Say, I didn’t see anyone post a link about the actual reasons for the Southwest cancel-cascade yet, and I got curious.

As it turns out, it was the result of over-optimization of their scheduling, combined with their determination to prioritize nonstop flights over hub-and-spoke routing.

They’d already been suffering worst-in-industry cancellation rates and postponements through the summer, with labor gripes stemming from the need to shuttle their pilots around between cities to match them up with planes needing crews. They apparently trimmed the budget down to zero redundancy, which means the slightest hiccup can lead to a chain reaction of failure.

Enter a single day of short-staffed air traffic control at one airport, combine with military maneuvers clogging up the air lanes, and suddenly that one day turns into a week of reverberating cancellations as they leave the planes sitting at the wrong airports for their leveraged-to-the-hilt schedule to use. And since Southwest doesn’t have hubs, those grounded planes were all over the map, useless to fill in for other missing flights.

That’s also why the situation isn’t causing crises at other airlines. It’s just them, and the airline, FAA, pilots’ union, and mechanics’ union are unanimous in their reports that it has nothing whatsoever to do with vaccine mandates.

I love Seth, but I got a little frustrated when his “closer look” didn’t look closely enough to explain the real situation. So, here y’all go.