Site Admin

Joined: 17 Jun 2005
Posts: 949
Location: Carmel, IN

Was at the airport last Wed. morning to see someone off on a NW flight. The NW area was totally swamped. The line outside for skycap service stretched from the NW door to the SW door - probably 120 or more people in line. The inside line for ticketing/luggage was totally full through the back-and-forth dividers, and they actually had a back-and-forth thing set up on the other side of the hall (by the windows that look out onto the driveway where cars drop off passengers), that fed into the main back-and-forth. There were probably another 200+ people in those lines. Fortunately, my passenger had checked in online and only needed to use the bag drop, but there were two lines for that, each of which probably had 40 people in it. There was one guy handling both bag drop lines plus one regular checkin line. There were maybe three more agents behind the counter to handle everyone else, plus one agent helping people find the right line.

The most interesting thing was, every other airline had virtually no line at the check-in counter. (Although I couldn't see over to the other side where UA, US, etc. check in). The longest line among the other airlines was DL, with maybe 10 people waiting. WN and F9 were deserted. CO only had a couple, American had more agents working than NW did, and most were standing around looking bored. This was around 7 am.

So I guess it's good, in part, because it suggests that NW's planes are full and they've got a lot of people flying from IND. But on the other hand, if people continue to experience long lines and waiting, when they see the other airlines with very fast check-ins, they might start to choose other airlines over NW to avoid the hassle.

And Concourse A security looked to be moving pretty fast, btw.

Site Admin

Joined: 15 Jun 2005
Posts: 2316
Location: Indianapolis, IN

I had the NW loads checked around either Memorial Day or Independence Day and it was something like 99.4% or 99.6% for the day.

Site Admin

Joined: 17 Jun 2005
Posts: 949
Location: Carmel, IN

When will you have data for the Thanskgiving-Xmas period? I'd be interested to see if their loads have remained that high. The question is, however - are they packing the planes full with fares that make them money? You can have high load factors but lose money, a la Independence Air. What they need are RPM's out of IND.

Member

Joined: 14 Jun 2006
Posts: 142
Location: IND

around 7AM at that time of year is about as crowded as it will get!

If you were there two more hours....the NW line would have had less than 10 people in line.

And the 29th wasn't that bad!