Southwest Airlines has now been awarded a single operating certificate for itself and the Airtran brand as of Thursday of this week.  This means that Southwest can begin truly blending the operations by turning Airtran aircraft into SWA aircraft, moving crews into Southwest operations and operating SWA or Airtran aircraft on routes as they wish.

So far, Southwest gets a good report card on its integration efforts in that it has seen most labor groups come to a quick agreement on seniority integration and it has achieved this single certificate on time.  Smooth integrations yield the results expected from a merger and this would appear to be working in Southwest’s favor.

Going forward, we’ll see a steady transition with more and more routes being served in SWA colors and more crew and staff transitioning into SWA operations.  I would expect little, if any, drama at this point and that includes the SWA mechanics who threw their small temper tantrum but who have much to lose if they hold off too long and force the seniority integration into binding arbitration.

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The FAA wants to raise the requirements for serving as a first officer with an airline from 250 hours to 1500 hours (with some special exceptions depending on your training.)  They would also need a type specific rating for the airplane they’re assigned to fly.

This move is supposed to be for safety and, in some ways, it would appear to have merit.  After all, how could more experience before becoming an airline pilot actually hurt anyone, right?

But there is a flaw in this idea that hasn’t really been adequately debated in public.  There hasn’t been a rash of accidents caused by inexperienced 1st officers.  To the contrary, there have been some rather inexperienced captains making mistakes or not even being up to serving as a captain but 1st officer mistakes aren’t being cited as the cause in airliner accidents here or abroad. 

More to the point, there haven’t been a rash of airliner accidents.  Year after year, the airline industry improves on its safety record and that’s a great thing.  It’s also a result of the already incredibly stringent training required at airlines all over.  Flying an airliner is an unforgiving task and if there was an epidemic of inadquate training or just a lack of experience, we would see more airliners crashes. 

I’m all in favor of more safety when its warranted.  In this case, I strongly question whether it is warranted.  In addition, think these new requirements will severely impact airlines with respect to staffing and costs and given the admirable record of the industry, I’m not sure it helps anyone with respect to safety or anything else. 

Make no mistake.  There will be accidents in the future and some will be attributed to pilot error.  That happens.  As a result of Captain Sullenberger and his co-pilot, we have this misinformed idea that there is no substitute for grey hair in the cockpit when it comes to safety.  It is true that what Capt Sullenberger did that day was accomlished in part as a result of his experience.  However, many other younger and nominally less experienced pilots have accomplished equally impressive results in other situations.  

Take a look at the British Airways Flight 38 incident at London Heathrow where in just moments a crew had to belly flop a Boeing 777 short of the runway and did so without fatalities.  It was the First Officer who was flying that aircraft. 

The primary driver in these new requirements is the Colgan Air / Continental Express crash in the Buffalo, NY area and that was a real tragedy.  The First Officer was thought to be severely fatigued (and may or may not have been) but what everyone tends to forget is that it was the Captain who made the real mistakes and that captain was allowed to continue as a captain despite poor performance that had been noted in his records during his career.  In other words, had basic airline policy been followed stringently, it’s unlike he would have flown as a Captain and it is likely that whoever might have flown in his place would have known to push the stick forward to recover from that stall since that’s a rather basic piece of knowledge known to pilots.

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The core of Southwest’s reservations systems dates back to a system developed by Braniff International called “Cowboy”.  It is nearly 50 years old and Southwest bought it from Braniff in the 1980’s and just kept patching things onto it.

As a low cost strategy for an airline in the 1980s or 1990s, that made sense.  The problem is that the 1990s started more than 20 years ago. 

Southwest has been severely impacted in code share relationships as well as international flying as a result of their antiquated system.  They began investigation of a replacement system after they began to realize their inability to codeshare in a North American pact between themselves, WestJet and Volaris.  That work was put on hold coinciding with the Airtran merger announcement. 

Now, Southwest has already figured out it can use the Airtran system to facilitate international flying for the interim.  In fact, Southwest has *added* international flights to the Airtran network while removing domestic flights (to be replaced by Southwest flights) at the same time.  As an interim solution, that works.

But over the next 2 years, we’ll see Southwest evaporate Airtran domestically and that may leave a tiny international airline in place (Airtran) to help with international flying.  The problem is, they’re no closer to being able to integrate with Airtran’s reservations system than they are with any other airline.

Cobbling together systems and doing things low cost is fine and even the right thing to do in many ways today.  However, it is *not* the way to handle reservations for an airline that the 10th largest in the world (by traffic) and which has a fleet of nearly 700 aircraft and almost a 100 destinations.  It isn’t the way to handle reservations for an airline that is now consistently *missing* revenue opportunities with partner airlines such as Volaris.  In fact, Southwest was actually kind of good in pioneering codeshares with other quirky airlines and making it work.  Now, not so much.

So why is Southwest willing to invest Billions (with a “B”) on buying new aircraft from Boeing but not into a reservations system that it really needed now and which isn’t really being looked at for anytime in the near future?  

I think there are 2 main reasons.  First, the Airtran merger which is occupying a vast amount of resources and will be doing so for the next 2 years.  Southwest quite rightly recognizes that it has an exceptionally big task to complete in this area and that losing focus could cost them.  They’ll innovate as much as they can in the meantime but that job is just way bigger for way more people in the organization. 

Second, a new reservations system is scary.  Many have tried to build them, very few have ever succeeded.  Much of what exists out there today is fairly antiquated.  American Airlines has reportedly had monumental problems with the new system being designed for it by HP, for instance.   There is a reason why several airlines have migrated from half baked systems to SABRE, for instance.  Two of those have been Virgin America and jetBlue.   I suspect that Southwest looks at that landscape littered with failures and half successes and doesn’t relish the job.  I wouldn’t.

So what’s the solution?  I would try to figure out if the Airtran system could be scaled up to Southwest’s needs.   That’s the Navitaire Open Skies system that many have left.  The alternative is to bite the bullet and build an IT infrastructure around SABRE (or a similar legacy reservations system.)  The options are limited until someone builds a new, modern reservations system that works.  SABRE is one choice but other legacy systems such as Worldspan and Galileo still exist.  

My point is that no one has built a new, ground up system for airlines capable of handling all the needs of a major airline in the world in decades.  All systems are systems conceived of in the late 1960s or early 1970s which have been patched, added to and migrated over the years.   Anything remotely new is inadequate to the scope and scale that these same huge airlines operate from. 

Oddly enough, I think that Southwest would be wise to find a partner in this system.  It’s an airline that prefers it’s own ways, yes, but sharing that risk with other major airlines would be a wise move today, tomorrow and a decade from now.

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