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.
I highly recommend the tour of the Itaipu Binacional hydroelectric dam in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil (well, it's also in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, but the tour starts from the Brazilian side).
Get the "special tour" which takes you inside the dam. An absolutely incredible spot and incredible achievement. They will take you into a room with a turbine shaft that's mechanically transmitting 700 MW of power.
Seconded enthusiastically. That dam tour is amazing. Did it in 2007 or so.
Expect potential weirdness though. My wife was wearing a (not particularly short) skirt, and the lady at the office selling tour tickets made her step back and spin around, then said she couldn't go in like that. There is a gift shop that sells dam branded pants, so she bought a pair and we were cleared to go in. After all that, one dude in the control room was watching soft-core porn on one of the control room computers.
The turbine shaft room is especially crazy, since they let you (at least back then) walk right up to a few inches away from the shaft mechanically transmitting 700 MW of power! You could reach out and touch it, but we didn't and I wouldn't recommend it.
Long skirts (or other loose clothing) around big, spinning mechanical load transmission elements are an easy way for the rest of your life to become a cautionary Youtube video on workplace safety.
Seconding this! Make sure you get the "special tour". It was an absolute highlight of my trip.
If you are interested in power infrasture it's a must see. If you're afraid of heights, perhaps not so much.
There is one part where you are invited to walk on a catwalk that's very high up (an outdoor staircase sort of like a fire escape). My recollection is that walking on it is not mandatory for the tour, but I'm not absolutely certain of that.
You're also invited, but not required, to look over the edge of the dam from the top, which is also very far down.
Yes, field trips were always my favorite part of school. The "How its Made" show scratches a similar itch.
I've noodled with the idea of starting a "fieldtrips for grownups" group but I feel like a wastewater treatment plant is more likely to open their doors for a group of third graders than a group of thirty somethings.
That’s probably true but I wouldn’t count it out. I think you’re more likely to get answers like “we do 10:00 on tuesdays” (timed for schools) than “no”
That is a great idea. Too often, we just grow up getting used to the idea that things are just made somewhere in a "black box" and never take the time to investigate. We could probably get into more places than we realize.
> ... more likely to open their doors for a group of ...
Probably true. Usually. Just keep your eyes on local news, and wait 'till the Sewer Dept. is facing budget cuts, or needs a rate increase to pay for long-delayed repairs, or is trying to get a millage passed.
I worked a VR tour shoot of the UPS sorting hub in Louisville. There's a bit of idle time, but once the planes start arriving, it is non-stop action. Each plane is unloaded, packages are sorted/routed to the proper plane, they are then reloaded, and take back off ending in a bit of wow at everything that happened in that short time.
It answered a lot of the "what can Brown do for you" question in a way that no commercial could ever do. Their drop shipping and picking/packing facilities are impressive too including their cold storage areas that are massive warehouse sized freezers.
Also learned that the Louisville airport is listed as an international airport solely because of UPS.
I love that. I want to take more tours like this. One thing I found very interesting about it was to be immersed in a company culture. It's kind of like being a fish in water. You might not notice your own culture around you, but going into one that is very distinctive, you can observe it.
On a visit to Hiroshima, Japan, I went to the Mazda HQ for a factory tour. They took the group on a shuttle bus through their massive city-like complex and then we got to walk through one of the assembly-line buildings. Real fascinating experience.
I went on the factory tour at the Airbus factory in Hamburg Germany. It's quite well done, very long (2+ hours), and does a good job of explaining why they're flying giant airplane parts from around Europe for assembly, and what goes on inside all those huge buildings. Among other things, you get to go inside the building where they used to assemble the A380, and now there's 4 smaller planes being worked on in the same space that used to fit one A380.
I had one such tour at Toyota's TMMK (Georgetown, Kentucky) manufacturing plant and witnessing the efficiency with which they were making cars blew my mind!
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.)
Sometimes, large corporation values consistency above one-off excellence. It’s how they build their brand (the promise of consistency).
I won’t be surprised if the people in rooms tasting coffee is also looking for coffee that is too good for one-off but hard to be replicable in the various stores they have.
Consistency and predictability is considered extremely important for large franchise operations (or corporate-run chains). People want exactly the same sausage patty and egg croissant in St. John's Newfoundland as they can get in San Diego, California.
Quoting Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash:
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left- turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.
In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere.
But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto.
