Originally Posted by knope2001

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.