Grn Air

At Southwest Airlines’ media day last fall, the company’s CEO, Gary Kelly, introduced the plane that would supposedly revolutionize air travel. What he wanted to talk about more than anything, though, was pleather. “We’re testing two different materials” for the airplane’s seat covers, Kelly explained to reporters in a hangar next door to the company’s Dallas headquarters:

E-Leather, “an ecofriendly, lightweight, and scuff-resistant man-made alternative to traditional leather,” and Izit Leather, “a lightweight product that’s economical. It’s recyclable. It’s durable.” The latter, he continued methodically, as if reading a quarterly earnings report, “also has the appearance and the touch of leather.” The airline industry might be on the brink of failure—profits shrinking, fuel prices mounting, Greenpeace nagging—but, by God, the pleather feels real.

Meet Southwest’s “green plane,” a four-year-old Boeing 737 whose interior has been converted into a test lab for environmentally gentle materials, from recyclable carpet tiles and lightweight foam cushions to, yes, pleather seat covers. All told, the new products shave 519 pounds from the plane, conserving an estimated 10,000 gallons of jet fuel a year. If Southwest refurbished its entire fleet, it would cut at least eight million gallons annually. That, Kelly assured us, scanning his prepared remarks, is “incredible emissions savings.”

This from an industry with the environmental instincts of a wildcatter? Each year, planes spew more than 600 million tons of CO2 (not to mention a litany of other bad stuff). That’s the rough equivalent of Australia and New Zealand’s combined carbon footprint, and it’s expected to double by 2025. Airline executives have largely responded with a shrug. But as commercial aviation logs another year of multibillion-dollar losses (its seventh in nine years) and jet fuel rises north of $2 a gallon, carriers are glimpsing a financial stake in their own ecoheroism. To that end, Southwest’s green plane flies on a message of shrewd environmentalism and shrewder business. Whether there’s any such thing as a green plane is another matter.

On October 21 of last year, Southwest Flight 662 took off from Dallas Love Field Airport and winged its way toward Albuquerque. It was, the cabin crew happily announced, the green plane’s maiden voyage. Otherwise, the passengers would scarcely have noticed. They trudged down a navy carpeted aisle that looked like any other navy carpeted aisle, except that it was made of recyclable squares and not landfill-bound strips. They passed those bumperlike protrusions (which protect aisle seats from beverage carts and invariably catch someone’s bag), now cast in metal instead of plastic. And they slumped into their seats, which looked the same—somber tan and navy—and, unfortunately, felt the same, with just 32 to 33 inches of legroom. Each, though, was two pounds lighter than a standard coach seat. Some people might have observed that their bags slipped more easily beneath the seat in front of them, thanks to new canvas life-jacket pouches that are 0.77 pounds leaner than the old plastic ones. But for most passengers, the green plane was like all Southwest planes: No fancy engineering. No high-tech accoutrements. No frills.

It’s the Southwest way. Founded by a couple of swashbuckling Texans on the eve of the first U.S. oil crisis, Southwest was the first carrier to make air travel cheap and fun. Short, frequent flying was its business, and a rakish, wink-wink corporate culture its trademark. Passengers bought bargain tickets at Love Machines and boarded Love Birds, where erstwhile baton twirlers in hot pants and go-go boots served Love Bites and Love Potion, playing to the company’s (pre–Anita Hill) motto: “Somebody Else Up There Loves You.” The business model took off. Within years, Southwest’s no-frills MO had upended the airline industry, forcing other carriers to slash ticket prices to stay competitive.

All of which proved lucrative, until recently. The Great Recession has decimated commercial aviation. Southwest still turns an annual profit, but barely. Meanwhile, the environmental problem has grown more vexsome with every passing year. Airplanes accelerate climate change by dumping more than just CO2 into the atmosphere (contrails and nitrogen oxide count among their harmful emissions), a fact much on the mind of any conscientious consumer worth his organic salt. A few carriers have made a show of their earth-saving efforts. Richard Branson recently dispatched a Virgin plane fueled on 20 percent coconut oil. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flew an aircraft on 50 percent camelina, an inedible shrub. And Boeing plans to deliver its most fuel-efficient aircraft to date, the gorgeous 787 Dreamliner, by year’s end. Southwest, for its part, took the cheap and fun route. “What makes Southwest Southwest is that we can do things inexpensively,” says Geoffrey Buschur, a systems engineer. “And because we were on a tight budget, we got creative.” They rang the decorators.

Southwest’s in-house “green team” had been fixing for a green plane, anyway. At the same time, Buschur and his engineering colleagues wanted to tweak the cabin to streamline its weight and improve its durability, while marketing eyed an opportunity to create a flying billboard for the better angels of our nature. “Everyone heard about what the other was doing, and the group just came up with this idea [of a green plane],” says Melanie Jones, a Southwest spokeswoman. She then adds with a laugh, “Though the green team will tell you it was their idea, and marketing will tell you it was their idea.”