At first glance, integrating Airtran’s fleet into Southwest’s operations would appear to be easy and straight forward.  In fact, it isn’t.  Airtran operates a different floor plan and a two class cabin.  All of this affects things like weight and balance of the aircraft as well as using the floor plan on Southwest flights.

So Southwest will begin slowly converting Airtran fleet over to the Southwest model one by one.  Southwest will add these aircraft and, over time, take over Airtran routes.  Airtran will slowly reduce in size by fleet and route at the same time until both are on the same single operating certificate and the aircraft are homogenized into the fleet. 

Expect this to take longer than a year.  Even converting the 737-700s is fairly straight forward but now Southwest has to decide upon how it will configure the Airtran 717 aircraft for all coach seating before it begins that integration.  Since Southwest generally executes these kind of changes when aircraft already require service and maintenance, the two airline operations could co-exist for a longer than usual period of time until this work is complete.

Filed under: Airline Fleets by ajax