Dan Webb

If you’re interested in reading about the FAA tech glitch you can do so here.

A few days ago Southwest updated their winter schedule and released more days for booking. There are a good number of cuts, and ATW reports that it is about a 5% reduction in departures. As usual, Bill Owen of Southwest made a blog post about the changes. Finally, Sky Talk has a nice chart of the changes. Most of them are reductions but there are a couple routes getting a boost.

There are only three city pairs being cut: Phoenix-Birmingham, Nashville-Oakland, and Nashville-Seattle. None of these really shock me. All of them were only operating only once a day. During the past few months, it seems that Southwest is cutting back on some of the longer stages.

Other than that most of these schedule changes are fairly minor - just a change of one or two frequencies. Southwest is in a pretty good position right now, I think. While some other airlines are making more drastic fleet changes (i.e. United), Southwest can prune its schedules gently.

It has also been said that some of the flights that are being cut in the schedule can come back in the spring. If so, this looks like a change for Southwest to me. In the past, it didn’t seem to do seasonal shifts in schedule as much as it does

now.