Grn Air

Whatever the story, the company’s first move was to pinpoint areas that desperately needed work. The plastic seat bumpers were an obvious choice. They had been destroyed by beverage carts and unwieldy suitcases, with maintenance replacing 5,000 pieces a year. “That’s a third of how many we have in the entire fleet,” Buschur says. The leather seats, by contrast, had held up fine, but they were bulky—1,004 pounds for a complete ship set.

Then came the task of selecting new products. Options were limited. Because production volumes in the airline industry are low and restrictions ridiculously high, few manufacturers bother producing materials for the cabin. Consider the constraints: about 50 years ago, the FAA discovered that passengers were surviving the impact of plane crashes, only to die from noxious fumes or a hot blaze (i.e., death by smoldering curtains). Now the FAA requires that cabin materials, down to the seat muslin, be able to withstand a 1,500-degree Fahrenheit flame for 12 seconds without burning or releasing odors. This rules out just about everything.

The carpeting had to be built from scratch. Boeing and Teague, the aircraft manufacturer’s design firm of 64 years (which started working on this before Southwest entered the picture), wanted something that wouldn’t have to be torn out every time a passenger took ill. They called InterfaceFLOR, a commercial-flooring company that specializes in interchangeable carpet tiles and has environmental bona fides. At first, Interface said no. “Boeing, Teague, and ourselves were uncertain we could bring all of this together as a finished product,” says Interface’s Steve Arbaugh, citing the challenges of the FAA checklist. Their solution? “We literally worked through them one at a time,” he says. He declines to share details of the design process—the carpet is patent pending—but says they drew on the principles of biomimicry to cut waste and better blend the yarns. Then, working with Southwest, they tried out various colors and patterns, at one point designing a sample based on the airline’s logo, a heart whimsically squashed between a pair of wings. (“It wasn’t very successful,” Martha Pronk, a designer at Teague, admits.) They finally settled on bright-navy tiles that attach to the aircraft’s floorboards with double-back tape. Individual pieces can be swapped out as needed and returned to the manufacturer, which incorporates them into new carpet. One queasy passenger doesn’t ruin the whole thing.

In other cases, Southwest convinced existing vendors to rejigger their products. B/E Aerospace, the airline’s seat manufacturer, agreed to recast its seat bumpers in 100 percent recyclable aluminum, which is stronger than plastic but also heavier—too heavy, generally, for airplanes. B/E responded by thinning out the profile. After several iterations, the company managed to produce metal bumpers that met Southwest’s weight requirement and widened the aisle by three-quarters of an inch. As Buschur tells it, they still look brand-new.

Add it all up, and it’s a series of incremental nips and tucks that makes the plane lighter, stronger, and more efficient. That’s what good engineering does. It’s just that now, Southwest flies good engineering under the banner of “good for the environment.” That’s what good marketing does.

Two days after its debut, the green plane flew a workaday schedule from Seattle to Sacramento to San Diego to Kansas City to Denver to Albuquerque and then to El Paso, where it landed for the night. In all, the plane burned 6,503 gallons of jet fuel; a typical 737, according to Southwest, might have used 6,569. Other factors affect fuel efficiency, such as wind, passenger weight, and head count. (Just two or three extra people on board add 500 pounds.) Nevertheless, the green plane posted better numbers than expected, and at this rate, Southwest could save as much as 16 million gallons of fuel and $32 million a year if it converted the entire fleet. The carrier plans to continue monitoring its test plane; then management will decide what to do next. Will others follow? “Everyone else watches what we do,” Buschur says. “Already, since media day, we’ve been inundated with other competitors asking us, ‘What is this new product you’re using and why?’”

The bad news is that even if Southwest refurbished all 535 of its aircrafts, the savings would represent about 1 percent of the carrier’s annual fuel consumption and an even tinier percentage of fuel consumption industry wide. Shrewd business, maybe. But shrewd environmentalism? You might as well talk about a green coal mine. “The ‘green plane’ tag is misplaced,” says Tim Johnson, executive director of the U.K.’s Aviation Environment Federation. “The real issues facing the industry are noise around airports and emissions that contribute both to local air quality and climate change. These measures will not affect any of these primary issues, but the labeling of the plane implies to the consumer that the whole aircraft is somehow better, cleaner, and more efficient. ‘Greener carpets’ or ‘greener seat covers’ is closer to the point.”

The same year that Southwest introduced its green plane, aviation spent $82 million on lobbyists, more than any other industry in the transportation sector, including $690,000 from Southwest to address, among other matters, proposed climate-change legislation dealing with carbon taxes and cap-and-trade—two policies commercial aviation has long opposed. That means Southwest has spent money fighting efforts whose goals the company purports to share, what with its green plane. The plane is a nice gesture. The pleather seats might shed a few pounds and woo some passengers who worry about their carbon footprints. But an airline that doesn’t just pay lip service to the environment? That would really send a message: Somebody Else Up There Loves You.