Service time change

[kadavath1967]

Hello,

I travel often between DCA to OMA. The trip from DCA to OMA is perfect as the flight around 4pm. But the trip back to DCA from OMA is a problem for me. The OMA-DCA flight is at noon. I travle home (OMA) on Thursdays and come back to work (DCA) on Sundays.

If there is an early morning direct flight, say around 5.30am from OMA to DCA, I think that will be huge help for me. I am sure a lot of other people will also feel the same.

How can I make this suggestion to SW? If there an e-mail address to make this suggestion?

Please let me know.

Thanks

Hari

[MrMagooAZ]

I have a similar question on a different route.

I fly PHX to STL almost every week.  Lately I've been leaving first thing in the morning on Monday out of PHX at 530am and then returning on Thursday late-afternoon.

The schedule has changed recently...my outbound is now 7am and the return leaves earlier in the afternoon.  It's not horrible, but not optimal.

I was looking at the schedule for later in the Fall and this schedule becomes impossible.  The soonest I can get to STL is almost 2pm on Monday.  

I know that the new computer system allows for more options when making flight schedules.  That is certainly visible when looking at the weekly flight list.  

As the OP asked, is there a way to give feedback on the schedule?  Can someone elighten us on what goes in to making the schedule?  I would imagine it's a very complicated process, and I'd like to know more.

[Bill]

Hi Hari and MrMagoo!  Bill from Southwest's Network Planning group here.  We hear you--and trust me, you're not alone.  We get TONS of mail, emails, calls, and everything but skywriting about people's opinions of our schedule.  In a very real way we have 56,000 schedule writers (our fellow Employees) and 110,000,000 other vested opinions (the number of Customers we serve in a year!).  But when we're writing a schedule, have to write the best schedule for our network as a whole, not just the best for individual markets and then try to stitch them together.  In ops research terms it's called solving for the "global optimal" vs. the "local optimal". In terms that I can actually understand, we have to schedule for the many, not the few. (Star Trek reference there.)  But we do all of this based on when people have actually flown in the past--and how many airplanes we have available--so we're not scheduling blindly but we have tight and sometimes severe constraints on what we can do!!  I hope this explanation helps.  It you want or need to, just call our Customer Relations folks Monday and they can chat with you about it and forward your comments to us.  *OR* just continue the conversation here at southwest.com!!!   Have a GREAT weekend!   ///Bill Owen