> 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.
I wish my project manager would understand this and face the fact that we're maintaining a 12-year-old application.
Our application just can't do all the things the client wants in its current state and we have to keep grafting newer tech to it, and we end up with defects like a hydra.
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.
Although, I thought the business parts of the book were excellent, but the mountain climbing anecdotes were absolutely gut wrenching. I actually at times found some of those passages about people freezing to death difficult to read. Others may have found it a bit more entertaining than I did though, and the life lessons about preparation and calculations are applicable to business.
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.
"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."
Southwest doesn't charge for changing your ticket. They don't charge for your bag. Their current boarding is better than it used to be. And it is mostly faster than many other airlines. The best thing about southwest is I don't feel like they are trying to nickel and dime me to death
> "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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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...
Without knowing any details, though, how can you make that conclusion? Sales people (especially in high-touch enterprise sales like this) do often promise and sell things they know they shouldn't. They should be well aware of the limitations of the software. I don't know how you felt there was enough information to decide who was to blame in this situation.
It all depends. From what the parent posted, the issue was the software and hardware combination didn't work. If this was a 'known' issue and it was sold anyways then this is definitely something within the sales organization. It perhaps was a 'known' to the parent but never communicated out to the management or sales staff.
However want to point out that the purpose of a sales organization is to sell. typically a sales organization will sell every and anything to the client. It is normal to sell features that are not implemented, or configurations that are problematic.
This was a MicroAge computer store selling equipment in 1985-1987/8 when I was there.
We had no QA beyond burning in kit ourselves before giving to the customer. Everything was simply vendor-supported hardware and software.
In this case it was Novell hardware back when Novell ran on your PC and there was no such thing as a dedicated Novell server. Those came after the hardware I'm talking about.
The software was a point of sale system (the name of which I no longer remember) and had to be network aware. From memory it was so the software could push transactions to another PC.
Anyway when the sales guy approached me and asked if we could sell the system I said no. The vendors had made it clear that the mix of network card and software didn't work and wasn't supported. We learned the hard way when another customer (the guy's brother) started having problems when we expanded his network.
It turned out the network vendor (Gateway?) had upreved their cards and the new ones caused reboots when used with this point of sale software. We had to call the distributor and beg for some older version cards to make the brother's system stable.
So the sales guy hears this explanation and goes to the boss and asks for permission to sell the systems since "We can just request old cards." Boss asks me, I say no because we can't guarantee getting old cards and as stated everyone in my support chain have washed their hands of this combination.
But the customer is price sensitive, it works for his brother and he's saying sell me this or no sale. So the sales guy writes a quote anyway. He knows my boss will feel obligated to honor the quote, and he did, so we sold the system.
In the end the store owner was screwed by his investment partners but that's a story for another day.
Hopefully you understand now why I thought the sales guy should pay for the replacement.
Sure, it can go spectacularly wrong. It really depends on the manager. I don't know this story at all, but I can see two possibilities:
1) This is a know-nothing manager who doesn't really know much, but somehow correctly identified the problem and picked the correct number out of the air.
2) He actually understood the market, the competition, and ground operations so well that he was able to correctly identify the problem and realize that 10 minute turnaround was possible.
I've had managers of both kinds. I was technical lead on a software project, and my manager was a PHB who never played with the software, and insisted that a positive, up-beat, can-do attitude could negate the actual facts. Which were that the software was going to be more time to build than he wanted. And then I've had the other kind, who understood the software, and therefore understood how much could reasonably be expected.
Survivor bias is really at work with "leadership" books or books about why x company is amazing. A lot of times, companies get ahead by dumb luck. In your hypothetical example not only would the CEO be wrong, he'd chase off the decent talent, historical knowledge, kill morale, etc and we'd be reading a different article about bad CEO's. But for whatever reason, this was possible. No one did a study or talked to experts. It was just a gamble from above. We shouldn't be rewarding that.
If it was impossible, the company would have failed: It was a hard constraint for them to turn around faster in order to maintain their flight schedule with one plane less in order to stop losing money.
> "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."
It also worked for adoption of webservices for every part of Amazon's business. Basically, Bezos sent out an email to everyone and said that all systems would be compliant, or every employee maintaining that system would be fired. It has to be that way in big companies with major software architecture/infrastructure changes, or everyone will just passive-aggressively make it somehow not happen.
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?
