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Technology Issue Delays More Than 2200 Southwest Flights Tuesday
Oh boy, we flew on Southwest 737 last summer. They switched from the long time stable DC-10 to this new plane.
Hi @Sven - The DC-10 is a wide-body type of aircraft, probably closer to the early 747s in size than the 737. It’s very unlikely SW ever used it. Suspect you meant to refer to different generations of the 737, which has grown greatly in size and capabilities over its 50 decades in service.
“Since its inception, Southwest Airlines has almost exclusively operated Boeing 737 aircraft (except for a brief period when it leased and flew some Boeing 727-200 aircraft). Southwest is the world's largest operator of the Boeing 737.”
“In November 2020, the FAA formally ended the 737 MAX grounding, and Southwest began the process of returning its 34 737 MAX aircraft to service and retraining all of its pilots. On March 11, 2021, Southwest resumed 737 MAX operation, becoming the fourth US airline to do so.”
“In October 2020, Southwest announced that it was considering the Airbus A220 as an alternative to the MAX 7 to replace its 737-700s, with deliveries from 2025. However, in March 2021 Southwest announced an order for 100 MAX 7 jets with deliveries from 2022 and said that negotiations with Airbus were never initiated.” -
Historically, the 737 line has been a very reliable aircraft and fit in well with Southwest’s point-to-point short-haul service model, which demanded high frequency takeoffs and landings and fast turn-around times, plus the ability to operate out of smaller airfields with shorter runways. Of course, the lastest 737 version, the MAX has created much havoc for SW.
We are a long way from "If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going"!
However my commercial pilot friends insisted they were not worried about the Max's initial problems, because they knew how to turn off the automatic control system
They claimed the two crashes could have been prevented with better training.
That's probably fairly accurate, but of course part of that whole fiasco was the fact that Boeing claimed that additional training was unnecessary, and made that a selling point.
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Some snippets from Wikipedia:
“Since its inception, Southwest Airlines has almost exclusively operated Boeing 737 aircraft (except for a brief period when it leased and flew some Boeing 727-200 aircraft). Southwest is the world's largest operator of the Boeing 737.”
“In November 2020, the FAA formally ended the 737 MAX grounding, and Southwest began the process of returning its 34 737 MAX aircraft to service and retraining all of its pilots. On March 11, 2021, Southwest resumed 737 MAX operation, becoming the fourth US airline to do so.”
“In October 2020, Southwest announced that it was considering the Airbus A220 as an alternative to the MAX 7 to replace its 737-700s, with deliveries from 2025. However, in March 2021 Southwest announced an order for 100 MAX 7 jets with deliveries from 2022 and said that negotiations with Airbus were never initiated.”
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Historically, the 737 line has been a very reliable aircraft and fit in well with Southwest’s point-to-point short-haul service model, which demanded high frequency takeoffs and landings and fast turn-around times, plus the ability to operate out of smaller airfields with shorter runways. Of course, the lastest 737 version, the MAX has created much havoc for SW.
However my commercial pilot friends insisted they were not worried about the Max's initial problems, because they knew how to turn off the automatic control system
They claimed the two crashes could have been prevented with better training.