Southwest's antiquated scheduling software had caused meltdowns before. Unions begged for modernization. Didn't happen. $8.5 billion excess cash went to stock buyback. After the storm, pilots & crew had to call in—manually. Hours on hold. Couldn't fly. nytimes.com/2022/12/31/opini…

Yes, Southwest's point-to-point model makes recovery after weather harder. But the unions have screenshots of crew waiting up to 17 hours ON HOLD just to let the company know where they are, and timing out so can't fly. That's a choice. Plus, it wasn't the first such meltdown.

This method of "use duct tape and wire to make old software hobble along" incurs something called *technical debt*—the bill will come due, eventually. Company executives keep betting it will be under the next management. It usually pays off for them. The public pays the price.

Months before this meltdown, the flight attendant's union hired a truck, put a sign lamenting Southwest's "outdated technology" on it and drove it around Southwest's headquarters and main "Love" airport in Dallas. This was presaged by past meltdowns, predictable and preventable.

Weather, we get. But executives deciding to spend billions of excess cash on stock buybacks — which shore up the stock price, which then increases executive compensation — while crew on having to wait on hold for *hours* because of antiquated software that kept causing problems?

This is correct. Southwest is currently a hybrid model, and they do indeed have many airports that function as hubs and that fly to "spokes". Point-to-point portion of their schedule is a contributor but it doesn't explain the scale of what happened.

Yes! Just *today* I saw a viral tweet referring to the Y2K bug as a "conspiracy." Just the US spent ~$100 billion to fix it—a multi-year effort. When infrastructure functions as it should, it recedes from our attention. That doesn't mean it's not there.