96 AIRLINER WORLD JUNE 2018
Southwest Airlines’ leader-
ship team (left to right):
Mike van de Ven (COO), Gary
C Kelly (CEO, chairperson)
and Tom Nealon (president)- together they steered the
company to a record net
income of $3.5bn in 2017.
“First and foremost are our
people and our culture,”
van de Ven states. “We take
care of our people and they
take care of our customers.
We find that by getting these
right, the economics for our
shareholders just seem to
work out.
AVIATION IMAGE NETWORK /
SIMON GREGORYSIMON GREGORYthere, we’ve probably got about 50 more
destinations that we think we can fly to.
That’s a 50% increase from where we
are today.” As he noted earlier, all that
could take up to 20 years to achieve.
“When we think about where we are
growing in the future, we think about
a couple of different things. First of all,
in our existing network, are there more
frequencies we need? And there’s a list
of priorities that we have with that. The
next thing we think about are the dots
in our existing network that aren’t c
onnected with non-stop services, and
we have priorities there too. Then
come those 50 new dots over the next
20 years. After that it’s the same play –
add frequencies to those dots,” van de
Ven explains.
The move to add Hawaii exemplifies
this tactic. “We haven’t announced the
city pairs yet, but we’re the number one
carrier in the intra-California markets,
so we’re in all the big cities there.
Hawaii is the one place we cur-
rently don’t fly to and Californians
wished we did. So, we have
several launch points [dots on
the network] that I think would be
compelling,” he elaborates. “When
you do something like that and add
20-30 aeroplanes a year, say 20 inincremental growth, it just sucks up
capacity. I like that, because it gives us
a kind of slow, steady growth; we don’t
have the peaks and valleys that some-
times cause consternation. That’s been
our history over our 47 years – and it
also adds to our financial stability.”
All of this takes the story full circle to
van de Ven’s earlier point about caring
for Southwest’s hard-working people,
this time via profit-sharing, which last
year paid staff a total of $543m. “We’ve
had record profit-sharing contributions
to our employees over the last three
to five years,” he reports. “If you’re an
employee in those profit-sharing plans,
and if you choose to, you can invest
in Southwest Airlines stock. If you’ve
been an investor in that stock over the
last five years as an employee, not only
have we given you a lot of money from
profit-sharing, but then – if you
invested in our stock – you’ve had
a significant return on that
investment.”
Southwest Airlines continues to
be in the vanguard of the low-cost
sector. Many others have tried to
emulate its success...but few have
succeed ed.“We’ve had record
profit-sharing
contributions to our
employees over the last
three to five years...”
Mike van de Ven
Southwest Airlines COO