Southwest Airlines flies 41% of the seats out of my home airport in Austin. I can’t avoid them. I’ve wanted to, and it’s not because of checked bag fees (I have status) and it’s not because I don’t love their new boarding.
I’m actually the perfect customer for the ‘new’ Southwest in a lot of ways. I’m willing to pay for more legroom so I can open up my laptop and work. They’re going to be opening lounges. I’m betting they add first class.
The biggest problem with Southwest Airlines is that their wifi doesn’t work very well. Flying Southwest has meant giving up hours of productivity for me. And things are worse now that the wifi is free. They should have raised the price of wifi, to ration what limited bandwidth they have on many aircraft.
A little over 40% of their 737 MAX 8 aircraft have ViaSat, which is good, similar to American and Delta. The rest of the fleet is hit or miss at best.
This is the same reason I avoided flying United for so long! But I flew United this week and had a Starlink-equipped regional jet. Starlink wifi just works. You’re in the air and you might as well be on the ground. In fact it works better than most home wifi networks.
The great news is that Southwest Airlines just announced they’re moving to Starlink, and that they expect to do it quickly.
- The first Starlink-equipped aircraft this summer
- More than 300 aircraft by end of the year
It appears they aren’t going to outfit the whole fleet with Starlink. They’ve just been putting in ViaSat, which works fine (but doesn’t come close to Starlink). But we should soon reach the point where flying Southwest isn’t a tradeoff with getting work done. I’d love it if they offered AC outlets at their seats – but that’s why I gave up my Lenovo X1 Carbon (poor battery) and travel with a machine that can go all day without charging.
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