Southwest Headquarters Tour

I adore behind-the-scenes tours. I get there's a lot of work that goes into making it happen, but when you drop into a place where people work, you'll learn so much about real life problems that never make it to the Internet.

The greatest tour I ever had was at the Smokejumper base in remote WA. At any time when they're open, you're allowed to drop in for a tour and whoever is there that day is obliged to give you one. Even in the height of fire season.

We got to see them pack parachutes, repair gear, coordinate parcel drops - everything. Our guide was a 3 year jumper veteran on summer break from his masters degree in linguistics. It was incredible.

Any org that's proud of what they do should aspire to have public tours.

A few years ago, I got a tour of Starbucks headquarters from a friend. One thing I didn't expect: it's literally filled with rooms where people just taste coffee, all day, every day, to make sure it's what it's supposed to be.

It's crazy how even something which feels mediocre so much of the time - fast-food coffee, a budget airline - requires an enormous amount of human effort to pull off reliably.

(And yes, you can dislike Southwest as a corporation and still think things like flight attendant training and plane simulators are cool. Come on folks.)

I don't know if if it's still there, but there used to be a really huge display of memorabilia and photos in their pilot training center along their first floor hallway that went on forever with photos spanning their history: from crewmembers dressed up in toga at company parties to NASA astronauts that became pilots, some of it really throwing back to their old school wild west culture.

Highly recommend reading Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger for a little more background on SWA rough and tumble startup story with Herb K.

Routing packets? Easy! Routing $100 million equipment with 200 souls on board? A bit more nerve racking. Airline operations is one of the most fun and complex problems on the planet. Thanks for sharing!

There appears to be a rope-like device on the emergency equipment training board (8th picture), with some bicone shapes.

Anyone know what that is?

Perhaps an escape rope for the pilots?

EDIT: Yup, here it is in action: https://www.jetphotos.com/photo/7389569

I was given a similar tour of Qantas's headquarters, including a walkthrough of their engine workshop and the chance to roam freely inside one of their A380s that was parked up for maintenance. I took heaps of photos, I suppose if this stuff is interesting to others I really should think about sharing them.

Very cool post. I don't fly much anymore, by choice. But I'm always impressed at the scale and complexity that it takes to operate an airline like Southwest. I appreciate you sharing. Sorry you didn't get to see the actual NOC!

// We later learned that sadly only 6% of Southwest pilots are women,

I am not sure that's a "sadly". I used to fly a lot and talk to flight crews. Aviation is a ton of crazy schedules and nights away from home (I assume this is well known)

From a family perspective it's bad enough if dads missing from the house for days at a time, much more catastrophic if mom's not around like that.

(A child's relationship with mom vs. dad is very different. Kids need their mom in a very different way that we can't just paper over)

Fantastic write up. It's mind blowing how much complexity there is to keep flights going day in and day out.

My guess is all airline NOCs operate 24/7 as flights happen around the clock. Also planes typically don't have much downtime as that loses money so everything has to be a continuous operation.

Cool looking at the pictures of the dashboards. It's nutty to think how much has to be tracked when doing airplane maintenance.

I’ve toured the Lucid Motors factory a few times, and man, it’s incredible. Sometimes we forget that the things we use every single day take massive amounts of space, people, and technology to build.

We software people are spoiled with our keyboards and Red Bull :p

TIL that pilots can't have a full beard because oxygen masks can't make a seal. Guess that's where the pilot moustache stereotype comes from.

Cool, I was on a contract last year for their cybersecurity division and implemented observability and AI for their cloud environments. They have a few different cafeterias at the HQ in the different buildings and the SWA store but I never got to see the sim and pilot training areas.

SWA does some seriously complex stuff. Neat tour!

oh hey kati! we met at pycon in portland years ago, awesome to see you on the HN frontpage!

Being a "superfan" of a corporation is already kind of questionable, but especially so when its leadership has been steadily dismantling so many great customer-friendly things that distinguished them from the competition. I'm glad at least something like this has survived long enough for you to have a neat experience.