It's far more complicated than that. For example, there's a lot of strict regulation around how many hours crew can work, how much rest they need between, etc. Likewise planes can't just randomly fly where-ever they want, whenever they want. There's mandatory maintenance, etc. You also have a limited number of hangers and jetways at each airport, so you have to coordinate how planes move around to not overload things. Oh we need to be sure there's enough fuel, fresh oxygen bottles, and so many other things.
The problem is nothing like writing a script to scrape ADS-B data. This is the classic fallacy of a programmer thinking the most cartoonish imagination of the technology is the problem while being completely blind to the fundamental difficulty of organizing large groups of humans in some activity.
Modeling and simulation has the concept of Emergent Behavior[1].
Once that complexity tipping point is reached (and other comments suppose that SA competitors were more aggressive at cancellations, avoiding that point in their systems) the system takes on a life of its own.
What follows, for those running the system, is called a "Significant Emotional Event".
Yes. Globally the vast majority of airlines use either Amadeus, Apollo, or SABRE for everything from reservations to crew scheduling. United wrote Apollo, American wrote SABRE back in 1960. So yeah, other airlines have far better tech people and have for decades. While Southwest now pushes ticketing data to those three, as of a few years ago they were using other software for scheduling and even doing things by hand (like tracking bags) that other airlines had already automated. If anecdotes from crew are accurate the other problem is that Southwest did nothing to optimize their disaster recovery plan (if there even is one). Manual data entry can scale more than it is at Southwest, but they're still stuck in the teensy airline state of mind where even wildly inefficient workflows can scale.
As for ADS-B, that's hopelessly naive. ADS-B tracks planes, not people. The problem Southwest is having is trying to figure out who is legal to work and where they are. Tracking equipment is so trivial in comparison it's largely a secondary concern.
The other carriers do also have a tipping point of no return, where their software can't handle the situation. But, they were more aggressive about canceling flights in careful waves before they got to that point.
Some of the observations here are correct, but there's a big missing piece. Southwest went too far in with an overoptimistic schedule. They won't say that because then there's no easy scapegoat, it's just a pure management thing.
There is always a trade-off between robustness and efficiency. By leaving less slack the SWA schedule is more efficient, but also more tightly strung. When failures exceeded the slack capacity the whole schedule fell apart.
The problem of recovery is also extensively studied. But it seems like SW did not put enough effort into having fault tolerant restart.
Right. I'm saying though, it's not just the initial state of less slack in their system due to hub and spoke versus point to point. It's also that other airlines were more realistic about backing off flights earlier and more aggressively as a reaction to the developing info on the storm.
It paints a picture of an organisation which didn't see the need to accurately assess risk on a real time basis. If I was the COO I would want rolling projections for the week based on good/bad/ugly weather. But it seems SW was too busy cutting costs and building capacity as cheaply as possible to think about that.
The problem is nothing like writing a script to scrape ADS-B data. This is the classic fallacy of a programmer thinking the most cartoonish imagination of the technology is the problem while being completely blind to the fundamental difficulty of organizing large groups of humans in some activity.