Our Success Stories: Southwest Airlines
Southwest Airlines Sings Praises of DSPatch
The airline chose DSPatch, Avtec’s touch-screen console communications system because of its simplicity, touch screen capability, and efficient design which enables the system to take up less space on the desktop. Avtec is becoming more and more the standard for OC’s in the airline industry, Wotton says. The company has 38 consoles used by dispatchers on 70 radios with online stations and 20 offline stations that fill the gap for airport locations with no regularly scheduled service.
Before DSPatch, Southwest was using a mobile radio system to communicate between dispatchers at the OC and pilots during its more than 1,500 flights per day (Today, the company has about 3,000 flights per day). The radio system also could be used as a telephone. With the installation of DSPatch, voice and phone operations were consolidated and Wotton noticed more flexibility and expandability in the system. He easily expanded the number of console positions from the initial 28 to 38 consoles.
Since federal requirements mandate Southwest to be in constant communication with its airplane pilots, there is no room for this mission critical system to fail. And it hasn’t. DSPatch has been 100 percent reliable, says Wotton. “We have never had an outage of the system.”
With built-in redundancy and no moving parts, there is very little to go wrong with DSPatch. The highly reliable design has proven to be a vital link in the airline’s operations for the past eight years.
Wotton also appreciates Avtec’s creativity. When Southwest Airlines once ran out of card slots, Avtec proposed switching some analog lines to digital lines and tripled the size of bandwidth without Southwest purchasing any equipment.
But the praise for Avtec doesn’t end there. Wotton says in a critical move in 2005, Avtec moved the entire DSPatch system into Southwest Airlines’ new OC – in half the expected time. Everything worked the first time, Wotton says of the incredible one-hour move.
Wotton’s favorite feature is the custom radio connection. Avtec’s team customized computer screens to enable dispatchers to push one button to call anywhere within the system. Avtec later added this feature to the standard DSPatch product feature set. Avtec has been a superior vendor for us, Wotton says.
