Southwest Airlines posted a $224 million profit last week for their 2nd quarter and guess what?

That’s actually down from last year.  Not terribly so but it is down.

By any observation, Southwest is flying with record passenger loads and increasing their revenue regularly.

So why are profits down?

I have a sneaky feeling that Southwest is suffering operationally.  From my own anecdotal observation over the past few years, this airline seems to find it very hard to get an airplane ready to depart on time now.  The planes are flying nearly 100% full on major routes and that presents problems that Southwest, as an airline, isn’t designed to handle well.

I even wonder if Southwest’s staffing for its operations is adequate to the current job.

And I wonder more and more if Southwest is making the AirTran merger become another version of its IT problems.  In other words:  Is this a problem that Southwest isn’t solving?

Speedier integrations into one system allow everyone to start marching to the same drummer faster.  Marching to the same drummer, even if you do it sloppily at first, is better than being in a disconnect.

An airline that takes several years to solve IT problems, merger problems and even labor problems is not an airline that is behaving “agile” and it isn’t setting itself up to succeed.

Filed under: Airline News by ajax