An airline's boarding policy shake-up shows the limits of efficiency. Boarding a Southwest flight is no longer first come, first served. What is the best way to cram people into a tin can in the sky? For five decades, Dallas-based budget airline Southwest made its reputation on its unique open seating policy. Savvy passengers who checked in early got to board early, too, lining up at distinctive silver stanchions to claim first dibs on whichever seat they preferred.

Southwest Airlines Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson will apologize on Thursday before a U.S. Senate committee over the holiday meltdown that led to the cancellation of 16,700 flights and pledge changes to ensure that there will be no repeats. "Let me be clear: we messed up. In hindsight, we did not have enough winter operational resilience," Watterson's written testimony for a U.S. Senate Commerce Committee hearing seen by Reuters says. In other written testimony seen by Reuters, Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) President Casey Murray will tell the committee that the low-cost carrier's "overconfidence" in planning and a "systemic failure to provide modern tools" were responsible for the December meltdown that the union said stranded 2 million passengers and is estimated to have cost it more than $1 billion. Murray will tell the committee that pilots "have been sounding the alarm about (Southwest's) inadequate crew scheduling technology and outdated operational processes for years. Unfortunately, those warnings were summarily ignored."

Only weeks after a Southwest Airlines meltdown led to thousands of canceled flights and stranded passengers, the nation's air travel system was briefly interrupted Wednesday due to an outage in the computer system used by the Federal Aviation Administration to give pilots vital information before they take off. While the FAA system was back online within hours and flights were slowly returning to schedule, those passengers whose lives were upended in last month's Southwest debacle are still feeling the effects of the meltdown and tallying up the financial damage they endured. Passengers who spoke to The Times said the fiasco cost them between $700 in one instance (for gas costs) and $70,000 in another (for a destination wedding that was ruined). "I am trying to be patient and give them a chance to make things right," said one of Southwest's stranded passengers, actor Deborah Rombaut. "What bothers me is that I don't have a timeline as far as when I'll be reimbursed." Thousands of holiday travelers like Rombaut were stranded late last month when Southwest Airlines said its computer system that tracked crew scheduling could not keep up with a severe winter storm.

During the winter storm, amid a huge volume of changes to crew schedules to work through, SkySolver couldn't handle the task of matching crew members and which flights they should work, executives of the Dallas-based carrier said. Southwest's software wasn't designed to solve problems of that scale, Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson said Thursday, forcing the airline to revert to manual scheduling. Unlike some large rivals with hub-and-spoke networks, Southwest planes hopscotch from city to city, which may have been another complicating factor. Many carriers still rely on homegrown solutions, which largely were built on legacy mainframe computers, analysts say. Analysts and industry insiders say the airline industry is overdue for a massive technology overhaul that would take advantage of highly scalable cloud technologies and fully connect disparate sources of real-time data to better coordinate crews with aircraft.

While automotive technology has not traditionally been a core feature at South by Southwest, the annual festival in Austin has, in many respects, been an innovator in finding ways to get people around town. From SXSW shuttle busses, rickshaw-inspired pedicabs and the proliferation of scooters and motorized bicycles, the City of Austin, and South-By in particular, have always made festival navigation relatively simple. For starters, the conference features a dedicated mobility track with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg speaking on Wednesday. A full lineup of panels covering topics like last-mile mobility, the hyperloop, autonomous vehicles, EVs, electric bicycles, personal air vehicles, delivery, drones, and commercial space travel are also featured. For the first time this year, a major part of the conference will feature the involvement and participation of multiple automotive manufacturers.

Ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft have made the daily commute a less frustrating part of the day for many. Now a crowd-sourced fleet of 14-passenger vehicles acquired by Ford is promising more. "What Chariot and Ford is looking forward to doing in the next couple of years is to actually make [your commute], believe it or not, the best part of your day," said Ali Vahabzadeh, founder and chief executive officer of Chariot Transit Inc., a Y Combinator-backed startup. At South by SouthWest in Austin, TX, Vahabzadeh claimed that Chariot is reinventing mass-transit by crowd-sourcing new routes in undeserved or overcrowded areas. Vahabzadeh told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's mobile live streaming studio, that Chariot is using Artificial Intelligence and commuter data to finetune rider experiences on-board.

The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. Southwest has about 2,000 open positions, ranging from flight attendants to gate agents, Mr. Muccio said. It historically has taken between 35 and 45 days for the company to make a contingent offer after posting a job, he said, but he wants to cut that in half with the help of tools that can automate routine recruiting tasks. The airline uses a software platform from Phenom People Inc. to help manage its recruiting. The software powers the Southwest careers site, and it uses artificial intelligence to tailor job postings and messaging to potential candidates.

Autonomous vehicle technology developer Aurora Innovation Inc. said it plans to expand testing throughout Texas as it works toward commercializing self-driving trucks. In a May 27 blog post, the company said that it is expanding its relationships with shippers and motor carriers as it works to refine its autonomous Aurora Driver technology to fit their needs and handle highway traffic. To safely deploy a self-driving truck that can handle the complexities of highway driving, Aurora is developing and refining key capabilities such as complicated lane changes and merges, and entering and exiting the freeway. The goal is to create an autonomous freight system that is "safer, faster, more reliable and more efficient," the company said. Take a closer look at how we're preparing the Aurora Driver to move goods for key logistics companies on middle-mile routes in Texas https://t.co/FlvnmBNaCN Aurora said it takes about three days to deliver goods from Dallas to Los Angeles with humans at the wheel.

Bell's concept model of a vertical-takeoff-and-landing air taxi vehicle, as unveiled in January at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas. Bell's concept model of a vertical-takeoff-and-landing air taxi vehicle, as unveiled in January at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas. In the not-so-distant future, you'll open your ride-hailing app and, in addition to ground options like car, SUV, scooter or bicycle, you'll see on-demand air flight. When the flying taxi comes, most of us will be passengers. We might hail it on our smartphones and head to the rooftop, where a ride is waiting at the helipad.

If, by some chance, you find yourself in Mark Cuban's bathroom, make sure to check out the reading materials. "If you go in my bathroom, there's a book, Machine Learning for Idiots," Cuban said on the latest episode of Recode Media. "Whenever I get a break, I'm reading it." That means everyone, including and especially business owners, are at risk if they don't educate themselves now. "There'll be a time when people take AI and its impact for granted, but if you don't know how to use it and you don't understand it and you can't at least at have a basic understanding of the different approaches and how the algorithms work, you can be blindsided in ways you couldn't even possibly imagine," Cuban said. "Algorithms are a function, literally, of the people who write them. Whoever they are, whatever they are, that's what you're going to get," he added. "If you don't know any better, it's like if you just had somebody who wrote software and didn't know anything about your business. There's going to be all kinds of risks involved. You have to understand it." You can listen to Recode Media wherever you get your podcasts -- including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Overcast. Below, we've shared a lightly edited full transcript of Peter's conversation with Mark, recorded live at Vox Media's The Deep End at South by Southwest 2019. I do a lot of these interviews now, either on a stage like this or at our own conferences or podcasts, and the thing I've learned over years is the best guest you can ever have is a billionaire who owns his or her own company because they can say whatever they want. So that's what we set up for you today. You answer your own emails. You know, I'm talented like that. Thank you for doing that. I'm not going to ask you if you are running for president. Because that's a boring ... I'm gonna get a boring answer. If you did run for president, like everyone else at South By Southwest, what would you campaign on? You put me on the spot. Let's just start by what I think is important, right, and I'm not a candidate so I don't give a shit if you like it or don't like it. First is common sense, right? Second is trying to bring people together.