Southwest Purchase of AirTran Official

Which is to say that Southwest Airlines now owns an airline that flies to Charlotte. So when will we be able to say that Southwest itself serves CLT? That could be awhile, perhaps not until 2013 or even 2014. Aviation Week offers a detailed description lies ahead, but the quick version is that the next step is for Southwest and AirTran to operate under a single operating certificate, which is expected to happened in the first quarter of 2012. After that, AirTran planes will start to be repainted and have their interiors redone to Southwest standards, and, yes, the Southwest brand will slowly takeover AirTran routes and destinations. By sometime in 2014, all the aircraft and crews will be transferred over to Southwest, and the AirTran brand will cease to exist.

AirTran flies to about three dozen places Southwest doesn’t currently serve including the CLT. Yet to be determined is exactly how many of these destinations Southwest keeps and how many get dropped somewhere in the integration process. Charlotte is considered a very extremely likely to be part of the post-integration Southwest.

What is uncertain though is how big a presence Southwest will have in CLT in, say, 2014. Southwest has been a big-buy in airline, a carrier that served relatively few destinations, but had a lot of flights to all the places it did serve. The smallest with one exception of the airline’s current 72 destinations are Charleston, SC and Greenville-Spartanburg, at seven flights a day. AirTran offers less flight than that to a lot of places, including Charlotte, which is at six flights a day as of later this month (3 x Atlanta, 2 x Baltimore, 1 x Orlando). Which is to say, there are lots of “connecting the dots” Southwest can do between whatever AirTran cities it keeps and its existing major destinations (hubs). There isn’t all that much overlap between Southwest and AirTran’s existing routes, and the airlines don’t have an incredible number of aircraft on order either, so aircraft availability will constrain the process.

So, yes, interesting times ahead.