I would really like to see Southwest fly out of RFD ( Rockford, IL) to Las Vegas and Phoenix. People come from afar to use this airport because of free parking and convenience. Is this a possibility?
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07-31-2008
10:32 AM
15 Loves
Steven,
Even though we're not hub-and-spoke, we, too put the majority of our Maintenance resources in what we call our "mega Stations" (i.e., the biggest ones). We do our heavy maintenance--and have hangars--in Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, and now Chicago Midway. However, we also have Southwest Maintenance Employees in a number of other large and medium size cities to do the overnight checks and just be there to fix minor mechanical issues. Those are located in Baltimore, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Nashville, Oakland, Orlando, Philadelphia, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, St. Louis, and Tampa.
Overnight checks are pretty easy to route aicraft into, because (1) we don't do any overnight flying, (2) the cities listed above combined have about 50% of our aircraft overnighting there (260 total out of a total flying fleet of 500 aircraft), and the overnight "A" checks only have to be done once each 7 days. The more involved "B/C" checks take longer, and we have to build special routings into the schedule to allow Maintenance Control to easily get aircraft into those checks as needed, which is about once every 3 to 4 months.
Thanks for the question!
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