Southwest Airlines could have a winner in Frontier

Besides getting Frontier’s gates and routes at Denver if Southwest buys the carrier out of bankruptcy, it gets more.

That “more” includes the possibility of changing its business model.

Could Southwest move at least somewhat more in a hub-and-spoke direction? Could it keep Frontier’s regional line, Lynx? Unthinkable as those ideas might have been just a couple of years ago, maybe so.

If Southwest stayed with the one-plane model for its main line, and put a “one-plane” model at work for Lynx, too, just a different one plane, and just tweaked its current modified hub system, it could stay in the clover.