Southwest Airlines will suspend service starting next week and require passengers to stow their laptops early – here’s why

from Gary Leff on November 26, 2024

Southwest Airlines will require cabins to be prepared for landing earlier to protect cabin crew from injury at the end of each flight. Starting December 4th, flight attendants will have to sit earlier. Therefore, passengers must prepare to land when a flight descends to 18,000 feet rather than waiting until 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 will begin on December 4, reflecting our unwavering commitment to the safety and well-being of our flight attendants.

Inflight Safety and the TWU 556 Health and Safety Committee were instrumental in the development of these new procedures. Together, we have developed procedures that put your safety first and are fully aligned with our corporate safety goals to prevent flight attendant injuries.

A summary of the December 4th changes includes:

• At the end of the descent, the pilots issue a required PA to inform the cabin that the descent phase has begun.
• At 18,000 feet, the pilots sound a high, low chime, signaling the start of the sterile flight deck. This bell serves as a cue to secure the cabin for landing and to sit and secure in your jump seats.

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

This change requires earlier final passes of the cabin. The final announcement, “Please prepare to land,” is made 8,000 feet earlier to allow the crew to complete their tasks more quickly and be seated sooner. For customers this means:

• Cabin service ends earlier
• Drinks will be picked up earlier
• The seats must be placed in the upright and locked position beforehand
• Hand luggage and personal items must be stowed away earlier

For a while, I used a convertible notebook instead of my more traditional ultraportable laptop. Most of the time I don’t care about using a tablet. The only reason I liked my Lenovo Yoga was because I could switch to tablet mode during takeoff and landing when laptops need to be stowed away but tablets can still be used.

I often want to squeeze every last minute of my productivity. Although the device was probably larger than it should have been in order to continue to be used, the crew members always put it in when it was converted into a tablet, which is the mental bucket, and no one ever asked me to put it away.

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad again. I don’t like the idea of ​​putting the laptop away sooner than necessary. It won’t be here for landing as much as “earlier so the flight attendants would see it was gone before they sat themselves down.”

United also switched to laptops earlier. And flight attendant safety sounds great, especially when you’re citing a 20% improvement, although that forecast is still off a small base and doesn’t necessarily pose the same risk as abusive passengers or clear air turbulence.

Airlines should have at least two employees at boarding gates to watch out for drunk customers instead of following the current cost-cutting trend of having a single employee boarding – the change to prepare the cabin for landing is a way to prioritize safety if it doesn’t cost the airline extra.

I would like to note that it might be okay to put my laptop away early on Southwest since the onboard Wi-Fi lags so significantly behind the industry. These days, only Frontier and Allegiant, which don’t offer Wi-Fi, are worse.

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