Probably that these days the company actually complies with safety regulations. Apparently back then the flight attendants were pulling luggage from bins right after the plane hit the ground. Passengers were lined up outside before the plane even hit the ground. The plane was pushing back and starting to taxi before passengers were even seated. I doubt any of this complies with safety regulations.
> Passengers were lined up outside before the plane even hit the ground.
This sounds like an unpleasant experience, but I don't see how it's a safety violation. (It's certainly not at all uncommon when flying today to have the boarding lines at least partially formed before the arriving plane touches down.) What did sound unsafe to me was having passengers deplaning and boarding at the same time.
> Passengers were lined up outside before the plane even hit the ground.
(emphasis mine). Someone else mentioned that 'modern-day' boarding is through a climate-controlled jet bridge; that's all I've known, so I didn't consider any other approach.
Now it is entirely my personal guess, but back in the day you actually had legroom and seats that reclined on planes. Now that extra room has been taken up by more seats. It is my belief that this condition, could explain a large portion of the time increase. As more seats leads to the combination of more people needing to board the same size aircraft, them needing to squeeze into smaller spaces (get up after sitting if they sat down before someone to their inside), and less room per person for carry on luggage so they sometimes need to find a overhead bin not directly above their row.
As commentators have pointed out security at the gate probably has also increased time, I think number of seats per aircraft could also be a contributing factor.
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.
The "unassigned seating" thing is a little amusing since IME SouthWest actually has like 7 levels of "special" (at least it feels like that) before general seating is allowed.
I probably wouldn't change it (the special priorities) given the choice, but it is mildly annoying when it feels like you're waiting in line for an extra 10 or 15 minutes because you're not pregnant, a veteran, a VIP, etc.
Southwest has 1 (one) pre boarding phase - the vast majority of passengers in that phase are physically handicapped and need extra time to board. I fly southwest frequently (a-list) and have never seen it any other way - you get a blue sleeve, you pre-board. If not, you get in line with your group.
If they occasionally let a veteran or pregnant woman in that line who cares?
I do know that families with small children often board between the A and B groups. Which is nice, because families often want or need to sit together, but it still makes having an A ticket special.
Maybe it depends on airport. I've definitely never seen a "blue sleeve". And I've definitely heard veteran pre-board called out at Love Field.
Either way, like I said, I probably wouldn't change it. It has no real impact on where I sit. It's just the whole making a slow, inconvenient, annoying process just that much slower, more annoying.
Yeah, they are entertaining, but their methods are pretty flawed. The episode with the snow plow http://mythbustersresults.com/episode56 was beyond flawed and actually gave a dangerous result.
I would say they're the European equivalent of Spirit Airlines, or rather Spirit Airlines is the American equivalent of Ryanair.
Southwest is head and shoulders above both those carriers as far as customer experience goes (Two free carry ons (1 overhead item and one personal item), two FREE checked bags, free peanuts/almonds).
I think that people haven't yet really got out of the mindset where you couldn't bring your own food on planes. Now that you can, their providing food (or not) is much less of an issue, but it's still hard, for me, at least, to resist the frisson of thinking "free food!" (even if, as you say, I have already more than paid for it).
No, it's not a deal breaker, but it's something small that makes the customer feel valued/appreciated and not like a walking dollar sign whose presence is an annoyance to the flight crew.
And in an industry characterized by extremely low margins a $0.50 bag of peanuts per person is definitely significant money out of their pocket.
Its value is a lot more than 50 cents when you've been hauling a baby through airports, sat on the tarmac because of weather, and didn't have time to grab a scrap of food yourself.
Ryanair have gotten a bit better, mainly due to the actual experience of buying tickets from them online recently becoming much less of a hassle than it used to be.
Still, there's no chance they'll go easier on carry-on and checked baggage: for them, that's about minimising fuel usage and maximising profit.
> 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.
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... ;-)
IMHO the reason Southwest free-for-all boarding works is that people choose their seat and then stick with it.
On assigned seating flights, I've noticed plenty of people deliberately sitting in the wrong seat. They know their assigned seat is waiting for them so they might as well try to score a better one. In addition, there are the more reasonable people who find their seat then ask people to switch to be closer to friends etc. This all takes time.
Having to play the seat game is stressful (o hai nonchalant couple straddling the middle seat...), but certainly not as stressful as getting fondled by the blue shirted molesters or wondering if you'll get into an argument with a flight attendant who wants to gate check your electronics-laden carryon.
> 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.
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).
