You would think that adding service to Minneapolis/St Paul, Boston, and New York/La Guardia would be enough for Southwest this year, but you’d be wrong. At the airline’s annual meeting yesterday, CEO Gary Kelly announced that Southwest will head to Milwaukee this fall. This is an old school, traditional move for Southwest, though there is a lot of competition awaiting their arrival.

Back before Southwest started flying into the heart of big congested airports, they used to like bracketing cities. Boston, for example, was served by Providence in the south and Manchester in the north. When they first went to Chicago’s Midway airport on the south side of town many years ago, it was just assumed that they would bracket the city by going into Milwaukee on the north some day. It took them long enough, but it’s finally happened.

For Southwest, this gives them access to many of the rich, northern Chicago suburbs that shudder at the thought of heading down traffic-choked roads to Midway. They prefer O’Hare, but Milwaukee isn’t too bad for some of them. North Chicago, for example, is 30 miles from O’Hare but only 45 miles from Milwaukee.

Of course, it’s not just about the northern suburbs of Chicago. There are the lovable cheeseheads in Wisconsin as well, and they must be jumping up and down at this bounty of new air service they’ve been receiving lately. It looked pretty bleak for Milwaukee when Midwest started its death spiral, but AirTran quickly came in and started building it up. Now to have Southwest too? It’s time for a polka party for the locals, but maybe not so much for the airlines. This could be like a mini-Denver situation where you have one legacy and two low cost carriers fighting it out. Only there’s a lot less demand here than in Denver.

I lump Delta, Northwest, and Midwest all into the legacy role held by United in Denver. Midwest is basically irrelevant. It’s a brand name with a couple of airplanes that basically exists as an arm of Delta. So let’s just say that Delta needs to decide what it wants to do in Milwaukee. Is it worth fighting? We’ll see.

But the real action is on the LCC-side of the house. Southwest started stepping on AirTran’s toes in Boston recently, and now this is a full frontal assault. It’s time for war. AirTran already serves most of the likely suspects for Southwest’s first routes (Phoenix, Vegas, Baltimore, Florida, etc). In fact, the only place where AirTran has a real hole that Southwest might like to fill is Texas. Of course, AirTran has limited frequency to most of these places (Phoenix is only seasonal), so Southwest would probably come in with a lot more firepower.

This also doesn’t look like it’s going to be a slow rollout. According to the press release, they will serve “multiple destinations from the airport of choice for business and leisure travelers who work and live across the vibrant and growing region.”

AirTran has to be pissed. They’ve been trying to secure Milwaukee as a good Midwestern base for some time. After their failed attempt to buy Midwest (Midwest’s loss, AirTran’s gain), they’ve been slowly building up their own operation as Midwest shrinks. Do they really plan to fight? Just after Southwest’s announcement, they thought it would be a good idea to remind people that they’re growing rapidly at the airport. And then this morning, they put out ANOTHER release about some Milwaukee flights that are launching. It’s on like Donkey Kong.

Meanwhile, this has to be the happiest group of airport folks on earth right now. Getting Southwest is a big win for Milwaukee which has tried to roll out the barrel for the airline for many, many years. To have both Southwest and AirTran fighting for supremacy is music to their ears. I imagine they’ve cracked open the champagne (of beers, naturally) to celebrate this one.

It’s good to see Southwest return to their roots a little bit here, but it’s not going to be easy. They’re trying to use some old-fashioned market stimulation in a mid-size city with a large metro catchment area to spark some growth. Only problem is that AirTran is there waiting for them, and they’ve got a lower cost structure.

I must admit I was initially really surprised to see Southwest open four cities this year alone, but I understand why they’ve done it. By adding cities, they can cut capacity elsewhere in the system without having to lay people off. In the past, Southwest could always grow themselves out of a jam, but now it takes a little more creativity. We’ll see how this fight goes.

[Original photo from Philgarlic via Flickr]

United spent so much money sending me my $32.40 voucher in the mail that I’d hate for it to go to waste. Unfortunately, what I didn’t realize is that it expires this Saturday, May 23 and I don’t have any tickets to buy before then.

So, anyone want it? There’s only one problem. It says I have to be present to use this for someone else, so you’re going to have to be able to join me at LAX before Saturday to be able to use it. If you’re interested, send me a note at cf@crankyflier.com and we’ll see if we can find a time that works. First one to respond gets it.

Shortly after I published my trip report including the non-functioning televisions on JetBlue, I received an email from LiveTV’s CEO Nate Quigley about my flight. He offered to walk me through what happened and try to explain why my flight had problems. It ended up being a fascinating discussion, and I’m really glad he reached out.

At left, you’ll see the map showing the signal performance on my flight. Green means the signal was good and red means it wasn’t. As you can see, it was not good. Thought you see a couple of green specks on the way down, the individual channel reports show that the channels still weren’t coming through until the end. In that much more detailed report, from boarding until we started taxiing at SFO, the signal was good on many but not all channels. Once we started taxiing, it was good only on a few channels. Within 5 minutes of departure, the signal had been lost entirely. It stayed that way until 14 minutes prior to landing when the signal came back.

So what happened? Apparently, we’re on the wild frontier out here on the West Coast, and these flights go over the toughest areas to pick up DirecTV signals in the continental US. Take a look at this map at right showing the DirecTV coverage area.

The antennas they use are actually slightly smaller than the 18″ dish, so the footprint is a bit smaller as well. As you can see, most of the US is covered very well, but just off San Francisco, the coverage ends. Now Nate showed me plenty of other flights over the same routes that received a much better signal. He estimated that on 8 out of 10 flights off the coast, you’ll get a great experience, but you might run into some trouble on the rest. My flight was an anomaly in that it was bad for much longer than even would be expected on those 2 out of 10 flights that might see some trouble. But why?

Did the clouds have anything to do with it? Nope. Nate explained that the only thing that interferes with the signal is standing moisture on the radome. That’s why you sometimes get obscured signals on the ground in heavy rain or some snow. But once you get moving, that moisture flies off and it’s not a problem anymore. We had the opposite problem on my flight where the signal was better when we were standing still, so that couldn’t have been the problem.

Was it a bad antenna? It doesn’t look that way. All the other flights on that aircraft over the three day period surrounding mine were trouble-free. It’s possible that this antenna is a little weaker than others, so it might have been more likely to run into problems flying at the edge of the coverage zone than others, but that’s also not clear. It is, however, something they will keep an eye on. They are constantly monitoring airplanes to see if there are some problematic ones out there, and they’ll fix them if necessary.

So was it really just a problem of being on the edge of the coverage area? Quite possibly. Or there could have been a sunspot or some other random occurrence that may just have screwed things up for flights on the edge of the area. It’s amazing the volume of data these guys have to make sure that they can address these types of problems, though that doesn’t always mean they can pinpoint the exact reason.

At least now we know that weather isn’t an issue. It’s more than likely just a problem of flying around the edge of the coverage area. So those of you flying between San Francisco or Oakland and Long Beach might want to be prepared. While the northbound flights tend to go more inland, the southbound ones head out of the water, and that means they might be run into trouble with satellite reception from time to time. (San Jose flights nearly always stay inland.)

I have to say thanks again to Nate and the LiveTV crew for putting together this incredibly comprehensive report for me. A minute-by-minute report on the signal strength on each channel is just an impressive amount of data. And their willingness to reach out and be open about this is really refreshing.