Field Notes: More Southwest Backlash, One MILLION Miles, and Snow
Latest observations from too much time on the road and not enough time writing
We’ve been traveling way more than planned here in early 2026. Ironically, the one thing that keeps us from posting about the airlines is spending too much time ON the airlines. As we navigate from airport to airport, here are some things that grabbed our attention.
Nostra-dAL-mus?
We’re going to go ahead and declare vindication on our earlier prediction that Southwest’s move to assigned seating last month would cause “chaos.” What we did not expect is that the strongest backlash would come from the airline’s best customers. As we mentioned in another prior post, A-List customers who used to always board first and comfortably scatter throughout the plane now have to do the same overheard bin jockeying that other big US carrier customers have been doing for years. Do you really think all those people on the Monday 8 a.m. flight from DFW to LAX or from ORD to SFO want to be standing at the gate (and staring down at their phones) a whopping 45 minutes before departure?1 Of course not! But they’d all rather do that than wait at baggage claim. Once they land, they’ve got to get to that very important meeting about the meeting next week.2
Now there are some news pieces and desperate social media threads speculating about Southwest returning to open seating.
That’s not going to happen.
Southwest says they had research indicating customers preferred assigned seats. And that may be true. But anyone with more than a hot minute in the airline biz knows that this change was really made to start generating additional revenue from paid seat selection. And, since Southwest’s stock price is up 79% in the last year, perhaps it was the right call. The investors at Elliott who drove these changes are certainly happy.3
When it comes to this business, sometimes what’s good for the airline isn’t great for the customer. This will probably never change.
Another Milestone Falls in the Forest
In one of our first posts, we noted how Delta celebrated another passenger on our flight getting to one million miles. There was an announcement and a little bit of fanfare onboard before we left.
Well, someone very close to this blog may have crossed one million miles on United last week. And that person may have been excited about some sort of acknowledgment onboard. And perhaps that person may have been disappointed when nothing was done, but it was a mess in Denver last week and that person understood that things sometimes get lost in the shuffle. So maybe that person figured that he would at least receive a celebratory email the next day because you really just need to program robots to do that. And perhaps that email never came and that person only got a generic splash page message when he happened to log into his account a couple days later.
But who can say for sure?
Snowstorm Nerdfest 2026
We try to keep the #avgeek tendencies in check, despite the certified bona fides. (Yes, we’ve been to Maho beach.4)
However, sometimes tendencies get the better of us, and that was certainly the case on Sunday night as the latest crippling winter storm made its way into NYC. While arrivals were virtually shut down, a few international flights were trying to make their way out of Newark before things came to a halt. Operationally, airlines put special emphasis on these flights because if they don’t get out, there is no plane waiting on the other side of the ocean to bring passengers and crew back.5
By using a combination of Flightradar24.com and LiveATC.net, we were able to enjoy a thrilling, tense and occasionally exasperating symphony of dispatchers, controllers, de-icing truck operators, snow plow drivers, pilots, and co-pilots as they navigated snow-covered taxiways, maintenance issues, and the tick-tick-tick of the clock. Congrats to the folks who got out to Edinburgh, Frankfurt, and Sao Paulo. Better luck next time those of you who were headed to Barcelona, Berlin, and Dubai.
As an airline-loving child, I could only imagine having that kind of real-time information at my disposal. We’ve come a long way from looking at airport terminal maps in the phone book.
Notes
We’ll likely see further “thin-slicing” of the boarding groups the way the Big 3 now do in order to get the “elite-elite” passengers onboard before the “commoner-elite” passengers — but be sure to get that credit card to get in between them!
Let he who has never had a meeting to plan another meeting cast the first Outlook invite (or stone)
Elliott Investment Management has cashed out a significant portion of its shares
We also had some personal investment in one of these flights getting out — it did not