I guess maybe the practical limits of traveler behavior trump the theoretical ideal? The mathematical solution to boarding passengers was examined a while back:
At times they have taken this to a new low: upselling the benefit of sitting together. The seat assignment algorithm is probably optimizing profit, not retaining groups.
It gets far, far worse than that. I had an American Airlines flight which showed every seat except the "premium" paid ones as full. Since I highly value sitting next to my wife, I went ahead and coughed up the $20 necessary to buy two seats together.
The plane flew at about 20% capacity. That diagram showing all the seats except premium ones filled? Complete and utter bullshit. I got a refund in my email a couple days later; I can only assume due to my complaining to the flight attendant about the situation. And I haven't flown American since.
Pure guess: they were already driving the plane to the runway while people were still getting settled, and similarly they'd take people's luggage down while navigating to the airport. These days, I assume there are regulations that disallow anybody to move until the plane is at a full standstill.
I wonder why, though. Seems to me like an airplane on the ground is a lot safer to stand in than a fully packed bus in a busy city. Any ideas?
My first thought: you would not want luggage blocking aisles if there's an accident on the ground.
Also, aircraft (and trains) are held to a far greater safety standard. Yesterday's bus crash [1] is unlikely to have much investigation, never mind a change to driving practices, road engineering, law enforcement, or anything else.
You have to wonder how such a crash can happen on clear, dry open roads in good weather. Buses never travel that fast, nor will they have reckless drivers. There's a slight irony in that the coach is made by Van Hool which is a Belgian company - and make very good coaches from what I know.
Belgium has a slightly mad thing that they allow buses full of people without seat belts / standing to travel at 50 mph along the motorways.
>> "Belgium has a slightly mad thing that they allow buses full of people without seat belts / standing to travel at 50 mph along the motorways."
I don't think that's specific to Belgium. Even when I was travelling to high school in the UK 8 years ago they would account for standing room when deciding how many buses were required. So you had a bus full of kids all seated and then standing from the front to the back without room to move and the bus going as fast as 60mph. I never really thought of the safety implications but looking back it seems very stupid.
Same as back in Hungary, travelling between my home town and university (2h bus ride), and often people were spilling over all the way to the lower steps inside of the door (that means carrying people almost at 2x seat capacity)... Just crazy...
> Seems to me like an airplane on the ground is a lot safer to stand in than a fully packed bus in a busy city. Any ideas?
A plane is designed to fly sitting passengers, a city bus is designed to drive standing passengers. A driving plane has very poor suspension - it's bumpy and the bumps are leveraged by the tall landing gears. Inside the plane, people won't just be standing, they will be unpacking the overhead lockers, handing around heavy luggage over people's heads. Busses don't have overhead storage for heavy items, probably for this exact reason.
When I was a kid, I don't remember anyone with anything but trivial carry-ons (purses, little bags, etc).
Now, there's this fight to see how much we can stuff we can cram in for free to avoid checked luggage charges. Everyone has a bag and another bag with a laptop or somesuch. Everyone is trying to fit the biggest bag they possibly can into the overhead. This all costs time.
The weird part is that Southwest accepts checked bags for free, but I still see people doing this. I imagine there's an element of habit here and also a, "Why wait for luggage, I'll just bring everything with me and then go straight to a cab." I know I've fallen for that temptation before, but only after having my luggage lost twice in one year. Now I'm one of those people who often stuffs the largest bag he can find onto the overhead. Losing luggage for just 1 or 2 days on a 3 or 4 day trip really sucks. Suddenly I have no clean clothes, whatever electronics I packed, etc.
I also never understood the fast boarding time gimmick. Sure, its nice, but I usually fly out of O'Hare or Midway, where there's always a long wait after boarding anyway as we wait for an available slot to take off. Usually 20-30 minutes from after doors are sealed. All that rushing was for nothing. I imagine things are better in airports outside of Chicago, NYC, LA, or Atlanta, but for me its a lot of silliness. Especially now that there's this early boarder fee which is just a reinvention of the assigned seating ticket, but crappier because now I'm paying my ticket AND that fee just so I don't sit in the middle seat.
I tend to pack that way myself, but I also pack far less than I used to, especially for international trips. So I bring a rolling bag and a laptop bag, but the rolling bag is well within the carry-on size, and the laptop bag is only just big enough for my laptop, power supply, and a handful of essentials.
Besides the safety issues others have described, it also used to be possible to board new passengers from the back door while the previous passengers departed from the front. All it required was two sets of stairs to the tarmac.
