Southwest and excellent Canadian low cost carrier WestJet have announced plans to codeshare starting in late 2009. That means we’ll sell seats on each other’s flights, allowing someone to buy a single ticket from Dallas to Vancouver, for example, flying part of the trip on SWA and the rest on WJ. I am SO excited about this! It will provide more options for our customers, extra revenue for each company, and some good nonrevving opportunities for the employees. Using a fleet of 737s, WestJet currently flies to Vegas, Phoenix, LA, and a few Florida cities where we could feed each other passengers. From what our CEO said in a Chicago Tribune interview, I suspect they will be adding service to Chicago Midway. Baltimore and Denver wouldn’t surprise me, either. Here’s a link to the story.
Category Archives: Aviation
Bid Time
It’s that time of year again. Our office is in the process of bidding our schedules for Feb 2009-Jan 2010. Everyone has his/her own priorities and strategies for bidding. Some people want Christmas off above all else. Some people want a particular start time, such as 700c, the most senior shift. Some less senior people want as many day shifts as they can get, even if it means taking some afternoons or midnights. In general, the day shift is more senior and the afternoon shift less senior. Midnight guys are scattered throughout the seniority list. Strangely enough, even though I still sorta feel like a new guy, I’m number 110 out of 146 for this year’s bid. We’re adding a bunch of people this year, which is always good when you’re on a seniority list. I still like the midnight shift, and I’ve decided that 2300c (11:00pm) is my favorite start time. It will allow me extra time for events and hanging out with Jenny and friends after Brenden is asleep. It also has better weather in general since most of the flights are in the western half of the country. It is highly unlikely that I’ll get Christmas off again next year (this year was a fluke!), but if I can get 2300c starts, I’ll be happy. We’ll find out the results at the end of June.
New Tool for Airport Security
As you might have read, the TSA has been quietly testing a new form of screening machine that can see through traveler’s clothes to detect weapons and other prohibited items. Security experts laud the machine’s ability to catch non-metallic weapons that current x-ray-based machines cannot see. Privacy advocates consider the machines overly invasive and likely to deter travelers. To address these concerns, screeners who view the images look solely into the machine’s scope and not directly at the traveler, the machines cannot save any images, and the traveler’s face is blurred. The Dallas Morning News just ran this story on them.
What do you think? For me (admittedly less modest than some), I think they are a benefical tool and hope to see wider use of them. I won’t go into details here for fear of being hunted down in the night by TSA goons, but I think our airport security has plenty of room for improvement. These machines are a significant step forward. But I imagine some of you might disagree. Click “Comment” and share your opinion.
The American Effect
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram ran this interesting article about American Airlines and the airline industry in general. As you’ve probably heard or figured out, $130/barrel oil makes jet fuel extremely expensive. The airlines need to raise their fares significantly with the same traffic level to cover the added cost. Unfortunately, since the airline industry is so competitive, no airline can instantly raise fares that much without driving customers away to other airlines who haven’t matched the increase. To make matters worse, many customers are price sensitive, and are unwilling to fly if the fare is too high. Most airlines are responding by reducing the number of flights and raising fares, hoping to cram in more people to each flight and forcing them to pay more by reducing their flight options. Meanwhile Southwest continues to grow, albeit more slowly than in previous years, and fill in the gaps left by our competitors. There’s no easy way to fix the Americans of the industry, and I don’t know if I would even want to try. I just thank God over and over that I work for Southwest and hope to maintain that privilege for decades to come.
Speaking of oil, a friend sent another article in the Star-Telegram that provides a fascinating and plausible explanation for the ridiculous rise in oil prices. Check out Part 1 and Part 2.
New Tombstones in the Airline Graveyard
In the last week, Aloha Airlines, ATA Airlines, and Skybus Airlines all shut down their passenger operations with no notice. One day they were flying, the next they were gone. Thousands of passengers were left stranded. If they called the airlines that had failed, there was no one to answer. Passengers who booked via credit card were instructed to contact their credit card companies and ask for a refund. If they could afford to buy another ticket and find a seat on the plane, another airline would have to take them home. A fourth airline, a charter operator that I’ve actually flown called Champion Air, announced that it would cease operations after May 31. The most significant of these failures is ATA’s, since it was a codeshare partner for Southwest. A customer could book a flight through Southwest from a Southwest city to Hawaii and some other good destinations that we don’t serve. We flew the customer part of the way, and then ATA took over. The arrangement made both airlines a lot of money and increased the flight options available to both airlines’ customers. But now all that is over until we find another codesharing partner. It’s a sad week in the airline business.
Another Reason I LUV SWA
Saturday night I was working flights in the South. We had an aircraft get hit by lightning coming into Nashville (BNA), so we needed to fly it empty to Dallas (DAL) for an inspection before we could carry revenue passengers again. Separately, we’d sent a flight crew to Dothan, AL, (DHN) to drop off one aircraft for heavy maintenance, test-fly another one that had been checked out, and fly it back to Dallas if it passed its test hop. This left us with a problem: one missing aircraft in Nashville and two extras in Dallas. We would’ve been forced to cancel a early flight in Nashville Sunday morning, resulting in lots of unhappy passengers. But our captain agreed to fly the checked-out aircraft to BNA instead of DAL to balance out the fleet and prevent the cancellation. That might not sound like a big deal, but understand that he had specifically agreed to go out to Dothan and back and was expecting to sleep in his own bed Saturday night. Instead, he stayed in Nashville and returned to Dallas the next day. He could have refused to change his plans and left us short in Nashville, but he didn’t. Once he took off for Nashville, I sent him a message thanking him again for his help. His reply said it all: “That’s why I came to work for SWA”.