Incident 432: Southwest Airlines Crew Scheduling Solver Degenerates Flight Network

Description: Southwest Airlines left passengers stranded for days throughout the flight network when Southwest crew scheduling software repeatedly failed to recover from weather-induced flight cancellations.

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Alleged: General Electric developed an AI system deployed by Southwest Airlines, which harmed Airline Passengers.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
432
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2022-12-21
Editors
Sean McGregor

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

How Southwest Airlines Melted Down
wsj.com · 2022

When Southwest Airlines Co. reassigns crews after flight disruptions, it typically relies on a system called SkySolver. This Christmas, SkySolver not only didn’t solve much, it also helped create the worst industry meltdown in recent memory…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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