Now that almost all planes board via climate-controlled jet bridges, I presume it's too expensive to use two of them at the same time.
I always wind up in the back of the plane, and I would give a lot to not have to stand in the aisle watching person after person in front take their sweet goddamn time- talking on the phone, unpacking their luggage, having an argument, or just daydreaming- as they block the entire disembarkment.
I too found that bit about how a 10-minute turn is now impossible to be pretty interesting. Which struggling airlines would now fail due to the (presumed) regulations which prevent a 10-minute turn? Which enterprises have failed in general due to those regulations? Has the cost in destroyed capital been made up for in lives and property saved?
I'm curious, because, 'don't move around while the plane is moving' sounds like a sensible regulation, but a world without Southwest Airlines would be worse. When is the benefit worth the cost?
It's not the specific "10-minute turn" that's the key, it's having a faster turn than the competition. The regulations affect everyone equally, and if Southwest has a 25-minute turn while other airlines can only manage a 35-minute turn that's still a win.
Also keep in mind that some airline regulations were much more strict in the 1970s - all routes and fares had to be approved in advance by the Civil Aeronautics Board and competition on price was nonexistent. Southwest was exempt from these regulations because they only operated within Texas.
Southwest flies 737s, which hold around 100 people (says Wikipedia). I can't imagine getting 100 people off a plane and then another 100 back on, plus stowing/unstowing baggage, all in 10 minutes.
Maybe that's why Southwest offers free checked baggage, to reduce the time passengers spend handling carryons.
And that was the original model and configuration which was released, since then we have seen variations of model and configuration with up to 215 seats on a 737 according to wikipedia.
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.
Looking at the issues you identified that reduced the advantage:
- full planes (lack of supply)
- parking/shuttles (airports are not efficient for the larger number of people traveling, and the very slow park-to-gate time that now exists, compared to the past)
- security (this alone can add an hour and I doubt it ever adds less than 10 minutes)
- "all the BS" - I'm reading this as lack of runway capacity, and generally mismanaged airports.
All of those things are the result of government control over the airline industry. Security only serves the purpose of keeping people docile to the government (nothing like being porno scanned or molested to let you know whose really in charge!) and the government control allows for limitations on the number of gates, limitation on routes, etc keeping the planes full and capacity down (not enough gates, airports are not kept up to date like thy would if run by an organization that needed to keep its customers happy, etc.)
The quick boarding and exiting times are important not because they provide a customer service advantage through convenience, but because they reduce the amount of time the aircraft spend on the ground. Time spent on the ground is basically waste from the perspective of the airline, and this is especially critical for short-haul routes where these delays add up to a significant portion of the aircraft's day.
If the aircraft is flying 1 hour trips, and you can reduce turn time from 20 mins to 10, that means that the whole trip is reduced from 1hr20min to 1hr10min, which works out to a 12.5% shorter trip time for the given route. This means you can either transport 12.5% more people on this route with a given number of aircraft, service 12.5% more equivalent routes with these aircraft, or reduce your fleet size (and marginal costs) by 12.5%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Flying on Southwest is actually the most pleasant experience that I've had, compared to the other carriers. They allow two free checked bags for example, and their employees are much friendlier and helpful. They give out free beer and wine several days a year (Mother's Day, Father's Day, Southwest's birthday, etc.) There certainly has been a race to the bottom in air travel the past few years, but it doesn't look like Southwest is participating.
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.
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.
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.
People Express is probably the most guilty party. Southwest has just been probably the most successful at building a business around no frills flying. Given deregulation though, the race to the bottom was pretty much inevitable. Too many people pick flights on the basis of lowest price.
I don't know my history of cheap airlines, but it seems that, today, Ryan Air is much more egregious about "racing to the bottom" than any other airline.
That's probably true based on what I've heard. (Though I've never flown them and hope to keep it that way.) Spirit in the US is apparently pretty bad too. However, they're pretty much all governed by the same calculus that a lot of people are going to buy their tickets based on whichever fare is lowest. There's some wiggle room on service quality within that constraint but not a whole lot.
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.
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.
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.
There were other efforts involved. Actually, if you're curious, there's some good analysis of Southwest Airlines' success in a book I read recently: "From Good To Great" by Jim Collins
It seemed that it made up for the one airplane they had to sell, which destroyed their planned schedules, but it wasn't super clear. Maybe if they hadn't met previous obligations they would have gone under.
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.
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.
