Can Southwest Airlines, the company that made the 10-minute turn—deplane one flight and board the next in 10 minutes—famous in 1972, shorten the time between each flight to only three minutes today?
With a few gate-side innovations now being tested at the airline's Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) hub, Lisa Hingson and her assistant Kaci McCartan are attempting to provide an answer to that issue.
Hingson and McCartan are part of Southwest's innovation team, which is entrusted with developing ways to enhance the traveler experience and, in this case, assist in enhancing the airline's operational performance.
The team even managed to generate 35 ideas that could help shorten each turn during the ideation phase of this project, which started well before the coronavirus outbreak.
Unfortunately, when the pandemic hit, all of this effort was abandoned, especially since tight turns weren't as difficult to make with load factors at historic lows.
Hingson, McCartan, and the rest of the team worked weeks in the innovation lab at Southwest's Dallas headquarters honing the 35 concepts and narrowing them down to only seven of the most workable ones in recent months, despite the airline's catastrophic operational meltdown around the holidays.
Now, through March 3, the airline's innovation crew is camped out at four of the airline's 18 Atlanta gates.
This is due to the fact that gates C13 through C16 are working as stress tests for the innovations that Hingson and McCartan initially devised in the lab.
In fact, we recently went to the airline's base in Atlanta to see these advances in action for the first time.
Here's a glimpse at what the airline is testing, even though some of the enhancements might never be implemented at all 121 Southwest airports.
Designated preboarding areas
Southwest has a unique approach. Southwest does not have assigned seating, in contrast to other airlines. Instead, passengers board the plane in the order that they checked in.
Preboarding is offered to passengers who require special assistance and those who use wheelchairs, however, McCartan claims that this practice frequently results in significant congestion.
There is frequently no designated space in the holding room for all of these flyers, making it unclear where the wheelchairs and preboard passengers should line up.
Southwest set up a color-coded carpeted area to mark where these passengers should line up as part of the test.
The four Atlanta gates each have a distinctively colored carpet.
The innovation team determined that dark blue would probably look the best in locations with a lot of foot activity, like airports, after coffee splattered on the yellow carpet on day one.
21st-century boarding pillars
You are given a boarding group letter and number when you check in with Southwest, which lets you know when you'll board the aircraft and choose your seat.
When your boarding group is called, metal pillars at most Southwest gates will direct you to where to queue up. It's difficult to know when it's your turn to board, though, unless you pay attention to the announcements.
To change that, Southwest's innovation team is working. The crew is introducing digital pillars with built-in monitors that show current boarding information in order to move passengers more rapidly.
When it's your turn to line up, the monitors will indicate which group is boarding. They even contain built-in yellow and blue LED lights to catch your attention; blue shows that your side is lining up and getting ready to board, while yellow indicates that your group is boarding.
It's difficult to understand how these stanchions wouldn't be an upgrade from the ones we now have. Finding power outlets for all the displays, however, is Southwest's largest challenge, which the innovation team will need to address if they wish to expand the use of these digital pillars.
A new way to see announcements
Noise-canceling headphones are frequently used by passengers today to block out distractions in airports. (I personally like Apple's AirPods Pro very much.)
Nevertheless, unless you're seated at one of Southwest's test gates, if you're wearing headphones, you might not hear a crucial announcement.
The updated flight status and whether gate agents need more gate-checked luggage are among the visual announcements that are displayed alongside live boarding information on the new digital pillars.
These visual messages should be enough to catch your attention even though you won't get a full transcript of what the gate agent says.
Self-service at the gate
Southwest is testing whether placing a self-serve kiosk in the gate area will reduce the wait time to speak with a counter-service agent. It's hard to believe this is being implemented as an innovation in 2023.
The answer is probably yes, going on the performance of practically every other significant U.S. airline. Even so, Southwest is still experimenting with it in Atlanta.
The innovation team is interested in seeing if passengers will utilize these kiosks to make changes to their boarding passes, create bag tags for gate-checked carry-ons, and add infants to their reservations without speaking to a customer service representative.
