First off I don't work for Southwest but I do have a question. Second of all my understanding is you have AM and PM schedules with no redeyes. When you start your Hawaii flying are you going to start doing redeye flights? I'm only asking because I don't see a plausible way of getting someone from Hawaii to the east coast without some type of redeye.

 

We don’t know the answer to that yet as nothing has been officially announced.

 

I could be wrong but I would expect SWA to eventually add redeyes. Why not? Huge source of additional revenue and airplanes sitting at gates ain’t making money. Would suck for crew members but I am surprised SWA still doesn’t fly these yet....

 

Then you may also be surprised to learn that not all flight-planning software was built with the ability to handle red-eyes...I know I was!

 

The res system was the original hold up for red eyes. They could do it now if they wanted. The last time our Dear Leader spoke about them he was elusive but said it doesn’t make sense in our operation right now.
The AM/PM schedule is pretty much a thing of the past. Our flying day is so long (flights scheduled to block in after 1:30 am and take off at 5) that you need like 2.5 crews to fly that schedule. We have a lot of mid day starts and plane swaps as a result.
As far as what the future holds, who knows? I suspect red eyes will eventually be a thing in limited numbers. The thing is, when you have 750 of the same type of airplane, the need to reposition aircraft during low pax density/revenue hours really isn’t that great.
As it is now, there is a huge 10-11pm push out of the mega stations to get airplanes out to the outlying cities to bed the planes down for the night.

 

I wonder how long before our AM/PM reserve system will catch up with the flight schedule. How many trips are out there that our reserves aren't legal/available for?

 

We’d have redeyes and concessionary rules right now if Weaks wasn’t president of SWAPA.

 

The company can schedule redeyes if they want to, right?

 

Yes. It is a conscious choice not to at this point.

 

We really could use 3 reserve shifts. I'm sure right now they cover very early and very late flying with reroutes instead of reserves. I've seen this happen on PM reserve where I time out and then I see the trip covered by a rerouted pilot who's duty started much later then me. Three reserve shifts would cost more money though, hence the reluctance to implement it.