Category Archives: Aviation

Vacation Vacation Vacation

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I have finished my coursework at Embry-Riddle. So far I’ve had three celebration dinners. Tonight Jenny made baked potatoes, steamed veggies, and homemade beer bread, and I grilled filet mignons. We split a bottle of Michel-Schlumberger cabernet sauvignon that we’d been saving since 2004 for this very occasion. It was all delicious, the taste of victory. Tomorrow we’re set to leave for Ft Lauderdale. I plan to come home Halloween night, but Jenny has to go directly up to Baltimore and Philly for work.

In case you haven’t heard, the Wright Amendment is gone, replaced by immediate through-ticketing and full freedom in 2014. Many thanks to all the local leaders (whom I bashed so much in months past) for finally coming together to get the job done. Airfares are already dropping at DAL and DFW, just like we said they would.

Until we meet again…I’ll leave you with a link to a fabulous picture of Maho Beach in St Maarten. The airport (SXM) is right next to Maho Beach, so aircraft spotters come from around the world to take pictures of the planes as they land a few feet over the beach. There are signs posted on the beach warning you not to stand directly behind departing aircraft due to the jet blast. I hope to bring you some great pictures. =)

Five Years at Southwest

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Last week was my five-year anniversary at Southwest. I started on June 25, 2001, so I was quite grateful that Southwest didn’t lay off all the new guys after September 11. To celebrate our anniversary, many of the new hires from my SMART Camp group (Technology new hires fresh out of school) met for lunch, and I got to join them. It was great to see some folks I hadn’t seen in months and catch up. About 2/3 of us are left from the original group of about 22, which is pretty high for technology workers. I think the high retention rate is partly due to SMART Camp, which was 6 weeks of orientation to the company, its various departments, and its history along with lots of fun. Sure, it was a long program, but it helped make us die-hard fans of the company.

June News

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Whew! We’ve had so much going on that I haven’t made time to update the blog in a while. My maternal grandmother was in the hospital for a few days last week, but I’m glad to say she’s now home recovering and feeling better. Jenny got a promotion at work! Starting sometime next month, she will be a project specialist for the onboarding group in the People dept. That means she’ll be working on a variety of special projects, such as organizing events, gathering and analyzing data, designing forms, etc. The onboarding group tries to make sure new employees at SWA get plugged in the culture and love the company from the beginning so that they stick around. I’m sure many of you saw the Wright Amendment compromise that Dallas, Fort Worth, DFW, American, and Southwest worked out recently. I’m actually quite happy with it. Sure, 8 years is a long time, but if American was going to sign off on it, we couldn’t get any less than 8. The agreement lets us keep 16 gates at Love, which is a huge plus, and allows immediate through-ticketing, which will also be a big help. I expect Congress to pass it this year. Vegas, here we come, after a stop in Albuquerque! =) I finished my economics class (number 11/13). The garden is getting very, very crowded, but we finally have 2 cucumbers! It’s schedule bidding time at work, and I think I’m going to bid midnights for next year (Feb 2007-Jan 2008). I’m not senior enough to get day shifts, so midnights are the only way to see my wife much when I’m working.

Seeds

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Jenny and I have a new project for this year: a vegetable garden. We built a raised garden in the backyard off the end of the porch. Friday night we planted cucumbers, tomatoes, banana peppers, squash, zucchini, green beans, basil, carrots, and leaf lettuce. We are very excited to see what happens! We already had some other tomatoes and strawberries growing in pots. It still amazes me that God can turn a tiny white seed into a tomato plant that provides food for us, using nothing but water, sunlight, and nutrients from the soil. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but I’m thankful that it works. We’re trying to use organic techniques to take care of the plants, minimizing our use of pesticides and other non-natural chemicals. We’ll release ladybugs to eat aphids. We planted some marigolds to repel some types of bugs. To enrich the soil, we mixed in peat moss and compost rather than artificial fertilizer. The veggies should begin to sprout within a week or two.

In SWA news, we plan to add service to Washington Dulles (IAD) this fall. I was NOT expecting IAD as our next city, further proving that SWA is full of surprises! I think Dulles will be a good airport for us, nicely complementing our Baltimore service and pulling in passengers from the rapidly growing west side of the DC area.

Graveyard Shift

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I worked my first two midnight shifts over the weekend – Friday and Saturday nights from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM. They actually weren’t that bad! The hardest part was an unpressurized ferry flight on Friday night from Phoenix to a contract maintenance facility in Dothan, Alabama. It was running 5 hours late, so it arrived around 3:00 AM, when the airport is normally closed. It caused me some problems, but it was good training. The second night I managed to finish my Airline Mgmt homework and complete my first Sudoku puzzle during the slow early morning hours when I had no flights in the air. After each shift I came home and slept. Then I woke up and hung out with Jenny some in the afternoon. I probably won’t bid the midnight shift for next year, but I’ll be OK if I get some midnights here and there.

PHOENIX!

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No, Southwest is not moving to Phoenix. You might have heard in the news that Southwest is moving its headquarters. This is a perfect example of 1) a company’s brilliantly using the media to advance its political gains, 2) the media’s tendency to turn a nonevent into news, and 3) people’s tendency to jump to conclusions. Southwest’s PR department is a master of keeping Southwest in the news. As part of the Wright fight, our CEO mentioned last year that it didn’t make sense to have HDQ at Love Field with Wright in place. Phoenix, a wisely pro-business city, heard that and wants to entice us to move HDQ there. Out of courtesy, we are hearing them out. No big deal. We get hundreds of pitches on all kinds of subjects each year – requests for new service, sales pitches on various products, sales pitches on new aircraft types, and so on. We pass on most of them, just like we will on this one. I’m sure Southwest made sure the media found out we had agreed to hear the Phoenix proposal, which is an instant news maker. The story returns the focus to the Wright Amendment, to Southwest’s importance as an employer and taxpayer here, and to Dallas’s poor support of one of its star employers. Unfortunately, upon hearing the story that Phoenix is pitching a move, many people heard it as “Southwest is moving to Phoenix,” and our moms got worried. =) The only way we would consider moving, in my humble opinion, is if the Wright Amendment somehow became a lost cause. I don’t see that happening. Instead, I see our local mayors and congressional leaders finally realizing that Wright will fall one way or another, and that they have a choice to make: let the rest of Congress decide how it falls, or work out a compromise together. They are working on a compromise. Thanks to Senator Hutchison for her efforts to get the ball rolling.

And in other news, American has resumed service from Love Field to Kansas City, St. Louis, Austin, and San Antonio. A credit analyst recently estimated that American would lose around $115 million annually by serving Love Field. That’s quite an expensive way to prove a point. I give them 18 months before they pull out again.