Farhan Hasham

Farhan Hasham enlisted in the Navy Reserve in March 2012, while he was a student at Texas A&M.

He was a resident advisor in a university residence hall, and he managed the laboratories of seven research groups at the Michael E. DeBakey Research Institute, named for the heart surgeon: equipment, ordering, inventory, maintenance, and the compliance paperwork a research institution runs on. He spent a summer at Parkland Hospital in linen services, processing and sterilizing supplies. He trained as an Aggie Ally, a campus program that prepares students to support LGBTQ members of the university community. He was doing all of it as an undergraduate.

He enlisted before he finished the degree. He graduated in 2016, four years into his service, with a degree in human resources development and business administration. The Reserve ran alongside every semester of it.

He was assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 22, the Seabees. His rating was logistics specialist, the Navy's specialty for supply and inventory work, and his first job was supply storekeeper for the battalion's Fort Worth unit. The supply department is small, and the storekeeper's inventory is the battalion's inventory. He kept it, and he shadowed the battalion's supply officers to learn the rest of the department's work.

Then he was the Houston detachment's mustering petty officer, responsible for the daily accounting of who was present and who was not. A detachment is small enough that the muster is a name-by-name check, and the report goes up the chain every drill weekend. Pay, orders, and readiness all rest on that book.

A construction battalion builds and repairs the roads, bridges, airfields, and structures the fleet and the units ashore operate from. A battalion moves on its supply: the tools, the parts, the material, and the paperwork that proves it arrived. The storekeeper is the reason the material is on the ground when the build starts.

The battalion was a Reserve unit, and its sailors came from the cities where it drilled. Fort Worth and Houston were two of them. A Reserve career runs alongside a civilian one, and his civilian one was a full-time job, a laboratory, and a degree. Drill weekends, annual training, and the administration of both lives fitted around each other.

He separated from the Reserve in November 2024, after twelve years and nine months. The Navy awarded him the Naval and Marine Achievement Medal, which is given for meritorious service, and recognized him as Blue Jacket Sailor of the Year.

Southwest Airlines hired him as an intern in 2016, while he was still drilling, and he stayed. He was a pilot crew scheduler, then a lead analyst, then a team lead, then a manager, then senior manager of strategy and portfolio in May 2025. In June 2026 he became a senior crew analytics consultant, ten years after the internship. He has been at the airline for a decade.

A crew scheduler builds the airline's monthly schedule from the contract, the flight-time limits, and the crews who are available. The work is governed by 14 CFR Part 117, the federal flight-time rule, by a pilot contract, and by the airline's promise that the right aircraft and the right crew are in the right place at the right time.

He has also published a paper on how applicants perceive video and telephone screening interviews. He speaks Urdu, Gujarati, and Hindi as well as English, and he lives in the Dallas area, where the airline is headquartered at Love Field.

For twelve years he kept two calendars. The Reserve one ended in November 2024. The other is still running.