When Southwest first started up, every other airline in the business paid pilots and ground crews to be inefficient.
The standard pilot’s contract pays pilots for flying according to actual flight time or block time (scheduled flight time, the time between when the wheel blocks come out and when they go back in), whichever is greater. So if scheduled flight time from JFK to PIT is 90 minutes and the flight takes 85 to get there, pilots still get paid for the 90 minutes. And if it takes 95 minutes, they get paid for 95.
So if flights from JFK to Pit are consistently arriving in 88 minutes, other airlines look at that as an excess fixed cost because they’re paying two pilots for two minutes each when they’re not flying. If it goes on long enough, the airline bean counters will direct direct crew scheduling to reduce the scheduled time for that leg to 88 minutes.
But if you’re a pilot, you see the change of “block time” as as losing two minuted flight pay. So there’s an informal procedure among pilots to ALWAYS BE 5% LATE. Just slow cruise speed a couple of knots, or taxi extra slow to the gate and you can easily add the 5%, which prevents the airline from monkeying with block time to the pilots’ disadvantage.
Ever wonder why Southwest taxis faster than any other airline (or at least used to)? It’s because they paid pilots extra FOR BEING EARLY.
Other airlines paid ramp rats at a set rate with no incentive to turn a flight around under schedule. Southwest paid a bonus if they turned around flights early.
And that’s the way their entire business was structured. Save us money, we pay you a bonus.
Every other airline had a business model that rewarded employees for being inefficient. Only Southwest rewarded industry.
We taxied fast because there was no incentive to drag your feet (unlike other carriers), unless you were going to overfly for whatever reason. If you were early, you got paid for the full scheduled flight time/pay. It made sense to save time.