Southwest in New Jersey?
As part of the deal to allow Continental and United Airlines merge, the two airlines will be required to open up some space at Newark Liberty International Airport and guess who’s leasing the take-off and landing spots?
Southwest Airlines.
I think this is smart of ContiUnited. They could have found any number of airlines that would be acceptable to the Department of Justice and Department of Transportation but that would mean allowing an airline with potentially even lower costs gaining a foothold.
Instead, they did a deal with an airline that, on some level, allows them to compete. Both airlines have experience competing with Southwest in various markets and both have managed to co-exist with Southwest without being driven out of markets. In other words, I think they realized the devil they knew was a whole lot better than the devils they don’t.
For Southwest, I think this is great. They get enough slots to do 18 daily roundtrips from an airport that arguably is more convenient to Manhattan and they get to build on their operations in the area by operating from 2 of the 3 major airports in the NYC area. (3 of 4 if you count Long Island’s Islip airport.)
No announcement was made on what flights SWA might operate from Newark but I have a few guesses. They could connect to Dulles or Baltimore’s BWI for one. I’m sure we’ll see some flights between Chicago’s Midway and Newark. I wouldn’t be too surprised to see a flight or 3 to Houston, believe it or not.
One thing is for sure, they won’t be flights on leisure routes.
When they’re able to, I would expect a few flights from the NYC to Dallas area and Newark would be a great airport operate those flights to and from. In the meantime, I would not be one bit surprised to see SWA re-jigger their route system to offer a few one-stop flights between the two cities. St. Louis or Kansas City could be choices for that.
Why do they only give up slots in Newark? Continental and United have very little route overlap and the one airport that the two had dominance at was Newark. Actually, Continental had overwhelming dominance at Newark but when you added in United’s flights to major markets, it crossed the line. This is good news for ContiUnited and expect their merger to close in late November or early December pending approval from a few other agencies.
In the meantime, someone please hand Senator Oberstar from Minnesota a roll of Tums, please.
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