I actually was in Durham for DjangoCon US a couple of times. One year I was on the fence about making a quick trip to Raleigh before my flight and that factory was one on my list. It was a very rainy day, and I was pretty tired. I decided not to go. Hopefully, I will make it back sometime. Maybe for All Things Open, which is on my bucket list.
The island of Kaua'i in Hawaii has both tours of a chocolate farm (Lydgate Farms) and a coffee plantation (Kaua'i Coffee) with a visitor center. Just gotta find a conference out there, then hop on a Southwest flight.
The USDA employs professional tasters so that it can continue to grade the "quality" of butter, where quality is defined as tasting the way that, in the official opinion of the US government, butter should taste. There are no non-flavor considerations that go into grading butter, and yet somehow this is an important legal duty of the government.
This is why Starbucks and mcDonalds win over mom-and-pop.
If you have this kind of scale, you can do crazy things. You have enough data to AB test every single decision, not necessarily even via customer surveillance, you can just have half of the restaurants do A and the other half do B for a month, and then compare results. You can optimize the hell out of everything. You can do focus group testing to discover what customers really want. You can hire the world's foremost expert in chair design to design chairs which fulfill your business goals.
If you're a mom-and-pop, you go off on vibes and on "Karen Smith posted an angry review on Google Maps and she mentioned that the coffee tasted bad, so let's change the coffee."
Apps like Uber Eats change this dynamic a bit, as they can use the power of 0-marginal-cost software to write some of these optimizations once, and then deliver them to all their customers, no matter how small, sometimes without those customers' explicit knowledge.
I’m not sure how you could suggest starbucks and mcdonalds outcompete based on product quality or ambiance. Have you been to a random mom&pop coffee or burger spot recently?
Chairs aren’t magic, we know roughly what’s good or not. You don’t need a PhD to choose a good chair. A mom and pop could just copy the chair too.
The chains outcompete on marketing, leverage with vendors, etc.
They put a huge amount of effort into baseline quality because it’s incredibly hard to pull off across 1000s of stores staffed by people who don’t have any incentive to care.
You gave me an idea I've not thought about before: whether large corporations view peripheral companies (like Uber Eats, Door Dash, etc.) as friends or enemies...
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.
there's a lull from 1am - 5am as pilots are sleeping and airports are dormant. It kicks back up again at 5am for the early bird flights. Aircraft parked at the gates will be powered down for the night only to be brought back to life a few hours later. Southwest isn't a major international airline so you won't find them flying 24/7 like Delta or Lufthansa.
Not necessarily; some airports are closed at night to keep nearby residents happy. If you're operating a hub-and-spoke airline out of such an airport, there's not much activity going on at night. There's still some; your longhaul flights are still there, so the NOC is likely still open, but there's far less activity than you'd have during the day.
The surprise for me here is the social media command center. I know businesses have staff dedicated to social media but hadn't expected a company to have them at a scale & operational level that necessitates a command center setup, with desks facing screens on the walls.
I find it fascinating how with flight attendants there’s such a gap between what your everyday work is and what you need to know. Like every flight is just normal, but then once a career you might find yourself in a plane that’s now upside down on the tarmac and need to evacuate it in one minute. And they manage to do that.
I had the same thought. I had no idea before the tour the extent to which they have to master the emergency skills, despite probably never needing to use it. On the other hand, passengers don't have to practice, but I sometimes hear it be said that you shouldn't assume a flight attendant will be there to help you in the event of an emergency!
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!
It was a bit disappointing, but going into the tour, I had no idea what I would see, so it wasn't something I had any expectation about. Altogether though, I felt like I saw some very amazing stuff up close.
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.
A worker was superstitious and wanted to hang rubber chickens from the bottom of the full-motion simulators. IIRC, one was hung beneath a simulator, then removed, and the simulator stopped working. So, the management caved and allowed rubber chickens to be hung beneath all of them. That worker had a simulator dedicated to him and they put two rubber chickens under that one.
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.
I read Hard Landing a few months ago and really enjoyed it. I was interesting to see how everyone in the industry admired Herb and SW during those years.
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!
This actually isn't the case anymore, plenty of non-US airlines allow beards and the new masks still provide perfect oxygen flow. It's more of a "professional image" thing in the US.
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
There was a charming reality TV show in the 2000s called "Airline"[0] in which a camera crew followed around Southwest ground operations, cabin crew, and passengers. There was a British series that aired around the same time about Heathrow, unsurprisingly called "Airport".
