Southwest’s flights at DIA may soar to 100 more a day
Executive with airline: Big boost in departures tied to acquisition of more gates
While Denver International Airport officials were addressing the fallout of firing the contractor tasked with renovating the airport’s main terminal building Tuesday, Southwest Airlines executives were quietly checking out Denver as part of a company retreat.
The get-together, which brought members of the Dallas-based airline’s sales, marketing, network planning and other commercial departments to town, is an annual event, according to Southwest chief revenue officer Andrew Watterson. The team picks a market to visit where the airline is “contemplating an investment.” In 2018, the retreat was in Hawaii before the airline launched service there this year. The year before, it was San Jose, Calif., as Southwest considered ways to expand its flights to Silicon Valley.
“So, pretty good company to be in,” Watterson said.
Southwest has already announced plans to build a $100 million maintenance hangar at DIA, a project that’s expected to be completed in 2020. But the airline has also made no bones about wanting more gates at DIA when they are added as part of the airport’s three-year, $1.5 billion concourse expansion project.
Thirty-nine new gates are being built as part of that project — including 16 on Con
course C, where Southwest’s DIA hub does business. Southwest CEO Gary Kelly in May said the airline wants to absorb all 16 of those gates. On Tuesday, Watterson provided a clearer picture of what that could mean for the company’s operations in the Mile High City.
Right now, Southwest operates out of 24 gates at DIA and averages eight flights per gate Monday through Friday, Watterson said. That’s close to 200 flights per day. The high-water mark for the airline is about 225 flights at DIA per day. By adding 16 more gates, Watterson said Southwest could add more than 100 daily flights out of its real estate in Denver.
“We keep our costs low through high productivity,” Watterson said of the philosophy that company officials hope will resonate with decision-makers in Denver. “We’re proud to pay top-of-the-industry wages and provide great benefits to our employees, but we keep our costs low by keeping our people busy and the assets busy. That means that our planes fly a little bit more, our gates have more departures and our employees handle more flights.”
DIA, designed to handle about 50 million passengers per year, served 64 million in 2018, airport officials say. It’s on pace to shatter that record this year, so gate traffic matters.
Southwest employs 4,200 people in the Denver area, which is a hub for its pilots and flight attendants. That number would obviously grow with the number of flights, but Watterson said the airline hasn’t mapped out what that will look like yet.
Southwest is among the airlines that flew 737 Max 8 jets out of DIA, airport officials say. Federal officials grounded all Max 8s in the spring and mandated manufacturer Boeing make changes to the aircraft after fatal crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia. That process is ongoing, and the 34 planes in Southwest’s fleet remain in storage until the situation is resolved.
Southwest cut 180 flights per day from its schedule because of the situation, about 5 percent of its total traffic, according to a spokesman. Denver lost a “handful” of departures, Watterson said, but because the airline operates a point-to-point network instead of a more traditional hub-andspoke model, the impacts were likely hard for the average traveler to spot.
United Airlines, the industry giant that led all carriers by serving 28 million passengers at DIA last year, also has Max 8s in its fleet but was not flying them through Denver, spokeswoman Erin Benson said. United is looking to add at least 11 gates at DIA, a company official said last fall.
Denver-based Frontier Airlines also is in the mix to grow with its home airport.
“Frontier Airlines currently has nine gates at Denver International Airport and we’re working with the airport to expand our gate count at DEN when the new gates open,” spokesman Zach Kramer said in an email Tuesday.