Southwest Airlines plans to speed up its turnaround — literally

After weathering recent turbulence, Southwest Airlines (LUV-5.66%) reported $67 million in third-quarter net income Thursday on $6.9 billion in operating revenue. But now that the dust has settled in its fight with activist hedge fund Elliott Investment Management, the company is focusing on what comes next.

“As we shared at Investor Day, our plan is detailed, actionable, and highly intentional,” CEO Bob Jordan said during the company’s earnings call. “We are fully committed to delivering the robust set of tactical and strategic initiatives we presented and restoring the financial prosperity that our plan supports and that Southwest and our shareholders expect.”

One aspect of that plan is to speed up how quickly it gets planes back in the air after passengers disembark. At that recent Investor Day, Southwest bragged that it turned around domestic-trip planes in 49 minutes on average, faster than any of its U.S. competitors. It wants to cut that figure by an additional five minutes, Jordan said on the call, and it’s already baking that reduction into the schedules for a number of its central hubs.

Besides that, the company is hoping to do more overnight “red-eye” flights. Starting in February, Southwest wants to have five of them a day before eventually building to 50 by 2027.

Since it can’t count on securing new Boeing planes because of production delays that were slowing things down even before January’s Alaska Airlines door plug blowout and the planemaker’s ongoing machinists’ strike, Jordan thinks that Southwest’s rapid-fire nocturnal flying will create the equivalent of an extra 34 aircraft by the end of next year.

“The turn and red-eye initiatives allow us to have modest year-over-year capacity growth of 1% to 2% in 2025, and limit our planned aircraft CapEx exclusively for fleet modernization,” Jordan said during the call.