
The Man Who Saved Southwest Airlines with a '10-Minute' Idea - ghosh
http://www.npr.org/2015/06/28/418147961/the-man-who-saved-southwest-airlines-with-a-10-minute-idea
======
Roritharr
A great example for lead bullets:
[http://www.bhorowitz.com/lead_bullets](http://www.bhorowitz.com/lead_bullets)

~~~
plq
> The issue with their ideas was that we weren’t facing a market problem. The
> customers were buying; they just weren’t buying our product. This was not a
> time to pivot.

A true gem, it's very important to make this distinction.

------
rpedela
I recommend reading Great by Choice [1] which talks more about Southwest
Airlines and what makes them great. The book is about "10X companies" and what
they have in common, but also what they do differently from their competitors.
For example, Southwest Airlines copied PSA's business model verbatim but PSA
[2] went out of business. The book talks about why. The main reason I like the
book and others in the series [1] is that it is like reading a really long
research paper about what makes great companies great with entertaining
anecdotes sprinkled in.

1\.
[http://www.jimcollins.com/books.html](http://www.jimcollins.com/books.html)

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines)

~~~
moheeb
I don't consider Southwest Airlines great at all. They are my least favorite
airline to fly. I've experienced some pretty terrible customer service from
them. I feel their boarding routine is the worst in the business.

What, in your opinion, makes them "great"?

~~~
baakss
From an article attached to the book:

"From an initial list of 20,400 companies, we sifted through 11 layers of cuts
to identify cases that met all our tests (our study era ran through 2002).
Only seven did. We labeled our high-performing study cases with the moniker
"10X" because they didn't merely get by or just become successful. They truly
thrived. Every 10X case beat its industry index by at least 10 times. Consider
one 10X case, Southwest Airlines (LUV). Just think of everything that slammed
the airline industry from 1972 to 2002: Fuel shocks. Deregulation. Labor
strife. Air-traffic controller strikes. Crippling recessions. Interest rate
spikes. Hijackings. Bankruptcy after bankruptcy after bankruptcy. And in 2001,
the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. And yet if you'd invested $10,000 in
Southwest Airlines on Dec. 31, 1972 (when it was just a tiny little outfit
with three airplanes, barely reaching breakeven and besieged by larger
airlines out to kill the fledgling), your $10,000 would have grown to nearly
$12 million by the end of 2002, a return 63 times better than the general
stock market. These are impressive results by any measure, but they're
astonishing when you take into account the roiling storms, destabilizing
shocks, and chronic uncertainty of Southwest's environment. Meanwhile,
Southwest's direct comparison, Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA), flailed and
was rendered irrelevant, despite having the same business model in the same
industry with the same opportunity to become great."

Src: [http://www.jimcollins.com/books/great-by-
choice.html](http://www.jimcollins.com/books/great-by-choice.html)

------
geon
> "You guys are either going to turn these airplanes in 10 minutes or I'm
> going to fire every single one of you — and I'm going to hire a whole new
> crew that's willing to work and turn these airplanes in 10 minutes."

Sounds like a great way to fail spectacularly. If it _was_ impossible, it
wasn't going to magically work just because everyone was too afraid to tell
him.

~~~
technofiend
It worked in this instance. Sometimes your boss is just a tool and you suffer
the consequences.

I specifically advised my boss not to sell a certain hardware and software
combination because it was problematic. In fact eventually the vendor dropped
all support. But one of our sales guys got dollar signs in his eyes and sold
it anyway to a customer of ours.

Sure enough I was regularly sent out to "do something" to fix it because the
systems kept crashing. Finally my boss gave me one of those "if you don't fix
it today, don't bother coming back to work tomorrow" ultimatums. What exactly
am I supposed to do? Rewrite the network driver for this LAN card myself? That
was my last day on the job.

I heard from a friend the company had to rip the entire network out and give a
new one free to customer after he threatened to sue. I never did hear if the
sales guy had to pay for it.

~~~
djrogers
>I never did hear if the sales guy had to pay for it.

Yeah - that's not on the salesperson. The basic 'social contract' when someone
takes a sales job is that the product the company sells isn't a fraudulently
useless piece of crap.

The salesperson didn't design, spec, or build the hardware. He didn't
architect or write the drivers, he didn't QA the product, and he damn sure
didn't assume the company would sell something that didn't/couldn't work.

Where the hell was your QA manager? Your product manager? Those are the folks
that should be responsible for this - not the salesperson.

~~~
JadeNB
> Yeah - that's not on the salesperson. The basic 'social contract' when
> someone takes a sales job is that the product the company sells isn't a
> fraudulently useless piece of crap.

