Besides today’s assigned seating announcement, Southwest Airlines plans to increase aircraft utilization with the introduction of redeye flights.
The airline will move towards 24 hour operations, kicking things off with the following five routes:
- Las Vegas (LAS) to Baltimore (BWI)
- Las Vegas (LAS) to Orlando (MCO)
- Los Angeles (LAX) to Baltimore (BWI)
- Los Angeles (LAX) to Nashville (BNA)
- Phoenix (PHX) to Baltimore (BWI)
Southwest plans to spend the next few years adding more capacity during redeye hours, on top of improving turn times at gates to improve overall utilization and offer more capacity without the need to deploy more aircraft frames in its fleet.
This is good news as the airline won’t have to stress too much about new aircraft deliveries (in the interim at least), but why hasn’t Southwest been doing this from the get-go like everyone else?
Up to 2017, Southwest used a very old version of Sabre which required all flights to be wheels down before 11 p.m. Pacific Time in order to allow the system to move forward to the next day. As a result, connecting flights involving those operating overnight could not be linked as one, and operations generally ran from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. PT.
Fortunately they switched to Amadeus, allowing them to create more flexible schedules around the clock. However pilot and cabin crew contracts also limited their hours of operations, so even with the new system in place, the airline was still prevented from including redeye service into its schedules.
Seven years later, this is no longer a problem thanks to revised contracts allowing Southwest to schedule crews whenever they see fit, even if it means them having to operate in the wee hours of the morning.
Redeye flights have already popped up in the system, but it will take some time before we see this being a general trend across their network. This is in part due to the added airport logistics, especially as smaller cities.
Featured image: Bradley Wint/Gate Checked
