From what I’ve gathered, Southwest’s problem this week is a combination of an outdated scheduling system and their generally high efficiency. They keep roughly 90 percent of their planes in service all day every day, but that means when something unexpected happens — like this past week’s weather across the country — the entire system is susceptible to falling apart. They now effectively need to “reboot”, and that might take an entire week.
There’s a software development analogy in here somewhere, I’m sure of it.