It is not unambiguous, but I got the impression from this paragraph that the
salesperson sold it _despite_ directives to the contrary, which surely _is_ on
him or her:

> I specifically advised my boss not to sell a certain hardware and software
> combination because it was problematic. In fact eventually the vendor
> dropped all support. But one of our sales guys got dollar signs in his eyes
> and sold it anyway to a customer of ours.

~~~
djrogers
Sales teams can't sell anything that operations and product management don't
approve. A customer can send in a PO for anything, but the company has to
accept it...

~~~
technofiend
I explained in my reply if you'd like a better explanation.

------
JoshTriplett
Interesting. I never knew about this, and it certainly isn't true of Southwest
today. These days they're the cattle-car of airlines, with their lack of
assigned seating.

I found this bit particularly interesting, though:

> Today, the task of getting in and out of the gate in 10 minutes is
> impossible — but back then, says reporter Terry Maxon, the 10-Minute Turn
> saved the airline.

What makes it so impossible? Airport security has gotten far worse, but that's
long before the gate. _At_ the gate, what makes this less possible than it was
back then?

~~~
PMan74
> with their lack of assigned seating.

I'm pretty sure unassigned seating has been proven to be the fastest way to
load an aircraft in practice.

> what makes this less possible than it was back then?

I'm not sure, I'd guess there are controls in place now that were not in place
then e.g. passenger manifest reconciliation for security, ID checks, etc.

Ryanair (European Southwest essentially) target 25 minutes. If there were a
way to do if faster I think they'd have found it.

~~~
tomarr
> I'm pretty sure unassigned seating has been proven to be the fastest way to
> load an aircraft in practice.

I would disagree with this. My experience is of low-cost operators in Europe
(Ryanair, Easyjet, Wizz etc.), and I believe their experiences have been the
opposite. Whilst most of the carriers used to operate on an unassigned seating
basis, with fees for reserved seating, now seating is 'randomly' assigned at
online check-in (although if possible groups are sat together). You can still
pay for reserved seating but the benefit is obviously a lot less now.

My anecdotal evidence is that this has massively quickened the boarding
process. Before, there would be delays waiting for people to sort out their
seating and luggage arrangements (families especially), now it is much less of
an issue and turnaround times are quicker.

It's also possible that the massive increase in people taking only hand-
luggage in recent years has been a factor, but I'm not sure.

~~~
ghshephard
The various controlled studies I've seen, including the mythbusters report,
all show unassigned seating to be fastest.

~~~
e12e
It's not clear from the link posted earlier[1] if mythbusters did a run of
10-100 seatings and calculated the average/median for each method - but it
looks like they just did each once. If so I don't think a difference of +/-1
minute is significant. A difference of 100 in customer satisfaction probably
is.

This is also culture dependent. Nobody boards planes like a group of Japanese.
Be that salarymen or high-schoolers on a school trip.

The rest of the world _might_ board in more reasonable time if they got help
to stand in line by their seat numbers (better yet, print seatnumber and an
integer on the ticket - have people line up at the gate prior to boarding in
accordance to the integer).

Would work except for the Scandinavians that'd consider themselves exempt...
;-)

[1] [http://mythbustersresults.com/airplane-
boarding](http://mythbustersresults.com/airplane-boarding)

~~~
JadeNB
> have people line up at the gate prior to boarding in accordance to the
> integer

Whenever I've had to queue way in advance of boarding in order just not to be
at the end of my line, I've wished for this sort of solution—but, every time,
it seems to me that you'd just run into the trouble where the lower-numbered
folks wouldn't all show up on time, and then you'd have to (1) find a way to
insert them into the line, which seems like it would have to slow them down,
or (2) put them at the back of the line, in which case the whole point of the
numbering scheme would be lost and we'd be right back to lines forming long
before they need to do so.

~~~
e12e
If one had to print tickets, that might be a problem. But with cellphones, you
could just have everyone et their seating at the gate. And "dynamically" move
people that are late, out of the way.

So, lets say a plane seat 100, 75 show up on time - seat them automatically
when the show up at the gate according to preferences. Those that remain, get
what remains when they arrive. Want your seat? Want to sit with your group? Be
at the gate 10 minutes before boarding (or however long it takes people to
line up).

------
StillBored
Being fast was good for the customer too. Being able to show up a few minutes
before the plane was scheduled to depart, buy a ticket, walk out on the
tarmac, board, and take off is a far cry from modern air travel.

The "bus" mentality, really worked in TX where the cities are close enough to
have a lot of commerce/travel but far enough away that driving can take a
considerable amount of time. Flight time between dallas->houston is an hour,
driving is 3 hours. The problem is that with full planes, reliably buying a
same day ticket is basically impossible. Add in parking/shuttles, security and
and all the BS pushes the time in excess of 2 hours. Plus, its hard to guess
at weather a few days out, so sometimes you know on the way to the airport
that delays/etc are going to cause a flight to take longer than driving.

