If the airline can tighten each turn by just a few minutes, it might be able to squeeze one more flight a day from each aircraft.

There are more processes, more resources and more paperwork required to get passengers deplaned and boarded. That's why the famous 10-minute turn was born back in 1972, as the fledging airline charted its way to profitability.Īs Southwest has grown in the past 50 years, so too has the complexity of each turn. When planes sit on the ground between flights, Southwest doesn't make any money. Of course, it's worth mentioning that many major airlines have successfully rolled out these displays already, so while this might be an innovation for Southwest, it's old news for some of the airline's competitors. These new dynamic displays should eliminate these wasted trips, giving Southwest's ramp workers a big efficiency boost. Sometimes, these agents would need to climb the stairs three to four times each flight, wasting precious time that could be spent on other important predeparture tasks, McCartan told TPG. Previously, ramp staff would need to trek up the stairs to the jet bridge to see if there were bags waiting for them. Instead, flyers line up to board (generally) in the order in which they check in.

Unlike other carriers, Southwest doesn't have assigned seats. Some of the improvements may never roll out to all of Southwest's 121 airports, but here's a look at what the airline is testing. In fact, TPG just visited the airline's Atlanta base for a first look at these innovations in action.

That's because gates C13 to C16 are acting as a real-world stress test for the innovations that Hingson and McCartan first concocted in the lab.

In recent months - notwithstanding the airline's massive operational meltdown during the holidays - Hingson, McCartan and the broader team have spent weeks in the innovation lab at Southwest's Dallas headquarters refining the 35 concepts and boiling them down to just seven of the most feasible ones.įast forward to today, and the innovation team is camping out at four of the airline's 18 gates in Atlanta through March 3. Related: 11 ways that Southwest is trying to improve the travel experience in 2023 However, all of this work was shelved when the pandemic began, especially as tight turns weren't as hard to achieve with load factors at historic lows. The ideation behind this project began well before the coronavirus pandemic, and the team even managed to come up with 35 concepts that could help shorten each turn. Hingson and McCartan are members of Southwest's innovation team, which is tasked with finding ways to improve the passenger experience, and in this case, helping boost the airline's operational performance. Can Southwest Airlines, the airline that made the 10-minute turn (deplane one flight and board the next one in 10 minutes) famous back in 1972, shave off just three minutes between each flight nowadays? That's the question Lisa Hingson and her deputy Kaci McCartan are trying to answer with a handful of gate-side innovations currently being tested at the airline's Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) base.

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