Does WN cancel flights because they're not full enough?
 

I'm a fan of WN for short hops where they have direct service, but I've seen this happen a couple of times recently, and I suspect they cancel flights when they're not full enough.

I was supposed to be on WN 421, which got cancelled due to unspecified "maintenance" They put me on the next SJC->BUR flight which was also pretty empty.

Here's my question:

Is there any easy way to tell what physical plane WN421 was, and if the next flight, two hours later, is actually using the same plane, which they just saved the trouble of flying it down to BUR and back with only 40 pax?

If I can't depend on WN to actually fly the flights I booked, then I can't use them any more. I frequently go down to BUR/LAX with only a couple hours time to see a concert or have dinner with someone, etc. Today I'm going to miss a lunch meeting because of WN.

This question is asked numerous times.

Some people say yes. Some people say no. Bottom line is you don't know. Even if you know where a specific plane went and when, you don't know why your flight was cancelled.

I would like to know what airline you can count on for your situation.

It can't happen often or it would be reflected in the published stats. I suspect if there is a problem they might do it occasionally, but it would really mess up network planning if flights were routinely consolidated. Planes would often be out of positions. IF a flight were routinely low then it would probably get cancelled.

One suspects that pax load is taken into account when managing plane swaps due to unscheduled maintenance or IROPS. On WN, it may seem like this is more common than on other carriers because your flight can be affected by things happening elsewhere, unrelated to your itinerary cities.

I would say yes, it does happen but not common. I have been cancelled on maybe two flights over the past 6 years that had very low occupancy that suddenly developed "mechanical problems"...but I have also been on many flight that were only 20-30 people.

If they have another fully booked flight that is having problems or delays...then I could see it happening for them to get ahead, but I would guess that they do not cancel flights simply for low capacity.

I have been on the other end of that situation with Alaska airlines where they cancelled another flight and gave us their plane because ours was having mechanical problems. It was not intended but the way the gate agent made the calls was blatantly obvious they we just stole their plane and they got bumped!

And this is not just a SW thing...any and every airline would do the same.

They may not cancel flights solely because they're not full enough, but why, if they're short a plane due to some problem, would they not choose the less-booked flights to cancel rather than the heavily-booked flights? :confused:

And, as mentioned above, why would any airline?

So the only way this is Southwest-specific is that they may have more planes out due to maintenance than some other airliens. So much so that it's the news about them getting fined multiple times for not doing enough maintenance before!

Because of the aircraft positioning issue, it's harder for a traditional network carrier to cancel a flight. OTOH, for routes where WN just goes back and forth multiple times per day, it would be pretty easy to cancel one RT and consolidate flights if they have low loads in both directions. This especially applies to routes that tend to be O&D rather than having a lot of connecting passengers.

Are there many (any?) routes on WN where the planes just go back and forth multiple times a day? That's how a legacy carrier generally does things, but not how, in my understanding, WN does.

It's more common on WN, in my experience, to cancel a connection and just take that plane on to the next city it was scheduled to go anyway, then re-accommodate the connecting passengers.

I don't know the numbers, but it sounds like the OP's route was there and back.

You just described every network carrier. Fly back and forth from hub as opposed to WN point to point

Not quite exactly that way always for every network carrier.

There seem to be regional jet subsidiaries of these network carriers that don't stick enough to going back and forth. I was have seen the AA "Envoy" (RJ) flights delayed because of weather nowhere near where they would be if they flew back and forth all day.

Plus there are longhaul planes which fly shorthaul routes when they have "dead time" between their longhaul legs.

The flying back-and-forth is thus more true (at other airlines) at some spokes but less true at some other spokes.

And as the big legacy airlines get more hubs due to mega-mergers, it's less clear whether the same plane will spend all day flying to the same hub, or maybe fly something like HUBx-SPOKE1-HUBy-SPOKE2-HUBz-SPOKE3-HUBz-SPOKE2-HUBy-SPOKE1-HUBx. (That's especially likely if the merger created several hubs in the same part of the country.)

If you think this is the case, that this flight goes back and forth to BUR, you can look to see what gate that flight was supposed to go into at BUR and gate the next flight to SJC left out of. Dollars to donuts it wasn't the same gate. Or check to see if a flight from BUR to SJC was cancelled that would fit into that timeframe. And it wasn't. So, not the same plane. They don't do that because the plane needs to be somewhere else, not right back in SJC. I think you are reading too much into what happened.

Not a big sample, but when I flew LAX-SFO, I understood that the plane had just come from SFO and was set to return to LAX after our segment. I looked up all of today's flight numbers on that route on FlightAware; on all but one of them, that was the only segment with that flight number. On the 10-day display for the flight number, a cancellation often appears. It's a way of handling things involving airports that are subject to delay.

SWA will have an limited number of planes that 'go out and come right back." It will mostly involve end of the line stations that do not have through flights. Example of a line might be DAL/HOU/CRP/HOU/DAL. There might be a few lines per day that shuttle a couple of times between HOU and DAL but most will then go somewhere else. So, you might have a SJC/BUR/SJC.

As others have said, WN is not going to want to cancel just because a flight is lightly booked BUT if the MUST cancel one for MX reasons, or because a flight is very late and this will get the line back on time, they'll likely chose a lightly booked round trip.