Southwest Airlines is ending service and making passengers store laptops earlier starting next week—here’s why

Southwest Airlines is ending service and making passengers store laptops earlier starting next week—here’s why

by Gary Leff on 26 November 2024

Southwest Airlines will require cabins to be prepared for landing earlier to protect cabin crew from injury at the end of each flight. From December 4, flight attendants will be seated earlier – so they will require passengers to prepare for landing when a plane drops to 18,000 feet instead of waiting at 10,000 feet.

According to an internal memo,

As first announced last week in the Leader Update and video by Steve Murtoff and Lee Kinnebrew, VP Flight Operations, significant advancements in our descent procedures that reflect our unwavering commitment to the safety and well-being of our flight attendants will begin on December 4.

Inflight Safety and the TWU 556 Health and Safety Committee have been integral in the development of these new procedures. Together, we have shaped procedures that prioritize your safety and are fully aligned with our corporate safety goal of preventing flight attendant injury.

A summary of the changes on December 4 includes:

• At the top of the descent, the pilots will make a required PA to inform the cabin that the descent phase has begun.
• At 18,000 feet, the pilots will do a high-low bell, indicating the start of sterile cockpit. This bell acts as your cue to secure the cabin for landing and to stay seated and secured in your jumpseats.

This procedural adjustment – flight attendants securing the cabin 8,000 feet earlier during descent – reflects years of research and your reporting through our Safety Management System (SMS). The evaluation of thousands of data points from flight attendant and pilot reports paired with information from the Flight Data Analysis Program (FDAP) confirmed that seating our flight attendants earlier should reduce flight attendant injuries by at least 20%. Inflight and Flight Ops will validate the effectiveness of these new procedures, and if we do not achieve the desired result, we will continue to find solutions. We are also committed to sharing updates on these results on a regular basis.

This change requires a final review of the cabin earlier. The final “please prepare for landing announcement” will come 8,000 feet earlier, allowing the crew to complete their tasks and be seated sooner. For customers, this means

• cabin service ends earlier
• drinks will be collected earlier
• seats must be placed in the upright and locked position earlier
• carrier bags and personal belongings must be stored earlier

For a while I used a convertible notebook instead of my more traditional ultraportable laptop. I don’t mind using a tablet most of the time. The only reason I liked my Lenovo Yoga was because I could go into tablet mode during take-off and landing when you need laptops stored but you are still allowed to use tablets.

I often want to get every last minute of productivity out of my flights. Although the size of that device was probably larger than it should have been for continued use when converted to a tablet, it was the mental bucket that crew members always put it in and no one ever asked me to put it away.

I’ve been back to a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon, and while I notice that not all crews force put away laptops, I always put it away when asked and then just switch to my phone. I don’t like the idea of ​​putting the laptop away earlier than necessary. It won’t be here for landing as much as ‘in the past, so the flight attendants see it’s gone before they even sit down’.

United has also moved to laptops in the past. And flight attendant safety sounds great, especially when marked as a 20% improvement, although this projection remains from a small base and this does not necessarily represent the same risk as abusive passengers or clear air turbulence.

Airlines should have at least two agents at boarding gates to watch out for intoxicated customers, rather than the current cost-cutting trend of single agent boarding – the change to prepare the cabin for landing is a way of prioritizing safety when it does not cost the airline extra money.

I will note that it might be fine to put my laptop away early on Southwest because their onboard wifi lags so significantly in the industry. These days, only Frontier and Allegiant, which don’t offer wifi, are worse.

More seen from the wing