The first part of Southwest’s summer Schedule is now open for sale, including Memorial Day!  You can now book travel on Southwest from now until June 26, 2009.

Schedule Planning, as usual, has been BUSY, and this schedule change shows it.  We are changing the number of flights we’re offering in 102 markets—not as large a change as we’ve had, say, in March of 2009, but it’s a hefty set of changes.  Many of these frequency alterations are simply a reflection of the airline industry today.  As if you guys hadn’t noticed—the economy is a little difficult these days!  To that end, we’re not planning to grow our fleet next year.  Still, we have to continue to respond to changes, opportunities, and conditions in the marketplace.  In order to do that, again, we’re flexing our schedule optimizer’s cyber-muscles to implement changes to balance the airline “teeter-totter” of meeting the needs of our Customers while maximizing profitability. 

To meet that challenge, we’re adding brand-new nonstop service between our ever-growing Denver franchise and the home of the University of Arizona—Tucson.  We’re also acting big-time on seasonal traffic shifts.  These happen every year, but in the past we weren’t really able to rip-and-tear our schedule to take advantage of them.  This year, we’re all over it!  For example, in this schedule change, we’re reducing capacity (by no more than one flight per day per market) in such warm-weather/”beach” destination markets as Ft. Lauderdale/Hollywood, Ft. Myers, Tampa Bay, Orlando, and Phoenix—mostly markets in which we added seasonal flights in our January and March Schedules.  Some of these will likely come back in Winter 2009.  Then, on the added-service side, we’re adding service in popular summertime destinations like Oakland, Seattle, and Nashville.  Again, some of these will most likely go away when the leaves start changing in Fall 2009. 

Other schedule changes are just a product of a changing economy, and the need to reduce capacity in some markets to allow growth in others, while keeping our fleet count constant.  We’re discontinuing our nonstop service between Austin and Midland/Odessa (although we’ll retain lots of convenient onestop same-plane and connecting service via Dallas), and reducing service in several others. We’re also adding service in other markets to help connect our network better during the busy Summer season so that we can give more of you guys the “Freedom to Fly” (without hidden fees!!!) across our nation.  Attached to this blog post in the "Attachment" section below is a .pdf file with all of the details.  And if you have questions, just ask by posting a comment—as usual, I’ll be watching for them and answering the ones that I can!

Now because I know you  guys will ask, because you notice EVERYTHING….we’re taking the very unusual (for us) tactic of only opening up our Summer schedule until the end of June Instead of opening it up into August. We’re still working on a few things, so stay tuned.    Don’t worry, we plan to open up the rest of the Summer for sale early next year.  In the meantime, we’re getting ready for nearly any eventuality—remind me to do a blog post one time on the subject of “scenario proliferation!”

Happy booking, everyone….and Happy Holidays, blogosphere!  

To me, Thanksgiving is unlike our other holidays--and that's why it's my favorite of the year.  On the fourth Thursday in November we're not celebrating anyone's birthday, nor a group of fellow Americans, nor a change on the calendar.  On Thanksgiving, we simply celebrate thankfulness--being grateful for those we love, for those that love us, those that enrich our lives, those whom we have lost, and all of the blessings (yes, and accomplishments!) that have made our lives better during the previous year.  No gifts--only a few parades--just quality time with our family and our friends.
 
Of course, another reason Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year is that it is a major food event.  This shouldn't be terribly surprising to anyone, as those that know me (and know how I was raised!) realize that in my family, food is a great complement to love.  It never replaces it--but food can certainly strike delicious notes of harmony to the wonderful melody of abiding, loving thankfulness we all are treated to every November. 
 
Happy Thanksgiving, all--be thankful--be loving--and be HUNGRY!

You could say we're going to turn our nation's Capital Red, White, and Canyon Blue.

For the few days before and after January 20th--the day America inaugurates our 44th President--Southwest is doing our part to help everyone celebrate the advent of the Obama administration by adding a number of extra sections to and from our Capital-area stations:  Baltimore/Washington International and Washington/Dulles.  We're adding a total of 26 flights to and from BWI and IAD from Austin, Houston, St. Louis, Kansas City, San Diego and, of course---CHICAGO! 

