Southwest, the only major U.S. airline to limit itself to daytime flying is finally about to take a stab in the dark at some overnight, or red-eye flights, but not anytime too soon.
CEO Bob Jordan told an aviation industry conference last fall that it would likely try some flights from Las Vegas and Hawaii, and saw the possibility of perhaps 50 overnight flights in its longer future.
However, the airline has said, it would first spend a year or two ironing out labor and operation details. Red-eye flights are important to airlines on many routes because they make money when planes might otherwise be idle, and in some cases they reposition planes to their next day’s best starting point.
Southwest avoided such routes for years for technical reasons, but even after it adopted a modern computer scheduling system, it continued to avoid the idea.