There was also a British series called Airline (about EasyJet I think). Aired in the late 90s and early 2000s; the episode I remember most vividly is the 9/11 one. It's on Youtube, which is how I discovered it.
Britain has plenty of these; there was one about Virgin, there's one about Scotland's national airline (on iPlayer, $4/mo Windscribe subscription required if you live outside the UK), "Heathrow, Britain's Busiest Airport" is another longstanding one about Heathrow.
A Youtube channel called Our Stories is a good place to find such content.
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.
That sounds awesome. They actually told us during the tour that many employees never see the areas we went to. It was pretty exclusive. As for different break areas, I loved that they had so much memorabilia around. I feel like I saw so many different scenes in there. I think I would have gotten lost in there if I hadn't had a tour guide!
the worst was when I had to come to Dallas and go to HQ where we were at on the 4th floor of the main building, someone booked a meeting room in one of the other buildings and we had to walk across the walkway to it. I logged 3 mile walk to and back from just that meeting.
I'm envious of your full tour. You got a chance of a lifetime to see everything up close where most of us just get a glimpse if we are lucky.
Rare photo of a crash axe (half cropped out) on the wall next to the other safety equipment. A lot of people don't realize there are weapons inside the cabin
When I was a very young kid in Eugene, Oregon, we always kept a supply of Chet's Tamales in the freezer. They always had one black olive hidden somewhere in the middle. It wasn't just a tamale, it was a treasure hunt!
In first grade, we took a field trip to Chet's factory. It was so interesting to see how they made tamales in quantity–and they sent us each home with a free tamale.
Another Oregon treat is Tillamook cheese. My family went on one of their tours. They still offer tours today, but you are in a glassed-in area on the second floor overlooking the line. Back then, we got to walk right up to the vats of cheese curd. They trusted us (and instructed us!) to not poke our fingers in.
Much more recently, a friend who works at La Terra Fina in Union City, California took me on a private tour of their manufacturing plant. You may have seen LTF's quiches and dips at stores like Safeway and Costco, and private label versions at other stores.
I think they were making the Artichoke-Jalapeño dip that day. What struck me was the contrast between the first part of the production line and the rest. They start with huge blocks of cream cheese, industrial size cans of artichokes and jalapeños, and dump them into a giant mixer by hand.
Once a batch is mixed and gets a taste test, the rest of the line is high speed and highly automated. Plastic tubs come through and get the dip squirted into them, the plastic seal and top goes on, and then a labeling machine attaches each label.
Pro tip: If you like their dips, try them warm. My friend had not actually done this, so I asked Claude for a recipe:
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One time a friend served some La Terra Fina dip warm at a party. I'd only had it cold before, and it was a revelation. I forgot to ask for his recipe, but I believe he warmed it in the oven for a while and then under the broiler for a bit to lightly brown the top. What would be a good temperature and time for the first step, assuming a typical shallow casserole pan?
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La Terra Fina dips warm up beautifully — the cream cheese base gets silky and the flavors meld in a way cold just can't match.
For a shallow casserole dish, I'd suggest:
Oven step: 325°F for about 20–25 minutes. Low and slow is the move here — you want it heated through without the dairy breaking or getting grainy. A shallow dish speeds things up compared to a deep one, so check at 20 minutes. You're looking for it to be bubbling gently around the edges.
Broiler step: 2–4 minutes on high, watching closely. The top should get lightly golden with a few darker spots — that slight caramelization on the cheese and any onion bits is where the magic happens. Don't walk away during this part.
A few notes:
• Pull it from the fridge 15–20 minutes before baking if you can, so it's not stone cold going in
• The spinach artichoke and artichoke jalapeño varieties both do particularly well warm
• Serving with something sturdy (crostini, pita chips, thick tortilla chips) beats thin crackers when it's hot and scoopable
The broiler browning is really what elevates it — that textural contrast between the creamy interior and the slightly crispy top is what probably made it feel like a revelation.
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.
Nothing against her, I just think it's not advisable to put a lot of emotional investment in a company that's already shown it's willing to throw away what made people loyal to it to begin with. I've seen a lot of other deeply committed superfans of Southwest feeling upset and angry and even betrayed at various unpopular and customer-hostile moves they've made in the last few years, so it was kind of surprising to see people still buying into their image. Maybe the changes just haven't hit something they care about (yet), but it's always risky to treat a company like they're family/friends/etc. (even if individual employees are great people).
