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Recorded at CAPA Americas Aviation Summit, 16-17 Apr 2018

Southwest Airlines Update

Southwest Airlines EVP and chief revenue officer Andrew Watterson discusses the timing of service to Hawaii and potential codeshares as well as the service profile of the Boeing 737 MAX-8.

Transcript

Andrew WattersonWe're going through the FAA ETOPS authorization process right now and so that will take us through the bulk of this year. So we promise it will be open for sale by the end of the year, but we're not sure when the first flight will be. It will be dependent upon the FAA process so we don't want to get ahead of the FAA on that. Whether that's the end of this year, the beginning of next year, it really depends on that process.

So our MAX aircraft will give us a lot more range. We first intend on using them to Hawaii and that will keep us busy you know, end of this year through 2019. As we kind of finish that up then we'll be looking further south. So we've opened up a lot of more near international routes over the last four years and the deeper will be after Hawaii. They interest us, which ones will be a function of the market timing at that point.

Coach is of interest to us. In our collective bargaining agreement with our clients the SCOPE clause it's called, allows us to have a limited interline coach share relationships. Those we see to be beneficial. They're not as pressing as some of the other opportunities we have, so they're a bit behind other things in our technology pipeline. But we will be there one day whether that's one year from now, two years or three years, who can say, but it's on the list.

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