The Dallas Morning News Aviation Blog is reporting that Southwest Airlines just announced that they will begin flights out of Minneapolis / St. Paul next March.  The first flight will be to Chicago Midway which is no surprise. 

For some time, pundits have claimed that Southwest couldn’t enter this fortress hub and now they are.   To me, this is exciting news because I think that Milwaukee might not be very far behind as a station.  There is a lot of originating traffic between Milwaukee, Minneapolis / St. Paul, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Detroit and Kansas City.  If you look at the type of flying one would do between those city pairs, it looks exactly like a Southwest Airlines strategy.   What’s more, Southwest is already very strong in all of those cities except MSP and MKE.  The cost to start those routes and market them are relatively low since the airline only has to introduce itself in two of those cities. 

I feel certain that Southwest will grow MSP and then turn its attention to Milwaukee either in late 2009 or early 2010.   Sooner if they can so that they can compete against Airtran there.   This is good news for Minneapolis / St. Paul and probably bad news for Sun Country Airlines, an airline that has been faltering in the MSP market for a few years now.   I would be tempted to mark Sun Country Airlines as a possible purchase by Southwest because their facilities  and base in MSP has some value for Southwest.  Even their fleet, Boeing 737-800s, comes close to matching Southwest’s (B737-300/500/700) but I suspect they know that all they have to do is wait and much of it will be theirs anyway.

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