I was certainly surprised to learn that Southwest even still has fans, given how they went out of their way to undermine any reason one would want to do business with them.
// 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)
> 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.
Ah, what is so special that women bring that men can't? Neither women or men are fundamental to raising a child, parents are. Gay couples raise healthy, well-adjusted children all the time without one or the other gender as a parent.
Positioning a family as having women-at-home as a requirement just sounds like old-school misogyny to me. (And also de-valuing the capability of men.) Men are perfectly capable of filling this domestic role as well.
I don't think FA is a great job for a mom but it's not as horrible as pilot. FAs can switch shifts between themselves and dial up or down their hours with relative ease. Pilots have a lot less of this flexibility.
The schedules have negligible difference with respect to your original argument. So if busy schedules are why there are hardly any women pilots, why is the gender balance the exact opposite for flight attendants? There are reasons, and they aren't all because "men bad", but your initial argument is 100% not true based on the simple counterexample of flight attendants. What is being "papered over" is this: why, given the same schedules, are women under-represented in the higher paying, higher prestige job?
> why, given the same schedules, are women under-represented in the higher paying, higher prestige job?
Why do you believe they have the same schedules? There's no rule that says when a pilot follows one flight with another flight, all the flight attendants have to join him.
I don't think there's all that much inherent value in having several flights flown by the same pilot -- if anything, it's the reverse -- so I'd tend to suspect that the rarity of female pilots owes more to the fact that pilots come from the Air Force.
FAs have very interesting schedules. As they work up seniority they have a ton of flexibility in how they space apart their required minimum number of shifts/overnights. Trading shifts and bidding for shifts is common. Additionally at some point in their seniority ladder they can start getting a regular set of shifts that get them back home to base daily, with occasional overnights.
I suspect this institutional flexibility is actually a natural consequence of the gendered nature of the role.
I don't care how many women pilots there are. Nor should anyone. What's important is that women have the opportunity to become pilots if they so choose, not how many women actually make that choice.
The narrative is "it is important that genders are equally represented in all professions". The "sadly" indicates that - it assumes that equality of representation is good and expected, so the fact that it was found to not be the case is "sad".
> Are we happy there aren't more women pilots?
I'm sorry, what? Who's we? You and... ?
> That would be your POV
If you want to know my POV all you have to do is ask.
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.
I highly recommend the tour of the Itaipu Binacional hydroelectric dam in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil (well, it's also in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, but the tour starts from the Brazilian side).
https://turismoitaipu.com.br/en/
Get the "special tour" which takes you inside the dam. An absolutely incredible spot and incredible achievement. They will take you into a room with a turbine shaft that's mechanically transmitting 700 MW of power.
Seconded enthusiastically. That dam tour is amazing. Did it in 2007 or so.
Expect potential weirdness though. My wife was wearing a (not particularly short) skirt, and the lady at the office selling tour tickets made her step back and spin around, then said she couldn't go in like that. There is a gift shop that sells dam branded pants, so she bought a pair and we were cleared to go in. After all that, one dude in the control room was watching soft-core porn on one of the control room computers.
The turbine shaft room is especially crazy, since they let you (at least back then) walk right up to a few inches away from the shaft mechanically transmitting 700 MW of power! You could reach out and touch it, but we didn't and I wouldn't recommend it.
Long skirts (or other loose clothing) around big, spinning mechanical load transmission elements are an easy way for the rest of your life to become a cautionary Youtube video on workplace safety.
Seconding this! Make sure you get the "special tour". It was an absolute highlight of my trip. If you are interested in power infrasture it's a must see. If you're afraid of heights, perhaps not so much.
Could you kindly elaborate on the "afraid of heights" aspect? Was there a lot of catwalks or anything of that nature?
There is one part where you are invited to walk on a catwalk that's very high up (an outdoor staircase sort of like a fire escape). My recollection is that walking on it is not mandatory for the tour, but I'm not absolutely certain of that.
You're also invited, but not required, to look over the edge of the dam from the top, which is also very far down.
This is correct. If you don't like heights, that's definitely not a reason to skip the tour, but you'll miss out on one piece (that I enjoyed).
Sounds incredible. I am going to bookmark this to do if I take a trip to Brazil.
Yes, field trips were always my favorite part of school. The "How its Made" show scratches a similar itch.
