Southwest Airlines Community

Reading this forum has been great! Now for some facts... (a) Southwest Airlines, with all due respect, abandoned Denver at the news of the high costs of landing fees at the new Denver International Airport which it said would be too high to fit it's business model. No sooner did the airlines that stuck with and paid for the new airport pay down the debt to a sufficiently low level as to allow the City and County of Denver to lower landing fees, did SWA / WN suddenly find themselves able to return to Denver. Draw your own conclusions. Some say "great business" others say "scheister-ville". (b) SWA can say what they want, but the truth of the matter is that F9 is the first airline to fend off their full onslaught. They've been flying half empty planes out of DIA and doing everything they could to put F9 out of business and failed at it. The plan was to put F9 out of business, and it didn't work, so here's the new plan and $170 million to do it. Draw your own conclusions. (c) People in this forum who bash Airbus have no knowledge of Airbuses. They certainly do not know that Airbuses were selected by Frontier precisely because they were more efficient, less costly to maintain, and greater in fuel efficiency which, by the way, are three of the things that have allowed F9 to profit during the past 9 months. Draw your own conclusions as to the brilliance of relying exclusively on the 737. (d) In it's history, F9 has never been found guilty of grave maintenance violations and fined millions by the FAA. Can SWA / WN say that? Draw your own conclusions as to which airline puts the safety of it's passengers first. (e) F9 was not forced into bankruptcy, nor was it ever truly a bankrupt airline. The CEO chose to declare bankruptcy as a strategic move to fend off First Data which decided to demand a larger front end holding percentage on all air tickets charged and processed by it. Sean Menke may live to rue the day he made this decision as it suddenly took the airline out of his hands and put into the hands of a bankruptcy judge. (f) QWEST, coincidentally the Denver-based baby bell, offered more money than Verizon for bankrupt MCI. Guess what? The higher bid was not accepted. Qwest lost MCI to Verizon despite outbidding them. What? How? It turned out that MCI management and the bankruptcy judge believed that Verizon was a better fit in every way for the melding of the companies. So, those of you out there who assume that SWA swallowing of F9 is a foregone conclusion don't know a single thing about this process. The justice department, likewise, is unlikely to eventually approve this buyout by SWA. There is way too much overlap of routes, it would drastically decrease competition in dozens of key cities not just in Denver, it would likely put over 4,000 people out of work, and another bidder has stated they plan to hold the airline and allow it to run as usual. There are, believe it or not, actually people out there who believe in doing what's right more than they believe in money. I know that's difficult for the majority of people out there to comprehend. So, even if SWA bids more than the $170 million they announced today, guess what, it still might not be enough to persuaded the F9 people as well as the DoJ to go along with what will be nothing more than the end of F9. ... View more