Southwest resumes flights to Houston post storm Harvey

Bloomberg

Southwest Airlines Co. resumed commercial service to Houston in the wake of flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey, landing its first passenger flight at William P. Hobby airport, according to tracking website lightAware.com.
That puts Southwest behind United Continental Holdings Inc. and American Airlines Group Inc., which started limited service late last week at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport.
Since August 24, a day before the record-breaking storm made landfall in Texas, the Dallas-based carrier has held sprawling, twice-daily emergency meetings. At the Friday morning session, which a Bloomberg reporter attended, staff discussed the status of aid for storm-affected employees, ferrying crew members to Houston from Dallas and Chicago and ensuring that enough fuel reaches airports even beyond Harvey’s path.
“It feels like something we can execute well, and like we have a good shot at being up to full strength next week,” Chief Operating Officer Michael Van de Ven said. Southwest plans to reach
100 percent on September 9, while its international flights from the airport are slated to resume September 4.
“This isn’t a headquarters-driven decision,” Chief Executive Officer Gary Kelly said. “It’s one that’s been collaborative. We thought that waiting until Saturday was the appropriate thing to do to mitigate the risk.”

Stranded Crews
The logistics are substantial. Harvey’s record-breaking rain stranded planes—and crews—in inconvenient locations.
Southwest, which carries the most domestic passengers in the US, used a handful of flights on Friday and Saturday to transport Houston-based employees who had been unable to return home, and evacuate others from the Texas city.
Southwest has a sufficient near-term supply of jet kerosene. But the carrier is anxious about closed pipelines from Gulf Coast refineries and arranged for tanker trucks to carry fuel to Dallas.
The airline also is reminding workers to conserve fuel. Crews are advised to taxi on one engine instead of two and to reduce the use of auxiliary power units for lights and climate control when parked. Kelly said he was “absolutely” concerned about fuel availability. Southwest gets about one-third of its jet kerosene from Gulf Coast refineries.
Workers and passengers were stranded at Hobby on August 26 as Harvey pounded Houston. The airline had been operating at 50 percent of its schedule at the airport at the time and had planned to continue throughout the storm. But when Harvey dumped 9 inches of rain on the area in 90 minutes, all service stopped.
“We weren’t put to bed for the night yet,” Van de Ven said. “We still had that level of staffing at the airport: customer-service agents, ramp agents, operations agents, mechanics, provisioning and cargo agents. A lot of them got stuck there. That night, the airport was an island.”

Fuel supply ensured
Bloomberg

Southwest Airlines Co., the largest US airline by domestic passengers, is working to ensure a steady supply of jet fuel after Hurricane Harvey forced the shutdown of crude-oil refineries and pipelines along the Gulf Coast.
“It’s something we are concerned about and are working very aggressively to manage,” Chief Executive Officer Gary Kelly said in an interview. “I don’t expect any problem, but this is an evolving crisis.”
The rush to guarantee the fuel supply underscores the fallout on US supply chains from widespread flooding in Houston and along the Texas and Louisiana coast after record rainfall.
Southwest relies on the region for more than a third of its jet kerosene, although not all refineries were affected, Kelly said. Two pipelines that supply the Dallas-based carrier have been closed.
“It’s not to the point where there should be panic,” Kelly said. “The concern is along the lines of, we know there’s an issue and we have to take steps to mitigate it and that work is underway. We won’t have trouble based on what we know right now sourcing jet fuel to power our flights.”
Jet fuel for immediate delivery in New York Harbor,
a benchmark for US airlines, surged 16 percent to $2.12
a gallon.