I've noodled with the idea of starting a "fieldtrips for grownups" group but I feel like a wastewater treatment plant is more likely to open their doors for a group of third graders than a group of thirty somethings.
That’s probably true but I wouldn’t count it out. I think you’re more likely to get answers like “we do 10:00 on tuesdays” (timed for schools) than “no”
The Oakland wastewater treatment plant offers tours open to the general public: https://www.ebmud.com/wastewater/collection-treatment/wastew...
Wouldn't be surprised if others do as well, or would be willing to if you asked the right person nicely.
That is a great idea. Too often, we just grow up getting used to the idea that things are just made somewhere in a "black box" and never take the time to investigate. We could probably get into more places than we realize.
> ... more likely to open their doors for a group of ...
Probably true. Usually. Just keep your eyes on local news, and wait 'till the Sewer Dept. is facing budget cuts, or needs a rate increase to pay for long-delayed repairs, or is trying to get a millage passed.
Remember, most fire stations will give you a tour, let you sit in the truck, etc, if you just pop in. They love to show off.
Source: My father was a 35 year veteran of the fire department in a large city.
Great tip. I would never think to ask. Now I want to go to one!
I worked a VR tour shoot of the UPS sorting hub in Louisville. There's a bit of idle time, but once the planes start arriving, it is non-stop action. Each plane is unloaded, packages are sorted/routed to the proper plane, they are then reloaded, and take back off ending in a bit of wow at everything that happened in that short time.
It answered a lot of the "what can Brown do for you" question in a way that no commercial could ever do. Their drop shipping and picking/packing facilities are impressive too including their cold storage areas that are massive warehouse sized freezers.
Also learned that the Louisville airport is listed as an international airport solely because of UPS.
I love that. I want to take more tours like this. One thing I found very interesting about it was to be immersed in a company culture. It's kind of like being a fish in water. You might not notice your own culture around you, but going into one that is very distinctive, you can observe it.
On a visit to Hiroshima, Japan, I went to the Mazda HQ for a factory tour. They took the group on a shuttle bus through their massive city-like complex and then we got to walk through one of the assembly-line buildings. Real fascinating experience.
I highly recommend a free Amazon warehouse tour. You really get to see how the items you order gets picked and packaged.
I've heard about that. I plan to do that sometime.
I went on the factory tour at the Airbus factory in Hamburg Germany. It's quite well done, very long (2+ hours), and does a good job of explaining why they're flying giant airplane parts from around Europe for assembly, and what goes on inside all those huge buildings. Among other things, you get to go inside the building where they used to assemble the A380, and now there's 4 smaller planes being worked on in the same space that used to fit one A380.
I had one such tour at Toyota's TMMK (Georgetown, Kentucky) manufacturing plant and witnessing the efficiency with which they were making cars blew my mind!
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.)
Sometimes, large corporation values consistency above one-off excellence. It’s how they build their brand (the promise of consistency).
I won’t be surprised if the people in rooms tasting coffee is also looking for coffee that is too good for one-off but hard to be replicable in the various stores they have.
Consistency and predictability is considered extremely important for large franchise operations (or corporate-run chains). People want exactly the same sausage patty and egg croissant in St. John's Newfoundland as they can get in San Diego, California.
Quoting Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash:
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left- turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.
In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere.
But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto.
I would love to tour a coffee company (or a chocolate company). Two of my favorite things. :)
If you ever find yourself in Raleigh, Videri Chocolate offers tours! https://viderichocolatefactory.com/
I actually was in Durham for DjangoCon US a couple of times. One year I was on the fence about making a quick trip to Raleigh before my flight and that factory was one on my list. It was a very rainy day, and I was pretty tired. I decided not to go. Hopefully, I will make it back sometime. Maybe for All Things Open, which is on my bucket list.
The island of Kaua'i in Hawaii has both tours of a chocolate farm (Lydgate Farms) and a coffee plantation (Kaua'i Coffee) with a visitor center. Just gotta find a conference out there, then hop on a Southwest flight.
There's a place in Hamburg called "Chocoversum" that offers a good tour, explaining and demonstrating the whole chocolate making process.
Highly recommend Hammond's in Denver CO as an amazing FREE candy/chocolate factory tour:
https://hammondscandies.com/products/hammonds-factory-tour
https://hammondscandies.com/pages/factory-tours-new
> filled with rooms where people just taste coffee, all day, every day, to make sure it's what it's supposed to be.
