One side point I noticed in the MKE monthly stats which may be interesting when the January T100's come out in late April. For airlines which only fly one capacity of aircraft you can use the MKE numbers to get a preliminary look at load factor. Southwest is one of those airlines since everything they normally schedule into MKE has 137 seats.

Southwest January 2011
65,016 passengers on 730 flight
89.1 pax per flight, approximate LF of 65.0%


Southwest January 2012
75,213 passengers on 1,018 flights
73.9 pax per flight, approximate LF of 53.9%


Passengers increased nearly 16%, but capacity increased nearly 40%

A load factor under 55% is certainly weak, even for January. But that alone isn't all that interesting. What's interesting is how they apparently got it.

Last January (2011) Southwest flew some soft markets (BWI, MCI) and filled about 53% of seats to those cities. They also flew to some stronger sun markets (MCO, LAS, TPA, PHX) and filled about 81% of seats.

This January (2012) Southwest did have some year-over-year additions (STL which is probably weak and DEN which should be decent), but the big change is that they took over the majority of AirTran's MKE-MCO and MKE-LAS flying for most of January. Even though January is a slow month, last year AirTran still filled about 85% of their seats to LAS and MCO. For Southwest to average less than 55% full across all MKE flights they must have had comparably weak loads to LAS and MCO, Southwest flights replacing AirTran ones which ran 85% full last year. And why would Southwest carry weak loads? Because AirTran passengers can't connect to Southwest flights, and without connecting feed the MKE operation simply had too much capacity.

At this point, I post this as an aside in the MKE thread as concern about how things will turn out with their gradual-phase-out strategy if they don't code share. MKE already seemed set up to fail with DSM-MKE and CAK-MKE likely losing buckets of money. I'm concerned that if at some point Southwest management sees MKE lost $X million, it won't be $X million with an asterisk because of how they chose to schedule things in a set-up-to-fail manner. It will simply be that MKE lost $Xmillion. That's what I believe happened with Frontier in Milwaukee, and it is not encouraging to see Southwest fly nearly half-empty here because of how they chose to schedule things by putting WN metal in without code sharing.

When we have more "meat" from the T100's for January, perhaps it's a subject to bring up in FL or WN boards. This is only preliminary stuff and is only as accurate as MKE's traffic total. But if those T100's loads are as weak as they need to be for the average to be below 55%, it's worth concern.