The 5 minute faster boarding time on SW is no longer a customer service
advantage when the customer has been waiting over an hour to board.

~~~
anovikov
Down here in Europe it is still okay to call a taxi 1.5 hours before takeoff,
get to the airport, buy a ticket and fly. Is American security checks system
so inefficient? In Europe it normally takes maybe 10 minutes if you go the
normal line or max 2 minutes if you go choose 5-10 euro fast track, plus 2
minutes to buy that fast track on a separate counter, which a bit sucks.

~~~
superuser2
I don't fly much, but I've never spent more than 10 minutes waiting to be
screened, 5 actually being screened. But it's really highly variable, and the
downside to missing a flight is very high, so most people show up really early
regardless.

I gather it can be really bad at peak times.

~~~
astrodust
The security lines here, except very early in the morning, are typically 40
minutes, minimum. It's atrocious.

The whole charade that taking off your shoes somehow makes people safer is
insulting.

~~~
anovikov
In Europe they ask you to take off shoes only if they are suspecting
something. Like, for <5% of people. I had an unlucky pair of shoes with steel
parts which always beeped on the screening machine, so they always asked to
take them off, but in no other case.

------
jusben1369
I'm so torn reading this. I do occasionally fly Southwest and I'm always
impressed with how everyone working for Southwest seems just as focused on on
time as I am. At the same time I think they started the "race to the bottom"
that has made air travel such an increasingly unpleasant experience now in the
US.

~~~
jdmichal
How exactly do you define race to the bottom? If on pricing alone, I can maybe
see your argument. But Southwest has had a pretty consistently high level of
service and low level of fees.

~~~
jusben1369
This emphasis on turning air travel into bus travel. How quickly can we turn a
plane? How quickly can we board people? How many tickets can we _oversell_
hoping/expecting some people won't show leading to stressed staff and
passengers getting bumped? How many flights a day can we push with no wiggle
room so that a single storm in Chicago means your San Diego to Houston flight
is 2 hours late. That whole mentality that it's ok to run the business that
way.

~~~
jdmichal
I suppose there's some parallels to be drawn to software. I've often heard
things like targeting 80% of memory / CPU / networking so that you have some
slack for unexpected events. It seems like Southwest focuses on running as
close to 100% asset utilization as possible. It's not necessarily optimal when
there are issues, but I find it hard to fault them for what I consider to be a
pretty legitimate business choice.

------
hliyan
Is this one thing credited with saving the airline, or were there other
efforts involved? I don't understand how a 10-minute turnaround time can turn
an airline around so quickly.

~~~
phpnode
Well it's pretty straightforward, if turnaround time is only 10 minutes and
your competitors take an hour then you can simply make more flights per
aircraft per day than them. This is amplified when your flights are short
distance domestic. Depending on destination it probably allowed them to make 2
- 3 extra flights per aircraft per day, at a time when jet fuel was not so
expensive. That could make a massive difference to profitability.

~~~
sliverstorm
Hell, even in a day where jet fuel is very expensive, daily miles is still a
key factor. Your margins might be smaller thanks to jet fuel, but more flights
still means more revenue.

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amelius
Sounds like an easy idea to come up with, but more difficult to implement.

------
Cymen
Why isn't it possible to get in and out at 10 minutes? Is the modern airport a
design failure?

~~~
ItsDeathball
Jetways. The article mentions boarding passengers while others are still
leaving the plane. That's only possible on a 737 by using two doors, which is
only practical if passengers walk out on the tarmac and board/disembark via
sets of mobile stairs.

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xpda
NPR doesn't give much credit to the SW airlines ads of the 1970's.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR7JApjgIGw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR7JApjgIGw)

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galago
Its interesting how the 'reduce friction' mantra was basically as true in 1972
as it is today.

~~~
mcphage
I'm sure if the Romans wrote business texts, it would be in there, too :-)

------
afterburner
Now, do it in 9!

~~~
metasean
Tangential anecdote - In bootcamp, our drill instructors were famous for
giving us a countdown and then counting us down along the lines of "You have
10 seconds, 10, 9, 7, 3, 2, 1, you're done!" In addition to skipping numbers,
the "3, 2, 1" portion was said as quickly as they could manage. I think we
only ever got about 50-75% of any supposed allotment of time. To this day, I
still can't hear a countdown without wondering what numbers will be skipped,
and of course, I expect "3, 2, 1" to only take up about a second and a half.