I’m picturing a room of tasters going “bitter, acrid, off-putting… approved”
The USDA employs professional tasters so that it can continue to grade the "quality" of butter, where quality is defined as tasting the way that, in the official opinion of the US government, butter should taste. There are no non-flavor considerations that go into grading butter, and yet somehow this is an important legal duty of the government.
This is why Starbucks and mcDonalds win over mom-and-pop.
If you have this kind of scale, you can do crazy things. You have enough data to AB test every single decision, not necessarily even via customer surveillance, you can just have half of the restaurants do A and the other half do B for a month, and then compare results. You can optimize the hell out of everything. You can do focus group testing to discover what customers really want. You can hire the world's foremost expert in chair design to design chairs which fulfill your business goals.
If you're a mom-and-pop, you go off on vibes and on "Karen Smith posted an angry review on Google Maps and she mentioned that the coffee tasted bad, so let's change the coffee."
Apps like Uber Eats change this dynamic a bit, as they can use the power of 0-marginal-cost software to write some of these optimizations once, and then deliver them to all their customers, no matter how small, sometimes without those customers' explicit knowledge.
I’m not sure how you could suggest starbucks and mcdonalds outcompete based on product quality or ambiance. Have you been to a random mom&pop coffee or burger spot recently?
Chairs aren’t magic, we know roughly what’s good or not. You don’t need a PhD to choose a good chair. A mom and pop could just copy the chair too.
The chains outcompete on marketing, leverage with vendors, etc.
They put a huge amount of effort into baseline quality because it’s incredibly hard to pull off across 1000s of stores staffed by people who don’t have any incentive to care.
While mostly correct it is missing that not all customers in all stores want the same.
Customers in store A might have wildly different preferences to customers in store B. Starbucks can't account for that - small stores can.
You gave me an idea I've not thought about before: whether large corporations view peripheral companies (like Uber Eats, Door Dash, etc.) as friends or enemies...
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.
there's a lull from 1am - 5am as pilots are sleeping and airports are dormant. It kicks back up again at 5am for the early bird flights. Aircraft parked at the gates will be powered down for the night only to be brought back to life a few hours later. Southwest isn't a major international airline so you won't find them flying 24/7 like Delta or Lufthansa.
Not necessarily; some airports are closed at night to keep nearby residents happy. If you're operating a hub-and-spoke airline out of such an airport, there's not much activity going on at night. There's still some; your longhaul flights are still there, so the NOC is likely still open, but there's far less activity than you'd have during the day.
The surprise for me here is the social media command center. I know businesses have staff dedicated to social media but hadn't expected a company to have them at a scale & operational level that necessitates a command center setup, with desks facing screens on the walls.
I find it fascinating how with flight attendants there’s such a gap between what your everyday work is and what you need to know. Like every flight is just normal, but then once a career you might find yourself in a plane that’s now upside down on the tarmac and need to evacuate it in one minute. And they manage to do that.
I had the same thought. I had no idea before the tour the extent to which they have to master the emergency skills, despite probably never needing to use it. On the other hand, passengers don't have to practice, but I sometimes hear it be said that you shouldn't assume a flight attendant will be there to help you in the event of an emergency!
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
Yes, that looks like an escape rope for pilots.
https://www.aviation-gadgets.com/photo/virgin-australia-boei...
I am glad you found that. Someone asked our guide, and I missed the explanation!
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!
It was a bit disappointing, but going into the tour, I had no idea what I would see, so it wasn't something I had any expectation about. Altogether though, I felt like I saw some very amazing stuff up close.
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.
Sharing these raw and unedited while the topic is still relevant: https://share.icloud.com/photos/006C8RDrTbAiQFIr3T2xJdekQ
Thank you for sharing!
Thank you! The Quantas Ops photos are awesome!
Found some old photos from "Cathay City" aka Cathay Pacific's headquarters in Hong Kong.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0c2fhRSXwnIe7SrgOgSG0-wPw
I would love to see it!
That would be welcomed!
> Ask them about the chickens hanging from the bottom.
Maybe you should tell me about the chickens, since I am unlikely to ever get to ask anyone at Southwest HQ.
A worker was superstitious and wanted to hang rubber chickens from the bottom of the full-motion simulators. IIRC, one was hung beneath a simulator, then removed, and the simulator stopped working. So, the management caved and allowed rubber chickens to be hung beneath all of them. That worker had a simulator dedicated to him and they put two rubber chickens under that one.