The added flights are available for sale right now at southwest.com or at 1-800-IFLYSWA.  If you're one of the lucky few with tickets to one of the inaugural events, book your seats soon!  It's going to be a BUSY weekend to and from D.C.  After all, if you were able to score tickets to one of the inauguration celebrations but NOT able to get to the District, it would be a real.....ahem...."Obamination."

(I sincerely apologize for that last sentence--but I just couldn't help it!)

Party on, Mr. President-elect, congratulations, and good luck!  And BTW....get the girls a Labrador Retriever.  They're big, loyal, intelligent, sweet, and goofy. Just like me.   

Now where are my tickets to the Ball?  *grin*

We’ve just published the March, 2009 schedule, so Southwest is now accepting reservations all the way out until May 8, 2009.   Whether you want some Florida sun to chase away the late Winter chill, or feel like some early Spring slaloming down the slopes in the Rockies or the Cascades, you can book your trip now at southwest.com.

As usual in any new schedule, we’ve got some exciting things in this schedule that I want to tell you about.  Exciting thing number one:  MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL!   Southwest starts service to “the T.C.” (the Twin Cities, to those not in the “know!”) on March 8, 2009, with eight weekday roundtrips between the Hubert Humphrey Terminal at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Int’l. Airport and Chicago’s close-in, uncongested Midway Airport.  Not only will we be bringing convenient schedules and the best Customer Service in the skies to the Minneapolis/St. Paul-Chicago market, we’re celebrating our arrival with a fare sale!  Besides our nonstop service to Chicago out of MSP, we’re leveraging our extensive service from Chicago and offering direct and/or connecting service to a whopping 56 other Southwest destinations.  As always, you can get all the details on schedules, fares, and fare rules by visiting southwest.com!

Exciting thing number two:  we’ve re-optimized the schedule again, and we’re using our new ability to respond to seasonal traffic shifts by changing in market frequencies.  We’re making changes in a lot of markets, in fact—out of the more than 400 roundtrip, nonstop markets Southwest serves, the March 2009 schedule contains changes in over a quarter of  them.  Besides the new service to MSP, we’re re-introducing nonstop service between Birmingham and Phoenix, and adding more flights in 62 other nonstop markets around our network.  Of course, with schedule additions come schedule reductions.  Thirty-three markets will see relatively minor schedule reductions, while we will eliminate nonstop service in two roundtrip markets (Albuquerque-Amarillo and El Paso-Lubbock).  However, even in those two markets, we’ll still offer connecting service so that our Customers can stay…well…”connected!”  To see the entire list of frequency changes by market, click on the link at the bottom of this blog post (under attachments).

Exciting thing number three:  this is the first schedule co-written by one of Schedule Planning’s newest colleagues, Sara.  Sara’s been with Southwest for more than a decade, first serving as a Customer Service Agent in Baltimore/Washington and Las Vegas before making the move to the Technology Department in 2006—and then moving to Schedule Planning in March of this year.  Sara is also one of the more than 2,300 Southwest Employees who is married to another Southwest Employee (her husband, Lin, is a Southwest Airlines Dispatcher).  Great job on the schedule, Sara—and, I’m sure, the first of many!

Happy booking, everyone—and stay tuned.  We’ve got some other exciting developments in upcoming schedules I’ll be blogging about.  You never know what we have up our sleeve!

Today Southwest announced our plans to add the 65th city to our network next March, and it’s one we have been asked about, often, for many years.

Twin Cities—get ready to fall in LUV!

Southwest plans to establish a “No Hidden Fees” zone at the  Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport in March 2009, bringing Low Fares and excellent Customer Service to the land of 10,000 lakes.  We’ll be giving the “Freedom To Fly” to folks flying to or from the home of the Twins.  And the Vikings.   And, of course, the home of Mary, Rhoda, Lou, Ted, and Murray (“Who can turn the world on with her smile?”  Any female Southwest Airlines Employee, of course…and, ya, you betcha, so can the guys!).  Trivia question:  where did they film the iconic scene from the opening title sequence of the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" where a twirling Mary Richards tosses her Tam O’Shanter into the air?  That would be the intersection of 7th and Nicollet, in downtown Minneapolis.

