Leeham News has a short blog entry referencing this article about Southwest and its Airtran merger and integration.  It is difficult to figure out where to begin in trashing this story.  But let’s take a shot at it:

1. Southwest Airlines will remain a single aircraft type using the 737 in the various variants it has today and in which it plans to have in the 737MAX.  The 717 has been offloaded to Delta and will be gone in a fairly short period of time.
2. Airtran is not based around the 717 solely.  It, too, uses the 737-700 which is also a significant part of the Airtran fleet.
3. Airtran is a hub and spoke operation but it’s major hub is Atlanta only with significant focus cities (a la SWA) elsewhere.
4. Airtran does not operate just primarily into major hub airports.  It has had a significant number of flights into cities that are smaller than the typical SWA destination that it made profitable using the 717.
5. As SWA takes over Airtran routes, it’s adapting them to SWA’s point to point model.
6. SWA has huge focus cities which kind of resemble hubs.
7. Atlanta was the only airport that SWA could fly into in that area.  There was no smaller, inner city airport.
8. SWA has been operating into and out of major hub airports already.  Notice its operations, for instance, into La Guardia and Newark airports.  It’s operated out of LAX for a long, long time.  Phoenix as well.  Same for Denver.  It’s figured out the “how to operate at a major airport” problem for a long time.
9. Airtran does present Latin American opportunities but also Caribbean opportunities and SWA has already announced plans for Puerto Rico as a first step.
10. It completely misses the point that Airtran, as a subsidiary operating entity gives SWA the chance to accelerate international flights via the Airtran reservations system.

I’m sure people see my point.  This isn’t SWA’s first rodeo and for sure it knows how to deal with a variety of destinations and airports.  What it completely ignores is SWA’s already high and rising labor costs which is an area of concern.  The creators of that “report” would know this if, you know, they had listened to Gary Kelly’s concerns expressed at a variety of quarterly earnings calls.

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