Southwest Airlines Simulation

Throughout the course of the semester, we’ve learned a lot about how much money, work and even luck it takes to run an airline in the real world through this simulation. Through it all though our airline fared pretty well for over the course of the semester through good times and in bad. Before we ever made any quarterly decisions, we first had to come up with our start-up decisions before we could begin our airline. Our first major decision was coming up with an airline name for our company. We agreed to call our airline NetJet since we thought it had a catchy name to it, as well as being a simple name the public could recognize. It also fit well with our overall strategic plan since we wanted to expand (or in our case web out) to more destinations

For example, when we leased our first three aircrafts, they were all Embraer Brasilia since they offered a good amount of seats, they were modern aircraft, and offered great mileage distance to places we wanted to offer to customers. In addition, we also used Southwest’s model of offering the best deals and rates on these destinations to customers. By doing this we thought we could attract more customers in the beginning compared to other airlines, and get us off to a great start. Next was how we were going to operate on a management and operation stand point for our company. Our primarily focuses in this area was to have great quality, reliability, and to keep our aircrafts up to date in maintenance since we’ve learned in the class that “aircraft in maintenance makes no money for the company”. We also wanted to make sure that we put our employees first in our company, since we want to keep them happy, and look forward to come work for us; in addition, we agreed that if we promote within our company they would want to stay and work for us, which in turn would look good on our company records through the