Tuesday, October 14, 2014

The cause of Southwest Airlines dip in on-time performance

Southwest Airlines 737-7H4 (32533/2294) N280WN "Penguin One" caught at John Wayne Orange County Airport (SNA/KSNA) on September 7, 2013.
(Photo by Michael Carter) 

Starting last fall, passengers on Southwest Airlines' usually reliable flights began noticing a sharp deterioration in on-time performance.

More flights arrived late, and more flights sat on the ground past their departure times, waiting for connecting passengers from flights that arrived late, and so on and so on.

Southwest was going to operate the equivalent of 16 new airplanes' worth of flying without increasing its fleet at all.

Luckily for Southwest, the airline had built up a reservoir of goodwill from years of low-frills but effective service so that its statistics on customer complaints didn't soar even as its on-time performance collapsed.

The airline explained to the press, blandly, that its problems were  caused by "scheduling too many flights at the most popular takeoff times," and shortening the turn -- the time set aside for loading and unloading passengers -- to accommodate the super-packed schedule.

Now, courtesy of Brett Snyder of the popular travel website crankyflier.com, we're getting a fuller explanation. The problem was caused by Southwest's deliberate, and very ill-advised, strategy to cram more flights into its schedule without expanding its aircraft fleet and while adding seats to its existing planes.

The carrier looked at its performance during 2012, a mild weather year, and decided to roll the dice that it could squeeze more out of the same collection of stones. As Snyder puts it, "Southwest was going to operate the equivalent of 16 new airplanes’ worth of flying without increasing its fleet at all."

It was wrong, with disastrous results. Southwest has spent much of the last year trying to undo the damage. It's still not home; in August, according to FAA figures, the airline's on-time performance still lagged all domestic carriers by a couple of percentage points. In early 2013, Southwest was consistently beating the industry in on-time arrivals.

No comments: