The Southwest Airlines Story

I am constantly amazed at what is possible with software. I wrote little programs on my TI-82 in middle school by transcribing pages of code to make bug ridden versions of Lunar Lander and the first text based RPG that every kid played on the bus, Drug War. I was amazed I could play a game on a calculator. Years later, in graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, I got to witness what happens when creative people tried to make novel experiences under the tutelage of Golan Levin in his Interactive Art course. People made crazy stuff and I was just floored. Years later, to satisfy my creative outlet while I suffered through government contracting by day at Deloitte, I made my Personal Beer Bot that got WAY more interest than I could have ever imagined.

But the most amazed I have ever been at what can happen when software and people work together was the day our ops team was able to save a kid in Baltimore by turning around a plane.

The Airspace flight router is pretty much a modern marvel. It is over 10 years old at the time of me writing this and still does not have a rival. It processes hundreds of millions of options and uses multiple machine learning models to come up with the most optimal route for a time critical shipment. It is awesome.

So when a customer called and said that a child in Baltimore would not survive if they did not receive life saving medicine that was currently in Texas, we immediately got a drive moving towards the pickup location. Our ops team put in the origin and the destination and found zero routes. The specialist working the order knew that zero meant zero. The last flight out that could have made it just took off.

Enter the humans

Our airline team, lead by Keysha Dampeer, called Southwest and explained what was going on. Southwest communicated the situation to the pilot. He got on the intercom and explained what was happening. The plane turned around, our driver gave the package to their cargo team and they got it to the plane. That child got his medicine and lived at the price of a short flight delay.

People are awesome.