Effective August 1, 2026 Southwest Airlines will begin boarding Boeing 737-800 and 737 MAX 8 aircraft 5 minutes earlier, according to Paddle Your Own Kanoo. The airline has not announced the change, but the flight attendants union put out the word to cabin crew. I wrote that this was inevitable in February 2025 as a result of checked bag fees.
Update: Southwest Airlines says, contra the report above, that flight attendants will be required to show up earlier, but passengers will not board earlier.
Beginning Aug. 1, our Flight Attendants will arrive five minutes earlier than before for certain flights so we can be prepared to begin boarding as early as 30 minutes before departure. There is no change to our schedules or to boarding time for Customers, which ranges between 30 and 45 minutes depending on aircraft type and route.
| Operation | Flight-attendant report time | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Domestic 737-800/MAX 8 | T-35 | Five minutes earlier |
| Domestic 737-700 | T-30 | No change |
| International/Hawaii | T-45 | No change |
As of June 30, Southwest’s fleet consisted of 803 aircraft. 515 aircraft, or 64.1% of the fleet, are in the affected group.
- 192 737-800s
- 323 737 MAX 8s
- 288 737-700s
Southwest eliminated two free checked bags for most newly booked passengers beginning May 28, 2025. More passengers consequently carried bags aboard, producing fuller bins, more bin-searching and more gate-checking. This slows down the boarding process.
Assigned seating began January 27, 2026. Passengers no longer rush on, scrambling for the best seats. And instead of spreading themselves according to available space, passengers reach their assigned rows, discover full bins and move about the crowded aisle looking for space. That also takes time.
In March, the airline encouraged crews to begin boarding early whenever all required flight attendants were present. Their union, TWU Local 556, objected because Southwest flight attendants do not receive separate boarding pay.
The 2024 flight attendant contract permits variable aircraft report times from T-30 through T-45, requires 90 days’ union notice, and says the selected times must appear in bid materials and remain consistent during the bid period. The union’s annotation says T-45 flexibility was first negotiated in 2016 but was not implemented because of technology problems.
- This change means passengers have to show up at the gate earlier, and spend more time onboard, if they want overhead bin space.
- It also reduces time available for cleaning planes between flights
- And where the schedule has a tight turn, that means adjustments need to be made pushing departure times five minutes later – or more aircraft to accommodate the same number of flights.
Southwest historically built its model around roughly 25-minute turns. Early in its history, when they were struggling financially and had to give back one of their aircraft to Boeing, they invented the ’10-minute turn’ to keep their schedule depsite having one less plane. Passengers deplaned out the back stairs while the next flight was boarding at the front.
Greg Wells, then Southwest’s Senior Vice President of Operations, once explained that schedule padding “would cost us approximately eight to 10 airplanes of flying per day” if “we were to add just a couple of minutes of block time to each flight in our schedule.” At the time, Southwest had 548 aircraft.
Since then there’s been 46.5% growth in the fleet, so 8-10 aircraft in 2010 scales to 12-15 planes today. At $55 million per aircraft that’s a cost of $660 to $825 million. That’s a hidden cost of Southwest’s checked bag fees that nobody calculates.
Last year, American Airlines started boarding most domestic flights at T-40 instead of T-35. That brought them closer to industry standard, but meant that each trip became five minutes longer. Southwest’s 30-minute boarding window was one of the last great benefits of flying the airline, respecting passenger time.
The real villains here are the short-term-profit at-all-cost thirsty vampires at Elliott Management. Those activist investors stripped away the two free bags and open seating to juice Wall Street yields, leaving passengers poorer and frontline employees to catch the fallout. Blame the boardroom raiders, not the people working the gate.
Ahhh, the corporate mentality of everything is perfect but only we can make it even more perfecter. Take a system that most people were mostly happy and satisfied with, and screw it up beyond all recognition. I’d write a longer comment but I need to head out to Circuit City for a new TV and then hop over to Toys-R-Us to do some early Christmas shopping.
As @1990 alludes to, the only people that made out well in this whole fiasco were the folks at Elliott Management.
@Lucky Larry — I’d write more, too, but I just landed on my Pan Am flight, need to check-in at Howard Johnson’s, and head to CompUSA for a dial-up modem before Borders closes.
It’s the same vulture-capital playbook. Strip a brand’s value to the bone, use frontline workers as human shields against furious customers, and cash-out while the company dies.
