Southwest Airlines reverses course on schedule - Dallas Morning News

In August 2013, Southwest Airlines tightened its schedule so it could add more flights during the day. In fact, it created the equivalent of 16 more airplanes of flying, without adding the airplanes.

It spent the following 12 months trying to clean up the ensuing operational mess.

The change created what one might consider the biggest operational snafu in the Dallas-based airline’s history, as measured by late flights. The airline ended the debacle only by revamping its schedule this August and reversing last summer’s mistake.

It is only now to the point that the airline’s executives can relax somewhat and conclude that operations are back to normal.

“Well, we’ve had a little over 60 days I guess with the new schedule, and I would say that it’s performing exactly as intended,” Southwest chairman and chief executive Gary Kelly told analysts and reporters last week in a conference call. “We’ll need a little bit more experience to decide whether it needs more tuning.”

A review of Southwest’s on-time performance from consultant masFlight’s daily reports would indicate that Southwest has turned around a bad situation, although it still ranks closer to the bottom among major carriers than to the top.

Immediately after Southwest changed its schedule in August 2013, its on-time record — the percentage of flights arriving within 14 minutes of schedule — plummeted. From being one of the better airlines in the industry, it hit bottom during late 2013.

For the 12 months that ended in July, Southwest tied for last among 14 airlines as reported by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Only 71.1 percent of its flights arrived on time.

By comparison, it ranked seventh of 16 airlines in the 12 months that ended July 2013, with 80.2 percent on time.

That’s a far cry from the golden days of the 1990s, when Southwest would award itself the Triple Crown for finishing first in on-time performance as well as having the lowest rate of lost-bag reports and customer complaints in Transportation Department reports.

Since the airline reworked its schedule as of Aug. 10, its reliability resembles that of the old Southwest more closely than that of August 2013-July 2014.

Data from masFlight indicates that 70.8 percent of Southwest flights between July 1 and Aug. 9 arrived on time. From Aug. 10 through Oct. 23, that has jumped more than 8 percentage points, to 78.9 percent.

Between July 1 and Aug. 9, Southwest had only six days in which at least 80 percent of its flights arrived within 14 minutes. In the first 23 days of October, Southwest has reached 80 percent or better on 14 days, including two days above 90 percent.

Kelly said Southwest has improved its on-time performance despite “some unusual springlike weather” in recent weeks and a Sept. 26 fire at an air traffic control tower that disrupted flights into Southwest’s Chicago Midway Airport operations, its busiest airport, for days. Southwest’s on-time average at Midway dropped below 30 percent for seven out of the first eight days after the fire.

He called Southwest’s recent on-time performance “superb.”

Speaking to reporters in September, Greg Wells, Southwest’s senior vice president of operational performance, explained the scheduling decisions that led to the year of poor reliability.

“In an effort to boost our revenue, we intentionally created 16 more airplanes’ worth of flying into our schedule without adding any airplanes to the schedule. In other words, we tightened up our network such that we could add more flying with the same amount of airplanes,” Wells said.

He said Southwest’s operations people were “on board” with the scheduling decision.

“We gave it our best shot. The combination of weather, higher load factors, things like that, just caused our operation’s on-time performance to plummet,” he said.

After seeing its on-time performance falter, Southwest started a “Start Strong” initiative to make sure that its first flights of the day left on time. Wells said the carrier had achieved “a double-digit improvement in getting the day started on time in the morning, about 85 percent on time in the morning, which is the best we’ve been in a long time.”

Southwest then put more time in the schedule for connections. In some cases, Southwest had allowed as little as 25 minutes for a passenger to get off one airplane and get on the next flight.

“We determined that was just not enough time,” Wells said. “So we went from 25 to 35 minutes on minimum connect time. In fact, in some of our larger locations like Chicago, you’d have 45 minutes throughout the course of the day to connect.”

Southwest also has put more time in the schedule for the airplanes to spend on the ground as officials recognized that the day of the quick turns were gone.

“You know, we’re famous for the old 10-minute turn, which is 40 years ago. But up until last year, we had several 20-minute turns,” Wells said.

But what worked when Southwest was a carrier of 122-passenger airplanes and had load factors of 60 or 65 percent doesn’t work in an era when it now fills 80 percent of its seats on average and its fleet is made up of 143-seat and 175-seat airplanes.

“We just realized with our load factor and large-gauge aircraft, that wasn’t feasible,” he said. “So the 20-minute turns went away.”

Then, this summer, a year after Southwest had squeezed the equivalent of 16 airplanes’ worth of flying out of its schedule, the carrier began adding airplanes.

“We added about four more airplanes’ worth of flying back in June and July into Baltimore, Denver and Chicago,” Wells said. Then, with the Aug. 10 schedule change, the other aircraft were put back in the schedule.

Wells said it appeared that the August schedule changes mostly fixed the reliability problems.

“We’re at about 84 percent on time. Our goal has been 83 to 85 percent, and I think we’ve totally recovered that and we’re back on track. We’re not going to stop tweaking the schedule, tweaking our operation, getting better at turning airplanes,” Wells said.

“But I think we’ve stopped the bleeding on what we created back in August of 2013. So, real good results.”

Follow Terry Maxon on Twitter at @tmaxon.

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