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.
I read Hard Landing a few months ago and really enjoyed it. I was interesting to see how everyone in the industry admired Herb and SW during those years.
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!
They interestingly invested very little into it and it imploded on them spectacularly.
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.
This actually isn't the case anymore, plenty of non-US airlines allow beards and the new masks still provide perfect oxygen flow. It's more of a "professional image" thing in the US.
Good mask fit came up a lot during Covid. Moustaches can interfere too (depending on size, and mask shape)
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
There was a charming reality TV show in the 2000s called "Airline"[0] in which a camera crew followed around Southwest ground operations, cabin crew, and passengers. There was a British series that aired around the same time about Heathrow, unsurprisingly called "Airport".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_%28American_TV_series%...
There was also a British series called Airline (about EasyJet I think). Aired in the late 90s and early 2000s; the episode I remember most vividly is the 9/11 one. It's on Youtube, which is how I discovered it.
Britain has plenty of these; there was one about Virgin, there's one about Scotland's national airline (on iPlayer, $4/mo Windscribe subscription required if you live outside the UK), "Heathrow, Britain's Busiest Airport" is another longstanding one about Heathrow.
A Youtube channel called Our Stories is a good place to find such content.
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.
That sounds awesome. They actually told us during the tour that many employees never see the areas we went to. It was pretty exclusive. As for different break areas, I loved that they had so much memorabilia around. I feel like I saw so many different scenes in there. I think I would have gotten lost in there if I hadn't had a tour guide!
the worst was when I had to come to Dallas and go to HQ where we were at on the 4th floor of the main building, someone booked a meeting room in one of the other buildings and we had to walk across the walkway to it. I logged 3 mile walk to and back from just that meeting.
I'm envious of your full tour. You got a chance of a lifetime to see everything up close where most of us just get a glimpse if we are lucky.
Rare photo of a crash axe (half cropped out) on the wall next to the other safety equipment. A lot of people don't realize there are weapons inside the cabin
oh hey kati! we met at pycon in portland years ago, awesome to see you on the HN frontpage!
Oh awesome! If you see me again, let's catch up!
SWA does some seriously complex stuff. Neat tour!
When I was a very young kid in Eugene, Oregon, we always kept a supply of Chet's Tamales in the freezer. They always had one black olive hidden somewhere in the middle. It wasn't just a tamale, it was a treasure hunt!
In first grade, we took a field trip to Chet's factory. It was so interesting to see how they made tamales in quantity–and they sent us each home with a free tamale.
Another Oregon treat is Tillamook cheese. My family went on one of their tours. They still offer tours today, but you are in a glassed-in area on the second floor overlooking the line. Back then, we got to walk right up to the vats of cheese curd. They trusted us (and instructed us!) to not poke our fingers in.
Much more recently, a friend who works at La Terra Fina in Union City, California took me on a private tour of their manufacturing plant. You may have seen LTF's quiches and dips at stores like Safeway and Costco, and private label versions at other stores.
I think they were making the Artichoke-Jalapeño dip that day. What struck me was the contrast between the first part of the production line and the rest. They start with huge blocks of cream cheese, industrial size cans of artichokes and jalapeños, and dump them into a giant mixer by hand.
Once a batch is mixed and gets a taste test, the rest of the line is high speed and highly automated. Plastic tubs come through and get the dip squirted into them, the plastic seal and top goes on, and then a labeling machine attaches each label.
Pro tip: If you like their dips, try them warm. My friend had not actually done this, so I asked Claude for a recipe:
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One time a friend served some La Terra Fina dip warm at a party. I'd only had it cold before, and it was a revelation. I forgot to ask for his recipe, but I believe he warmed it in the oven for a while and then under the broiler for a bit to lightly brown the top. What would be a good temperature and time for the first step, assuming a typical shallow casserole pan?
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La Terra Fina dips warm up beautifully — the cream cheese base gets silky and the flavors meld in a way cold just can't match.
For a shallow casserole dish, I'd suggest:
Oven step: 325°F for about 20–25 minutes. Low and slow is the move here — you want it heated through without the dairy breaking or getting grainy. A shallow dish speeds things up compared to a deep one, so check at 20 minutes. You're looking for it to be bubbling gently around the edges.
Broiler step: 2–4 minutes on high, watching closely. The top should get lightly golden with a few darker spots — that slight caramelization on the cheese and any onion bits is where the magic happens. Don't walk away during this part.
