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.

I had posted this in the AirTran forum yesterday but will make a few comments here as well.

MKE-BWI has never been a very strong market. In years past, AirTran has always seemed to struggle on this route outside of peak travel periods. Things can't be pretty from a financial standpoint with five mainline flights per day between Southwest and AirTran not to mention all of the DCA flights as well.

With that said, suspending a hub-to-hub route is pretty noteworthy and is likely a sign of things to come in the next couple of months.

In the short-term, this may have an impact on MKE and BWI passengers. Long-term, with the exception of DSM, nearly every connection option offered by AirTran in MKE will be available through Southwest via MDW (especially when DCA slots are shifted to Chicago). It might be a negative for MKE, but will have little to no impact on the Southwest network as a whole.

What color scheme is being applied to the E145s?

This picture will show you.

http://www.airliners.net/photo/Front...8d0d37f85312a8

Sorry -- I had not been over to the FL board recently and have been short on participation time as of late. Didn't mean to steal your thunder!


That's really the crux of why I decided to mention it here....it might well offer some of the first solid evidence about the role of Milwaukee in the WN system. In reducing the overcapacity beetween MKE and BWI, the decision was made to keep Milwaukee as a spoke for the WN Baltimore hub, but not keep Baltimore as a spoke for the FL Milwaukee hub. Ultimately, of course, when the integration is complete it's all one airline and a BWI-MKE flight can serve hubs at both ends. But who knows if there will be a MKE hub by that point.

Blue is right on the money that nearly everything AirTran offers BWI-MKE-XXX is already available on Southwest nonstop or via an existing WN hub. Speculation has MKE unnecessary, but this might just be the first concrete move supporting that speculation.

Nah, you didn't steal my thunder and my comment wasn't meant to imply that at all. You posted the BWI suspension along with a few other schedule changes so it fit much better than simply having a seperate thread.

The only comment I made on the AirTran forum was that the timeframe for the suspension of the route just seemed...odd.

Were it not for the pending acquisition, the odd suspension period (ends early March and returns early May) might be more puzzling than the suspension itself. But with the looming merger, it seems likely that the existing summer schedule is something of a placeholder, awaiting a more significant rework.

Why pull it now and not wait until the merger? Likely one or both airlines are losing enough money on the MKE-BWI overcapacity that they didn't want to wait, and preserving Baltimore as a spoke of MKE wasn't viewed as important.

Why only pull FL through early May and not indefinitely? My guess is that they are aiming to have code-sharing and intermingling start by then (which seems pretty aggressive but what upper management has probably dictated). At that point MKE-BWI might be 717's with FL an WN* codes, or 737's with WN and FL* codes, or a mix of both. So the existing FL and WN schedules might as well stay out for the time being, because at that point if they do have people booked on a flight which ends up not operating, they will be able to switch the reservation over to the actual operating carrier. But until the merger is approved, they can't start publishing those kind of schedules or marketing and selling that way.

If they are able to code-share and interline already by early May, then it's only about a 60-day window when the AirTran Milwaukee hub loses the BWI spoke. But if the MKE east-west hub is planned to stay, it doesn't make sense to pull a key spoke during the peak spring break/easter holiday period when everybody makes money. And that's where I think this is meaningful.

I like how F9 put the logo tagline on the engines. Pretty cool, especially when you consider their location relative to the animal pictures on the tail of the aircraft.