Just a few schedule items underway or upcoming...nothing too exciting.

One line which is normally E145 is flying as E135 this month, apparently to swap out more E145 to get to the paint shop. GRB-MKE-DAY-MKE-GRR-MKE-MSN-MKE-STL-MKE-GRB is the line, and it returns to E145 in February. The repainting is going more slowly than many would like, but just getting those white-tail birds painted will help. It sounds like Delta has finally gotten rid of the last NW-painted planes, and that took many many months for that to happen. So I supposed it shouldn't be a surprise here.

The afternoon MKE-DSM-MKE upgrades to E145 in February.

One line of A319 flying to the east coast is schedule dto switch from 319 to E190 from February 14th to April 15th. The line is DCA-MKE-BOS-MKE-DCA-MKE-DCA. The Airbus is too much capacity to the east coast this time of year, although LGA doesn't do too badly. Of course this is the dead of winter. Probably better to have the Airbus rather than E170 going to the east coast this winter until more E190's come, but E190 is a better match.

Finally, a competitive item. AirTran is ending MKE-BWI starting March 7th. It shows as returning May 3rd, although it's questionable that the summer schedule for AirTran is meaningful given the upcoming Southwest acquisition and likely aggressive integration. Of course one can (rightfully) say that thsi is probably a cut in preparation for merger in a market that doesn't need both carriers. And even though the acquisition approval hasn't happened yet, it seems likely this is about that. However...it's worth noting that Southwest and AirTran don't interline and you can't even buy their tickets in the same place. So even if this switch is essentially Southwest taking over a market which will ultimately be all Southwest anyway, having WN keep MKE-BWI (rather than FL keeping it) means that the BWI-MKE-xxx connections to the AirTran hub here are gone. No more BWI-MKE-DSM, BWI-MKE-MSP, BWI-MKE-LAX, etc. (At least for now.) If they were concerned about keeping the integrity of the MKE hub in the intermediate period until the two carriers are integrated, then it should have been AirTran, not Southwest, metal flying BWI-MKE. Now maybe this doesn't really mean anything, but it seems peculiar that the FL hub is losing another spoke. On a related note, in the same period they are adding a 3rd MKE-RSW flight...evening southbound, and early morning return to MKE.