A few notes:
• Pull it from the fridge 15–20 minutes before baking if you can, so it's not stone cold going in
• The spinach artichoke and artichoke jalapeño varieties both do particularly well warm
• Serving with something sturdy (crostini, pita chips, thick tortilla chips) beats thin crackers when it's hot and scoopable
The broiler browning is really what elevates it — that textural contrast between the creamy interior and the slightly crispy top is what probably made it feel like a revelation.
These are gems. Bookmarking them to do someday if they still exist!
Chet's Tamales are long gone, and La Terra Fina was a private tour. I had to wear a hair net, face mask, long white overcoat, and overboots.
But the Tillamook cheese and ice cream factory is going strong, and one Google review says it's a great experience.
It would be fun to compile a list of places like this that offer tours to the public!
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.
You could’ve just said, “I’m glad you enjoyed it!” or said nothing at all rather than lecturing her on your politics.
Nothing against her, I just think it's not advisable to put a lot of emotional investment in a company that's already shown it's willing to throw away what made people loyal to it to begin with. I've seen a lot of other deeply committed superfans of Southwest feeling upset and angry and even betrayed at various unpopular and customer-hostile moves they've made in the last few years, so it was kind of surprising to see people still buying into their image. Maybe the changes just haven't hit something they care about (yet), but it's always risky to treat a company like they're family/friends/etc. (even if individual employees are great people).
This is the internet; we don’t do “reasonable” here, apparently :p
I was certainly surprised to learn that Southwest even still has fans, given how they went out of their way to undermine any reason one would want to do business with them.
// 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)
> 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.
Ah, what is so special that women bring that men can't? Neither women or men are fundamental to raising a child, parents are. Gay couples raise healthy, well-adjusted children all the time without one or the other gender as a parent.
Positioning a family as having women-at-home as a requirement just sounds like old-school misogyny to me. (And also de-valuing the capability of men.) Men are perfectly capable of filling this domestic role as well.
Fair - how does that account for the predominantly female FA population?
I don't think FA is a great job for a mom but it's not as horrible as pilot. FAs can switch shifts between themselves and dial up or down their hours with relative ease. Pilots have a lot less of this flexibility.
The schedules have negligible difference with respect to your original argument. So if busy schedules are why there are hardly any women pilots, why is the gender balance the exact opposite for flight attendants? There are reasons, and they aren't all because "men bad", but your initial argument is 100% not true based on the simple counterexample of flight attendants. What is being "papered over" is this: why, given the same schedules, are women under-represented in the higher paying, higher prestige job?
> why, given the same schedules, are women under-represented in the higher paying, higher prestige job?
Why do you believe they have the same schedules? There's no rule that says when a pilot follows one flight with another flight, all the flight attendants have to join him.
I don't think there's all that much inherent value in having several flights flown by the same pilot -- if anything, it's the reverse -- so I'd tend to suspect that the rarity of female pilots owes more to the fact that pilots come from the Air Force.
FAs have very interesting schedules. As they work up seniority they have a ton of flexibility in how they space apart their required minimum number of shifts/overnights. Trading shifts and bidding for shifts is common. Additionally at some point in their seniority ladder they can start getting a regular set of shifts that get them back home to base daily, with occasional overnights.
I suspect this institutional flexibility is actually a natural consequence of the gendered nature of the role.
What evidence is this claim based on?
forgive me if I am wrong, but this comment sounds like we are trying to build a narrative. I might be wrong. No offense.
Not sure the point. I was citing the article and sharing my reaction. What are you doing with the royal we?
Is “build a narrative” code for something? The comment was pretty cut and dry as written.
"Narrative" is the code word people use when they want to act coy and not say what they really think. Edgy vagueness.
The "sadly" comment in the article is also a narrative. No offense.
It isn't a narrative, it is simply a point of view. Are we happy there aren't more women pilots? That would be your POV.
I don't care how many women pilots there are. Nor should anyone. What's important is that women have the opportunity to become pilots if they so choose, not how many women actually make that choice.
The narrative is "it is important that genders are equally represented in all professions". The "sadly" indicates that - it assumes that equality of representation is good and expected, so the fact that it was found to not be the case is "sad".
> Are we happy there aren't more women pilots?
I'm sorry, what? Who's we? You and... ?
> That would be your POV
If you want to know my POV all you have to do is ask.