There will be another M&A event in Southwest's future sometime within the next 1-5 years. If upgrade time is important to you, then you should definitely take that into account when considering whether or not to come here. It's still a good place to work, but someone telling you that upgrade times will drop below ten years with a potential merger on the horizon is not shooting you straight IMO.

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Upgrade time is 10 years now. With the planned growth it's not going to increase. It probably won't fall much, but it's not going to be 15 years unless they contract rather than the planned expansion.

There are still AirTran captains who downgraded when they came over who have yet to upgrade again. We need all of them to upgrade and the fleet to be equal to what it was when the 717s were still in the mix. Those will ratchet up the upgrade time for a few years before it begins to fall again. We just don't have the retirements that the legacies do to drive upgrades. Best we can hope for is a "third shift" (red eyes) to increase aircraft utilization. That block hour increase is the equivalent of adding more airplanes and will yield additional upgrades, new hires, and should also necessitate a third shift of reserves.


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Is it true that our current flight planning software can't handle red-eyes due to its need to do a nightly reset, but the new program due out soon will have all those latest technologies and stuff?

Not exactly but sorta. It doesn't get reset every night, but as anyone who has tried to get a deadhead boarding pass after midnight Herb time knows, the software isn't designed for flying into a new day.
Starting May 9th that will no longer be an issue. The schedule is out through August I believe and there are no redeye flights scheduled. Expect that to change soon.

Can schedules be amended once published or are they locked in?

Sorry, after re reading my post it doesn't make sense.
Expect future schedules to have red eyes. The schedule through August is locked in with the exception of charters, etc.

Apparently the new system will give them a lot of flexibility to run more efficient schedules, change routes, add red eyes, etc.

Interesting...if it helps me get off reserve then I'm all for it! Will have to re-read our red-eye language. 24-26 hours of rest after a red-eye is just about the worst scenario I've experienced.