Actually if the gate agents do their job properly and the flight attendants make regular announcements getting the idiots in the aisle to stow their bags, sit down and STFU (personally I’d like to see cattle prods in place) a 737 can be boarded within 30 minutes.
One thing the 40 minutes does is sometimes allows the plane to depart 5-10 minutes early. That can make a difference at a large hub airport where take offs can get bogged down.
“That’s a hidden cost of Southwest’s checked bag fees that nobody calculates” …except those of us who’ve flown them a lot. Going for the cash grab for bags ran counter to the operations efficiency they always had. But I guess as long as Elliott got a net of $5 on it all…it was worth it.
@Michael e Dunigan — Mhm. They traded three decades of operational efficiency and goodwill for a short-term hedge fund payout.
And right on cue, @George Romey rushes to blame flight attendants and gate agents for the fallout. Imagine boasting about your Concierge Key status on every thread just to end up doing free PR for Elliott Management. Embarrassing.
In the good old days, when the airline was under the leadership of the beloved Herb Kelleher and Coleen Barrett, they were hugely loved and profitable, even in the toughest of times. Then Herb retired and Gary Kelly took over. GK imagined himself the smartest person to ever lead an airline and immediately started making changes to what Herb had built because he, like a petulant teenager, knew more than Herb. He systematically took apart everything Southwest stood for. And, he began pandering to the whiners so they could feel special. When the others started charging for bags, many of their Customers switched, telling employees how much they appreciated not being gouged for more and more money. So GK never touched the bags fly free but kept telling Customers that unless they had status, they really were not anything of value. He truly did not value employees either, especially front line employees as they kept having to deal with the complaints from the Status Customers who were not happy if they could not have the entire plane to themselves. The wheelchair mess, created by Gary Kelly, has since gotten beck to normal because now the truly in need are the only ones in them. GK could see what he was striving for on the horizon and may have personally invited the Predator to descend, but first he set up his successor to take the heat.
Herb was far and away smarter than GK. He always knew that a plane on the ground is not making money. He designed Southwest to be profitable, and to respect each and every passenger, no matter how much they paid for their ticket. Passengers could sometimes find Herb greeting them at the gate or passing out Peanuts and snacks on the airplane. He knew the value of making all of the passengers feel valued. And until GK, they came back over and over.
An idle aircraft sitting on the ground, even for 5 extra minutes, is changing the bottom line, and not for the better.
You do realize the quick turns were back in the days of 60% to 70% load factors and usually out of less crowded airports. And by the way who cleaned the planes? The flight attendants between flights.
Southwest also flew the smaller 700 series.
@George Romey — Oof. What a sad attempt at shifting goal posts. A gish-gallop of “Ignore what actually matters! Look over here! Aircraft variants! Load factor! Dirty planes!”
You went from advocating “cattle prods” for passengers and dunking on gate agents to lecturing us on 737-700s. And yet, the math hasn’t changed. When a hedge fund kills two free checked bags to extract $800M in fees, everyone hoards carry-ons and clogs the aisle. That’s not a load-factor problem; it’s an operational disaster engineered by Elliott Management, and no amount of distraction changes the fact that you’re blaming frontline workers for Wall Street’s greed.
Quick! Hop over to OMAAT to repeat your same tired tropes. I’ll be waiting for you there, too.
I wonder what the cost is to WN in lost customer loyalty? Historically, before the Elliott fiasco, Southwest was my first choice, especially when flying direct. Now I favor United or Delta because the prices are roughly the same, but the hassle factor with Southwest is higher (flying out of MCO yesterday with a ton of pre-boarders was unpleasant), and the inflight product is vastly inferior.
I’ve said it before “what was once the happiest, most friendly airline in the sky has now just become a cesspool just like every other carrier” Probably never fly SW again since I get less hassle from the big two.
@1990: Correct on the private equity short-term focus and destruction of brand equity long term.
This explains the fact that most of my November flights were changed by 5 minutes.
SWA could sell assigned overhead bin space (by number) and make bank for those who want to avoid the cattle car effect.
Bob Jordan waiting to be told what to do next…never gets old.
@nsx at FlyerTalk — Yup. I have one in October that did, too! Just 5 minutes. Bah!
There are a couple of problems I see, and I fly every other week
1st -Foreigners not understanding the boarding process at all (no offense at all)
2nd – Everyone trying to bring their house with them on board 4 and 5 bags then get upset when told to size down when they make several announcements
3rd – Tying up the aisle when everyone is trying to board for the love of God put your stuff down or up or whatever you’re going to do and clear the aisle.