I’m not seeing this as a valid departure/arrival flight combination on the Southwest website even though they fly to and from both of those airports. Is there some wacky law where Southwest can’t sell one way tickets intrastate in AZ?
Off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons. First, Southwest is discouraging people from trying to use “hidden city” ticketing. Alternately, IIRC, Tucson and Phoenix are only about an hour and a half drive from each other. The only airlines I know of that fly regular routes that short are commuter airlines that code-share their flights with one of the major carriers, flying into a hub so that the passengers can connect to another flight. Since Tucson and Phoenix both have large airports and are so close, I don’t imagine that there is much call for commuter flights between them.
I just checked Expedia. There are direct flights between Tucson and Phoenix on US Airways and AA, but actually all flights are operated by US Airways Express, a commuter airline. These are probably small jets or even prop planes. Southwest doesn’t operate any small equipment like that, just 737s, and I bet it’s not efficient to fly a larger plane on such a short route (can anyone who knows weigh in?).
I’m surprised there’s any flights at all. When you consider the time it takes to get on and off a plane with security and all, it’s cheaper and faster to drive, or take a bus.
I don’t think airlines necessarily load every single theoretical connection into the system. I just tried to do Parkersburg to Charleston on United and it didn’t come back with anything even though you could book Parkersburg to Chicago and Chicago to Charleston. I also tried Parkersburg to Columbus just to see if it was an intrastate thing, and it also came up empty.
If your heart is set on flying from Tucson to Phoenix, and only doing it on Southwest, you might be able to try doing it as a multi-city itinerary (from Tucson, they fly to Chicago, Denver, Vegas, LA, and San Diego), but I don’t know if your connection would be protected.
It’s only offered by US Airways (Express) in order to create connections at its hub in Phoenix. For example, if you wanted to fly from Tucson to, say, Boston.
Southwest also has a hub (or focus city, whatever they call it) at Phoenix, but they don’t have planes small enough to be useful to fly nonstop to Tucson.
It’s not a legal thing, it’s just that airlines don’t load every possible combination into their computers, especially the wacky ones. This would be wacky because you’d have to connect in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, or maybe someplace even worse.
If you really wanted to do it you could buy two separate segments.
Its a practicality thing first…
There is no Southwest plane taking off from PHX with the intention to land (next landing) at Tucson, nor taking off from Tucson with the intention to land (next landing) at PHX.
And Southwest do not codeshare with an airline that does the flight, and they do not suggest any reasonable connectivity for the route, so you can’t get a Southwest ticket to say Tucson to Pheonix, or the reverse.