For a carrier that flies only 737 narrowbody passenger aircraft, Dallas-based Southwest Airlines carries a substantial amount of freight throughout its domestic network \u2013 some 98,400 tonnes in 2015. Despite various interline agreements with international carriers, Southwest still lacks the ability to carry cargo to any of the international destinations in its network. Next year this will begin to change.
\nWally Devereaux, Southwest\u2019s senior director, cargo and charters, told Air Cargo World that, in 2017, the airline will unveil a new point-of-sale and back-office IT system that will enable the carrier to make international freight bookings for the first time.
\nIn 2011, when Southwest Airlines acquired Orlando-based AirTran Airways, it picked-up eighty-eight 717s and access to seven new international cities, giving Southwest\u2019s network a strong boost in Latin America. Although the integration was more or less finished on the passenger side by the close of 2014, and the former AirTran 717s were slowly transferred to Delta Air Lines, Southwest has yet to carry cargo on its international routes. Even today, \u201cwe are still not able to put cargo on those international flights,\u201d Devereaux said. \u201cAnd that is certainly something we wanted to be able to do \u2013 to be able to grow [cargo], as Southwest Airlines grows, beyond the United States.\u201d
\nThe largest obstacle preventing international bookings, Devereaux added, was the antiquated, closed-loop IT infrastructure built in the 1990s. After tinkering with a few off-the-shelf products, the airline eventually decided it was time to design and develop the system in-house.
\nNow that a new system is more than two-thirds under way, Southwest\u2019s cargo division has started to explore how the new capabilities of the IT system may factor into its long-term international strategy, such as the ability to share electronic airway bills, accept payments in multiple currencies and exchange messages directly with U.S. Customs. Devereaux said that, because forwarders will be able to book directly online, Southwest will also be able to pursue new opportunities to interline and partner more effectively with other carriers.
\n\u201cWe do very little interlining today, just out of our network to a couple of destinations,\u201d Devereaux saide, citing Southwest Cargo\u2019s current interline arrangements with Canada\u2019s WestJet, and Hawaiian Airlines \u201cIt\u2019s very manual and not scalable, but the new system will allow us to scale up these arrangements. With the interline capabilities, we fully intend to not only feed other carriers from our network, but also accept freight into our network from other carriers. I think we provide a pretty attractive option for those shipping into the United States simply because of the fact that we have close to 4,000 flights per day in the United States, a lot of redundancy in our schedule, a lot of point-to-point flying in our schedule, so we can reach a lot of markets very quickly.\u201d
\nSpeaking of schedule redundancies, during e-commerce panel discussions at recent air freight industry conferences, panelists have said Southwest\u2019s unique cargo network could be adapted to handle express packages. (Perhaps even similar to 12Send, a recent partnership between Schiphol Airport, KLM and Parcel International).\u00a0 Devereaux said Southwest was already engaged in e-freight shipments, as some of its customers, \u201care large players in the e-commerce space and are able to leverage our space and frequencies.\u201d
\nMoving into 2017, Southwest plans to replace its some of its aging 737-300s with new -800s and MAX variants. When asked if he thought any of the -300s would be converted to freighter configuration, Devereaux unsurprisingly said, \u201cthat is not something we are considering.\u201d Despite not operating freighters, Devereaux said cargo is still a consideration when choosing which aircraft to deploy on a certain route. He added, \u201cThere have been a few instances where Southwest\u2019s cargo division has persuaded its network planning division to \u2018upgauge\u2019 from a -300 to a -800, because of very specific cargo needs in that lane.\u201d
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\nSource: aircargoworld<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For a carrier that flies only 737 narrowbody passenger aircraft, Dallas-based Southwest Airlines carries a substantial amount of freight throughout its domestic network \u2013 some 98,400 tonnes in 2015. Despite various interline agreements with international carriers, Southwest still lacks the ability to carry cargo to any of the international destinations in its network. Next year[…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49],"class_list":["post-2058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-airport-code"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2058\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}