Last week, most of you liked the idea of doing a weekly news roundup, but not all. So I’m trying something a little bit different. I’m going to pick just a few links (3 this week), and then pick one as the featured link. That one will show up first and will help guide discussion. This week…
April 2016 Schedule is Here! No Foolin’! – Nuts About Southwest
Southwest rolled out its April schedule this week, and there are some interesting smaller-city changes hidden in the full list.
- Dayton loses service to Baltimore and Denver (besides seasonal Florida cancels) and instead gets new thrice daily service to Chicago.
- Des Moines loses its Chicago flights and instead gains St Louis.
- Flint loses Baltimore and Vegas (besides seasonal Florida cancels) and instead gets Chicago.
- Grand Rapids loses St Louis and one of its two Baltimore flights (besides seasonal Florida cancels). Instead, it gets 3 daily to Chicago.
- Greenville/Spartanburg is the oddest of all. It loses Baltimore, Chicago, and Houston. In their place? Three daily to Atlanta a mere 150 miles away.
- Wichita loses Chicago and Dallas and instead gets Phoenix and St Louis.
What do you make of this? It’s an interesting restructuring in these markets. It says to me that these markets weren’t working well before, so the airline is hoping a shifting of routes will fix the problem. Not a great sign for people in those cities.
And then, here are two other stories that caught my eye.
Arabian knight: Sir Maurice Flanagan’s proud legacy as a founding figure of Emirates – Arabian Business
This is a good read profiling the father of Emirates, Maurice Flanagan. What really stands out are the digs at Etihad and Qatar. US carriers have made this false attempt to lump the three of them into one bucket. But there is clearly no love lost between them.
Dream Team: Air Canada takes a ‘pit crew’ approach to 787 maintenance – Skies Magazine
Air Canada has apparently decided to have mechanics swarm 787s after landing in Canada. This has allowed the airline to speed up its turns.
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24 Comments on "3 Links I Love – Southwest Shakes Up Small Cities, Emirates’s Godfather, and Air Canada’s Pit Crew"
No surprise there is a lot of grousing about this on the Flint airport facebook page, they are responding
by saying the Chicago flights are great but the public isn’t buying it.
I wonder if Southwest is seeing that the onward destinations are better served by routing them away from MDW. Could allow for higher yield connecting or O&D traffic around MDW.
Almost 15 years ago AA bought TWA with the intention of routing more connections through STL due to ORD’s (then) operational issues. Now with MDW running close to capacity for WN, they’re flowing more connections over…STL. Funny how history is repeating itself, though STL seems to be safe from any massive WN cutbacks in the future as they’ve been utilizing STL as a connection point successfully for many years now.
It seems as if this is a scaling back of routes that were inherited from AirTran, except for GSP. For example, I believe that BWI – Akron, Dayton and Grand Rapids were all legacy AirTran routes. My guess is that these planes will eventually be deployed on international routes out of Houston, BWI, SoCal and a city or two in Florida.
To me, this is just further solidification of Southwest’s Hub & Spoke structure. The days of WN’s flying point-to-point are over – unless you live in one of their focus cities. While they may keep the cattle-call boarding and free bags (which I don’t use) there’s really no other positive differentiators between them and the other legacy carriers at this point.
Even if they start new service to a domestic city, they’re not going to come in with 10 flights to 4 different cities. You’ll be lucky to get 2 cities and 3 outbound flights a day.
Yes and no. First, they have 18 hubs, leading to many more nonstop options. Second, there’s still quite a bit of non-hub flying like their routes from MSY to AUS, SAT, and DCA.
U MAD BRO!!!
I fly BWI/GSP occasionally and I have noticed that the GSP schedule is generally incorrect when Southwest extends the schedule. If you check back in a couple of weeks, the schedule will be updated and the BWI/GSP flight will reappear. I’ve emailed Southwest about this before but never received a response.
Clark – This is different. Southwest has specifically and publicly announced that those flights are done. It’s not just an omission, it’s a proactive announcement.
I find the 787 pit crew piece interesting. Do widebodies really require that much more maintenance than narrowbodies? Is this just a 787 thing or does it also apply to the other widebodies? I fully get that your not going to turn a 787 or a 777 in 45 minutes like you can an A320. But the pacing item in turns on the 320 is getting people on and off not mx so I find it very interesting that on the 787 that mx has become the pacing item.
121 Pilot – Well, they’re keeping these airplanes in the air for 16 to 18 hours a day, so they have to do more work on the turns than on a narrowbody which may sit overnight longer.
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I wouldn’t say it’s easy from anywhere, but being on the SE side of Grand Rapids city, there’s zero city traffic to factor as well. And definitely useful for Lansing and Flint.
And CF love the livery.
Here’s a video of the Air Canada 787 pit crew in action.
https://youtu.be/zp3snEvEh_0
I think that the Dayton shift to flights to MDW is a combination of factors from fleet utilization, but more than that, DAY has been seen as an alternate for CVG, but now that CVG has been flooded with low cost flights on Allegiant and Frontier to many Southwest markets (Orlando, Denver, seasonal IAD), that the demand for travel on Southwest in Southwest Ohio has likely decreased. Additionally, by offering a connection in MDW, Southwest is more directly competing with AA and UA that funnel a huge amount of their traffic from the region through O’hare.
Cranky, I LOVE this new Friday format!
For anyone who says that ATL is only 90 miles away, that may be true on the map, but in real time, that’s 4 hours with our traffic. Side note: SW also dropped ATL-SFO for ATL-OAK. Could this open the door finally to Virgin, since we only have Delta flying that route??