recently issued to Southwest for the 2022 episode, noting that the agency was "chang[ing] the economics that might create some reason for airlines to think that they would benefit from delaying important investments." The unrealistic scheduling practices Buttigieg referenced include planning flights that the airlines weren't prepared to fully operate, he said, including "for reasons of gaining market share or other anti-competitive reasons." "We have active investigations right now, and are calling on airlines to do the right thing in the first place and not allow there to be reason for suspicion that they are knowingly scheduling flights that they're not prepared to adequately serve," he said. "When they were short on staffing, a number of airlines responded with better pay for these high-demand positions," he said. Buttigieg cited higher pay rates for pilots at regional airlines as an example. The low flight cancellation rates came even as the Federal Aviation Administration continued to cope with a shortage of air traffic controllers that has caused disruptions to U.S. flights over recent years.