The airline is also thinking about allowing last-minute boarding group upgrades to be purchased at these kiosks, which might perhaps shorten the wait time to speak to an agent.
An all-in-1 iPad app
Southwest is creating mobile-friendly versions of the tools that agents need to master a turn, such as the capacity to print luggage tags, interact with the onboard crew, and keep track of the number of wheelchair and special needs passengers. Speaking of agents:
The innovation team is testing this technology in Atlanta with a number of personnel that interacts with passengers, including operations agents, customer service agents, customer service supervisors, and inflight crews. This technology is driven by a new internal iPad app.
Agents can complete many of their daily chores using the iPad app that does it all.
It also drives numerous more improvements, such as team-wide chats and visual announcements.
For instance, gate personnel had to go down to the plane to ask the crew if they were ready to embark before the release of this iPad software.
Sometimes an agent would have to make the journey more than once, particularly if the cleaning team was running late or the plane was having technical difficulties.
The flight attendants no longer need to make time-consuming journeys to the aircraft because the gate agent can now wirelessly communicate with them thanks to the new chat capability, hopefully accelerating the boarding procedure.
Jet bridge party
The next significant delay usually involves a protracted wait on the jet bridge after your boarding pass has been scanned. To lessen that, the Southwest team developed three fascinating improvements that have the potential to completely change the jet bridge experience.
The first is the addition of Bluetooth speakers to the jet bridge that will play (royalty-free) hip-hop, kids' music, electronic dance music, and disco during boarding and deplaning.
According to McCartan, listening to music with a high beats-per-minute rate encourages individuals to move more quickly and effectively, which is exactly what Southwest wants during one of the most crucial parts of the turn.
Better yet, the flight crew can also control what is playing on the speakers, so if there aren't any more middle seats or overhead bin space is running low, the crew can play a prerecorded message over the speakers to help manage your expectations for what will happen on board. The message will even include Southwest's signature "ding" sound.
Being on the jet bridge makes you a very captive audience. That's usually the reason why the majority of these walls are currently covered in advertisements for airlines and travel services.
The innovation team is experimenting with other methods to see whether they can speed up boarding by presenting instructions for doing so.
It will be interesting to watch if this program spreads more widely because the team has so far received tremendously great feedback from occasional Southwest flyers.
Display of ramp information
Despite the fact that all of the aforementioned advances are made for "above-wing" operations, the team is currently testing one for ramp workers: a dynamic display placed outside the gate that gives crucial preflight information.
Together with other crucial details like the status of the boarding procedure, these screens provide a countdown till departure time.
Most significantly, these displays notify the ramp team when bags that have been gate-checked are ready to be loaded into the cargo hold.
Before, ramp personnel had to climb the stairs to the jet bridge to check if their bags were there.
In other cases, these agents had to walk the stairs three to four times per flight, taking up valuable time that could have been used for other crucial pre-departure responsibilities, according to McCartan.
These new dynamic displays ought to stop these unnecessary journeys, greatly increasing the productivity of Southwest's ramp staff.
Although this may be a fresh development for Southwest, some of the airline's rivals may consider it to be a rehash as many big airlines have already successfully used these displays.
In conclusion
Southwest doesn't generate any money when planes are idle between flights.
In order to navigate the fledgling airline's path to profitability, the infamous 10-minute turn was created in 1972.
Southwest has expanded over the past 50 years, and each turn has been more difficult.
To get passengers off the plane and on the plane again, more procedures, more materials, and more documentation are needed.
The airline might be able to squeeze one additional trip per day out of each aircraft if it can shorten each turn by only a few minutes.
Because of this high usage, fares are low and the members of Southwest's innovation team are currently busy.
Southwest is putting a lot of effort into reducing turn times, from digitalized boarding pillars and a brand-new mobile app for gate workers to a revamped jet bridge experience and other improvements.
Nobody knows if these advancements will ever be used outside of the Atlanta beta test.
The holidays saw the greatest industry breakdown ever, so one thing is for sure: Southwest should be investing heavily in whatever it takes to increase operational stability.
FACEBOOK