LAS VEGAS — In the first three months after Dallas Love Field is opened up to long-haul flights, Southwest Airlines plans to boost its schedule from about 120 daily flights to 153.
So, Southwest executive Andrew Watterson was asked at an aviation conference here Monday, can the airline boost its flights even more? His answer: Maybe.
“The answer to that is we don’t know yet, but we hope so,” said Watterson, Southwest’s vice president of network planning and performance.
Southwest controls 16 gates in the new 20-gate facility, and Watterson said it will take some time to see how the airline functions in a new facility.
“We traditionally pride ourselves on having a very high-tempo operation and getting a lot of turns per gate,” Watterson told attendees at the annual Boyd Group International aviation conference.
“We started off based on our simulations and modeling about what is an optimal operation when we open up Love Field,” he said. “But we’ll wait until we see the results of that and we understand how the facility operates with a mix of short- and long-haul. It’s been many decades since Love Field saw long-haul operations.”
Since 1980, airlines operating airplanes with more than 56 seats could fly from Love Field to Texas cities and only a handful of states spelled out in a federal law known as the Wright amendment.
A 2006 compromise will end the restrictions as of Oct. 13. But the deal between the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, Southwest, American Airlines Inc. and Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport also put a 20-gate limit on the new terminal that was to be built at the Dallas airport.
Southwest has announced it will launch nonstop service to seven cities beyond the Wright amendment boundaries on Oct. 13, another eight cities on Nov. 2 and two more on Jan. 6. At that point, Southwest will have 153 weekday departures from Dallas.
On Monday, Southwest announced it will also add a Saturday flight between Dallas and Panama City, Fla., in March.
With 153 daily departures from its 16 gates, Southwest will have just over 9.5 departures per gate. Travel industry consultant Henry Harteveldt, founder of San Francisco-based Atmosphere Research Group, said that sounds reasonable.
“The way Southwest Airlines runs its operation, they’ll probably be able to get between nine or 10 flights a day,” Harteveldt said. “Some other airlines, maybe not so many. But low-cost airlines like Southwest and Virgin [America] could potentially do between nine to 10.”
Virgin America, which will get two of the 20 gates, has announced plans to operate 18 flights a day by late April 2015 or nine flights per gate.
Harteveldt said that Southwest’s ability to handle more flights in its gates will be affected by the fact that it now has larger airplanes, including the 175-seat Boeing 737-800.
“Planes like the 737-800 will take more time to board and disembark the passengers because they’re larger. It’ll take more time also to service the airplane, fuel it, load and load the larger number of bags,” he said.
Boyd Group president Michael Boyd asked Watterson whether Southwest has considered moving up even more to the largest Boeing 737 version, the 737-900. Watterson said the airplane doesn’t seem to meet Southwest’s needs.
“We fly to some short-field airports, and short-field performance is very important to us,” he said. “The -900 and short-field airports don’t mix as well as the -800 and -700 and short fields.”
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