Southwest Runs out of Flight Numbers

Southwest Airlines unveiled its schedule out until January of next year today. Southwest has, with the help of new scheduling software, been optimizing its flight schedule for increased efficiency. It was this gain that allowed them to open up several cities without any actual growth.

On a typical, non-Holiday Sunday this November and December, they’ve scheduled 2878 daily departures.  However, for New Year’s Sunday…3145 flights; for Christmas Sunday 3163 flights; and for the busiest  Sunday, Thanksgiving…3315 departures.

This created a problem for the airline, as the highest flight number Southwest used was 3999. With the new flights and optimizations, they had to adjust the system. Flight numbers now go up to 5999, which required testing, tweaking, and monitoring to ensure no computer problems with this amendment.