Things in the Sky

Apologies in advance for a quickly-written post. Last night I began having a lot of trouble with my laptop. My biggest fear is that I’ll end up with a new hard drive today.

Anyway, Midwest announced some new routes last week, and the airline continues to rebuild its route map from past cuts. When Midwest dumped its MD-80s Milwaukee lost nonstop service to Seattle, forcing passengers to go through Kansas City (and more recently, Denver as well). Well, Midwest is restoring Milwaukee service on a seasonal basis three times a week from May 14 to June 10, and then four times a week until September 6. The schedule of the service is kind of interesting – the outbound leaves at 7:55 PM, arrives at 11:20 PM, then leaves from Seattle at 11:45 and comes back to Milwaukee at 5:35 AM.

I found it pretty interesting that it was decided to make the SEA-MKE route a redeye. I think one reason for that Midwest  schedule is so that E190 can fly that route at night while keeping its normal schedule during the day. (On a side note, at first it seems that Midwest’s schedule was a bit unique, but it appears that AirTran has a redeye now as well. I’m not sure if that’s new, though.)

Second, Midwest is coming back to San Diego from April to November with daily service from Milwaukee. When that station was cut, it only had service from Kansas city. The service will be provided with Frontier A319s.

Additionally, Frontier will be adding another flight between Milwaukee and Denver, for a combined six flights between the cities from Frontier and Midwest. My hope is that the route is being added because demand for codeshare routes between the two airlines.

On a side note, Midwest’s press release mentions how both the Frontier A319 and Midwest E190 feature STRETCH seating. Does this mean that Midwest Signature Service has been rebranded? (Midwest didn’t reply to my question on that one.)

Anyway, I’ll have more thoughts on Frontier/Midwest/Republic when earnings come out later this week…and when I have a working laptop.