I am scheduled to fly to Love Field in the Dallas/Fort Worth area on April 19 for Spring Break. I am flying Southwest Airlines, and they use a LOT of the Boeing 737 MAX planes that are currently grounded.
If these people can’t fly me, are they going to transfer tickets to other airlines, or are we going to be hung out to dry?
This is from the landing page of their website: https://www.southwest.com/html/advisories/swa_travel_advisory_20192141552591016643.html
I’m surprised they also haven’t emailed you, but maybe it’s because your flight isn’t affected, or is far enough off that they hope to have the problem resolved by then. Speaking of which, I think Boeing just announced today that they had some sort of software fix ready or almost ready.
You can also look up your flight on SeatGuru and it should say the type of aircraft Southwest flies on that route.
Southwest won’t put you on another airline if they can’t fly you. That’s part of the “budget” in “budget airline”.
FYI, Southwest has 754 planes, of which 34 are the Max 8 model. So only a fraction of their fleet is affected. And Chicago Midway and Dallas Love Field are two of their busiest hubs. So I’ll bet they have many flights between them. I doubt you’ll have a problem.
Per the link posted above, Southwest only has 34 Boeing 737 Max 8 planes out of a fleet of over 750 planes (which are all Boeing 737 variants). This is less than 5% of their fleet.
In any event, you can look up your flight on the Southwest webpage here (by going through the procedure to select a flight), and will specify the specific model of the plane that is scheduled to fly the route. By this point, all scheduled flights should be on non-grounded planes, or they would have already cancelled the flight.
If your flight is one that is affected, they should email you in advance, but this doesn’t always happen.
Finally, as Telemark correctly notes, if your flight is cancelled, they won’t put you on another carrier. They will simply try to get you to your destination as quickly as possible on one of their own planes. However, because most of their flights fly completely full now, this can take some time. For example, I had a Southwest flight cancelled a few years ago due to a huge snow storm. The flight was supposed to leave on Thursday morning for a cruise out of Florida that departed on Sunday. (We were going to Walt Disney World first.) The earliest they could get us on a subsequent flight anywhere in the Northeast was Monday. :rolleyes: We ended up driving nearly halfway to Florida (to Norfolk, VA) that same day (Thursday) to catch a flight that afternoon instead.
What are you doing in DFW for spring break?
It’s a bit of a mystery if any given flight will be affected. I’m flying from Oakland to Las Vegas soon, and I found something online that indicated that they did not fly the Max 8 from OAK to LAS. HOWEVER! This did not tell me that they might have needed to pull a 737-700 or 737-800 from the LAS-OAK route to accommodate some other route that was using the Max 8 and cancel the mid-afternoon flight I was booked on.
They were at least good enough to put me on a nonstop flight that’s only an hour and a half later in the afternoon. I just looked on their site, and that flight is completely sold out. Sardineville, here I come!
It’s an unhappy situation for everyone involved, so my best advice is check your flight status a day or two before departure and pack your patience!
This is golden advice, and I thank you all!
I just did, and it says that my flight utilizes the 747-700, not the MAX 8, and that’s in both directions. Thanks for that tip!
Now, my beef. When I saw this on the evening news, it was all very dramatic. They said that Southwest was a very affected airline because of the number of MAX 8 planes that they have. They gave the impression that the airline was all but crippled and would be a nightmare to deal with. It’s just another example of “shock news” designed to cultivate ratings. I’m really disgusted.
This used to be a very big difference between Southwest and the other airlines, but the legacy airlines are a lot more stingy about this than they used to be. They’ll do it eventually, if they really need to, but their need will often be measured in days rather than hours.
I assume you mean a 737-700, as Southwest doesn’t fly any 747s.