A Southwest Airlines flight made a detour to drop off a flight attendant needed on another plane
- A Southwest flight from Texas to Missouri made an unscheduled stop in Kansas.
- The detour allowed a flight attendant needed on another flight to get off.
A Southwest Airlines flight made an extra stop in a different state so a flight attendant needed on another plane could be dropped off.
The Friday morning flight was scheduled to take passengers directly from Dallas Love Field, Texas, to Kansas City International Airport, Missouri.
But data from tracking site FlightAware shows the Boeing 737 stopped off at Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport in Kansas on the way. It then landed in Kansas City less than an hour behind schedule.
Southwest told Insider that it had to bring a flight attendant to Wichita so that a flight could take off after one scheduled to work had fallen sick. "We don't have flight crews based in Wichita, so we rely on crews that finished their duties the night prior and stayed overnight there to start their next duty day," a spokesperson said.
The airline said that the alternative would have been to bring a flight attendant on the next flight to arrive at Wichita, "which wasn't until much later" and would have "heavily" delayed flights throughout the day. The first Southwest flight to land at Wichita each day is one from St Louis, Missouri, due at noon. The rerouted flight from Dallas arrived more than three hours before this.
Southwest has a crew base in Dallas, and bringing in a flight attendant from there led to just a "small arrival delay" into Kansas City and supported "the entire day's operation," the spokesperson said. "Very creative and quick thinking from our teams," they added.
Flying a pilot or cabin crew to another airport so they can work a flight is known as "deadheading." This happens, for example, if a flight attendant calls in sick at the last minute and a replacement must be found to comply with aircraft staffing rules.
A passenger on the flight told View From the Wing, the aviation site that first reported on the detour, that passengers were only told of the stop just before boarding. The pilot apologized and said that he'd never experienced such a situation, they added.