One important component is slack. Every airline at every airport should have a certain number of crews and airplanes capable of providing service in place of a delayed flight. Running on maximum efficiency for airplanes and staff means unexpected delays will cause cascading failures. Weather can be forecasted, and additional crews can be routed to replace probable future cancelled flights. Temporary staff and increased hours can be utilized for peak demand seasons. We saw similar problems with manufacturing failures when the supply chain became unreliable because of a lack of slack. This type of slack can be seen as an inefficiency and costs money, so it's unsurprising to see budget airlines struggling.
Another important component is disaster recovery. How quickly can the system recover from missed flights? What is the game plan for dealing with crews/airplanes that are out of place. How will they return to normal operations? Often times having a play book everyone is working from can lead to faster recoveries than dealing with each individual crisis as it happens, often with either too much micromanagement from leadership or too little coordination between departments. The play book generates a conciseness before the system is stressed.
> Every airline at every airport should have a certain number of crews and airplanes capable of providing service in place of a delayed flight.
Airline pax are probably not willing to pay for spare standby aircraft and flight and cabin crews at every airport every airline operates from.
Southwest’s original low-cost carrier business innovation was to run an all-737 fleet and make business-wide efforts to optimize for fast ground-turns, in order to get more flights out of each aircraft.
Certainly not, that would destroy profit and competitiveness. Spare airplanes are mostly in for non-essential maintenance, and spare crews can be called up in an hour or two. That's good enough. Catastrophic outages every few years still cost less than building decent redundancy into all operations.
This is partly because airlines are still externalizing a good portion of the cost onto their customers, who need to rebook at short-term pricing. I'd love to see legislation to address this loophole.
Unpopular opinion but airline tickets are way too cheap for what they are doing. My last trip to Vegas, the Uber ride to the airport was more expensive than the airline ticket. My Uber money went toward 1. The driver’s labor, 2. The car and gas, and 3. Uber’s (mostly engineering) overhead. That’s it. And it was like $150! My airline ticket pays for pilots with decades of training, dozens of trained professionals and support agents, baggage handling, security, airport operations, sometimes meal service and entertainment, not to mention the wizardry of launching me 30kft into the air so I can get to another state in an hour. All that for $99?
For comparison, a Greyhound bus on the same route I was about to take a Southwest flight on was about $160 and took 36 hours with 2 transfers compared to $250 on Southwest with one transfer and 5 hours total travel time.
I don't pay for extra standby aircraft, but additional flight availability is why I pick one airline over another. If you choose to fly Spirit, and your flight is canceled or delayed for any reason, you might not make it to your destination for days. With a major carrier, you'll simply be rebooked on the next flight.
Southwest used to be a budget-friendly airline with decent service. Now they're priced as much or more than the other major carriers with the added friction of having to book search flights only on their site.
> One important component is slack. Every airline at every airport should have a certain number of crews and airplanes capable of providing service in place of a delayed flight.
Airlines have crew on "reserve" at all times near bases to handle this problem. They are being paid to sit around and not actually work unless called in. Pilots love to try to get on the reserve list for obvious reasons.
I don't know how Southwest handles reserve, since they don't have "bases" like other airlines do.
> Every airline at every airport should have a certain number of crews and airplanes capable of providing service in place of a delayed flight.
Good luck finding pilots to be “on-call” to fly anywhere in the world (and most commonly to small US cities) on a moments notice, with a jump seat return flight as their way home (after a night in a small city hotel).
You'll find that almost all airlines keep staff on call in various places and with various reporting times, because already at very small scale, you'll have some crew not making it to work for whatever reason all the time.
Maintaining right sized and right placed operational buffers is an entire sub-category of within airline scheduling software/consultancy.
Those buffers will never cover a major disaster of course. They should let you hit your on-time and cancellation targets at smallest possible cost, though.
Another important component is disaster recovery. How quickly can the system recover from missed flights? What is the game plan for dealing with crews/airplanes that are out of place. How will they return to normal operations? Often times having a play book everyone is working from can lead to faster recoveries than dealing with each individual crisis as it happens, often with either too much micromanagement from leadership or too little coordination between departments. The play book generates a conciseness before the system is stressed.