Shutdown brings rare quarterly loss for Southwest

Mccarran International Airport’s busiest commercial air carrier, Southwest Airlines, on Tuesday reported a rare loss in net income and a 17.8 percent decline in revenue as travel demand dropped as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Dallas-based airline, which normally has 235 flights a day to 54 cities from Las Vegas and has more than 3,500 Las Vegas-based employees, has parked 350 of the planes in its fleet of 742 Boeing 737s while the company awaits a return of passenger demand.

Company executives also said that they’ll sell fewer seats on flights in the immediate future to promote in-flight social distancing and that other usual standards will be affected by new procedures in response to the virus.

For the quarter that ended March 31, Southwest reported a net loss of $94 million, 18 cents a share, on revenue of $4.234 billion. That compares with net income of

$387 million, 70 cents a share,

revenue of $5.149 billion for the same quarter a year earlier.

“In late February, we began experiencing a precipitous drop in passenger demand and bookings due to the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a first-quarter 2020 net loss,” Southwest Chairman and CEO Gary Kelly said in a statement. “The U.S. economy has been at a standstill, and the current outlook for second quarter 2020 indicates no material improvement in air travel trends. Trip cancellations remain at unprecedented levels, though they have receded from their peak in March.”

Southwest has been critical in delivering tourists to Las Vegas since January 1982, when it became the 15th city in the airline’s system. In 2019, the airline served more than 17 million passengers in the Las Vegas market. Mccarran is the third-busiest airport in Southwest’s system.

Kelly said Southwest hasn’t adopted rules requiring passengers to wear masks on flights, although flight crews will wear them and have them available to passengers who request them.

Southwest is expected to sell about 67 percent of the seats on flights to keep center seats empty and allow passengers to sit farther apart from one another. Kelly said he doesn’t

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