We’re excited to be adding Minneapolis/St. Paul to the Southwest route system for lots of reasons.  Some are all business—the area has a booming economy,  and it complements our existing network beautifully. Other reasons are all pleasure—the beautiful lakes and woods, the Mall of America, the incredible arts scene, the St. Paul Ice Festival (and I have to admit, it was news to this Texas boy that you can have FUN with ICE!), and so many other wonderful activities.  But the biggest reason we’re excited, and able, to finally add MSP to our system is that you guys—our Customers and our Employees—have told us that it’s time.

We will announce the details--the flight schedule, the fares, and the start date—in the not-too-distant future.  I’ll make sure to give you guys a heads-up here on “Nuts About Southwest” when we do.  And what’s next?

I’ll never tell.  *wink*

Bob Jordan, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Planning, Pete McGlade, Vice President Schedule Planning, and a blog name you all know, Bill Owen explained the history of the Garage-o-Mizer.  As long time blog readers will know, Bill told the story here on the blog.  Interestingly the first two schedule optimizations freed up six additional aircraft each time.  These were aircraft we didn't have to buy for the schedule.  I always find it amazing, that no software companies could offer us a program that would optimize our schedules, and that we had to build it inhouse.

If you want to see an outside perspective of today's events, check out Terry Maxon's reports at The Dallas Morning News' "Airline Biz" blog.

As I promised in my "WHOOPS!" post....as penance for forgetting to write about our new January 2009 Schedule.....I will now reveal my grandmother's incredibly delicious, and surprisingly easy, recipe for banana pudding. For those of you who have never had it, banana pudding is very definitely indigenous to Texas and the South. Down here, this is a special treat, one drenched in family history, and revered as an heirloom recipe handed down from our parents' and grandparents' era. However--before I tell you how to send your guests into dessert heaven, you get to read a few things about my grandmother's life and times.

Her name was Dollie Sue Nichols, but we called her Nanny. She was born way out in the country near the town of Glen Rose, Texas near the turn of the century--the 20th century. She was one of nine children, raised by a stern but loving set of parents in the days before supermarkets, automobiles, television--even before radio. Quite literally, Nanny and her brothers and sisters were their own (and only!) entertainment. This forced reliance on each other for support and amusement forged a bond that would last quite literally for over a century. The cool thing about Nanny, and about the whole Nichols clan, is how intensely they shared that singleness of mind. They hung together through everything--those Nichols kids were literally a band of best friends that just happened to have the same mother and father. The annual Family Reunion I have blogged about is the living testament to that, where up to 200 of the descendents of Nanny and her brothers' and sisters gather near the old homestead in Glen Rose every June to recognize the special bond of the Nichols clan and to keep it going--and to celebrate family, fun, and of course, food.

Nanny and her sister, Mamie, were the only two girls in the clan, and they wound up spending a lot of time in the Nichols' kitchen cooking for their brothers and parents. Thinking of what life was like that far out in the country in the early 20th Century, I can't even imagine how hard it must have been for them to make a banana pudding like this recipe creates. Most certainly there were no last-second dashes to Whole Foods for organic bananas back in their day! Things probably got easier when Nanny moved to Fort Worth's North Side after World War I as a blushing bride who soon had three small babies of her own. To hear my mom, aunt, and uncle tell it, Nanny was a frequent visitor at the neighborhood grocery store where, during the Great Depression, she'd often barter the beautifully hand-stitched clothes she had made for groceries for her family. Still, evidently Nanny preferred the country life, because by the time I was born in 1958 Nanny had moved out of the city to a farm northwest of Fort Worth, where she was again able to harvest eggs from the chickens in the henhouse, get milk and butter from the cow ("Bossy"), and in her spare time grow the most delicious tomatoes, cucumbers, and peaches this side of heaven. And the chicken Nanny fried was...ahem....very "fresh."

My brother, cousins, and I clearly remember three things about spending time at Nanny's.....one, how different the weekends we spent working on the farm were than our normal, boring suburban lives...two, how much fun we used to have just out of Nanny's watchful sight (dirt-clod fights and playing in the hayloft are memories that 45 years have yet to blur!)...and the most important of the three--Nanny's cooking. She had a number of signature recipes for which she was famous in our family, in her church, and in a surprisingly large swath of Wise County--like her fried chicken, her black-eyed peas, her fresh peach cobbler, and of course, her banana pudding.

So here it is...although, I have to admit I've had to make a few changes to Nanny's original recipe. Nothing drastic (no instant pudding here, thank you!!), just a little update to reflect the differences of today's ingredients. For example, I think Bossy's milk--unpasteurized and just full of cream--must have made the pudding thicken better, so I've switched to half-and-half and added just a little unflavored gelatin. And storebought eggs today have little dinky tiny yolks, not at all like the jumbo double--yolks that Nanny got fresh from the "girls" in her coop. So I've upped the number of eggs in this recipe. But the resulting product still tastes remarkably like Nanny's. And as for her other three stand-out culinary achievements--her fried chicken, peach cobbler and black-eyed peas? Who knows, maybe one day I'll share those recipes with you as well. Or--maybe not. After all, some family secrets are worth keeping.  :)

NANNY'S BANANA PUDDING

6 eggs, separated

1 ¼ c. granulated sugar

4 ½ c. half-and-half

3 tablespoons cornstarch

1 package unsweetened, unflavored gelatin

1 box Vanilla Wafers (don't even think of using reduced fat!)

4 ripe bananas, peeled and sliced

1 stick of unsalted butter

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

For the meringue:

6 egg whites from the eggs above

¾ cup granulated sugar

½ teaspoon cream of tartar

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Ground nutmeg for garnish

Separate ice-cold eggs, keeping both the yolks and the whites--just keep them separate! Beat yolks just a bit and set aside. Mix sugar, cornstarch, and half-and-half in a double boiler, and bring them to just below the boiling point. Stir VERY frequently. If you scorch it--game over, start again.

When the liquid mixture begins to thicken slightly, slowly put spoonfuls of the hot sweetened cream into the beaten egg yolks to temper them, whisking the yolks constantly. When they are warm, *slowly* add them into the hot cream mixture, stirring like crazy (see, you get a great dessert AND a workout with this recipe!). Stir for another 5 minutes, still over the heat in the double boiler. Then add the vanilla extract and the unflavored gelatin, mix thoroughly, and cool the mixture for about an hour.

Just before you assemble the pudding, peel and slice the bananas and set aside. In a very clean and dry bowl, pour the 6 reserved egg whites to make the meringue. Two words of caution. First, if there is even a speck of egg yolk in the whites, the meringue will just never stiffen. The oils in the yolk will just kill it. Second, meringue does not set up well on rainy or humid days (which makes me wonder if cooks in Seattle or New Orleans ever successfully make meringue). So plan to do this on a dry, sunny day. If it's too humid for a meringue, then make some home-made sweetened whipped cream instead and top the pudding with that. However, assuming you've passed these hurdles, it's time to make the meringue. In a mixer, beat the egg whites and the cream of tartar on "high" until you get to the soft-peak stage. Then add the sugar slowly. Continue to beat and as you approach the stiff peak stage add the vanilla.

To assemble, put the oven on "broil." Spoon a bit of the cooled pudding mixture on the bottom of a glass dish. Then, put a layer of vanilla wafers, a layer of bananas, and smother them with the pudding-then repeat. You should get either 2 very generous layers or 3 skimpy ones. You'll use the whole box of vanilla wafers--and I HOPE you use all the pudding! When that's assembled, mound the top with the meringue mixture, making pretty little peaks on top. Put the entire dish under the broiler, watching extremely carefully, until the meringue starts to brown (usually no more than 2 to 3 minutes). Be CAREFUL-once it starts to brown it progresses QUICKLY! When it's just a little less brown than you want it, pull it out-it will continue to brown a bit after you remove it from the oven. Finally, sprinkle ground nutmeg sparingly on top and serve.