Midwest Express Airlines began operations on 11 June 1984 with two Douglas DC-9-10 aircraft. These were fitted with two by two seating across the fleet instead of the usual two by three, providing a high level of comfort.
Their long time slogan was “The Best Care In The Air”. With leather seats, free gourmet meals and plenty of leg room, they were quite a popular choice for people flying out of their Milwaukee base.
Midwest Express Airlines Video
Following on from the last video about People Express Airlines, this time we stay in the USA for a look at Midwest Express Airlines. The video below runs for a shade over 12 minutes and gives a decent history of the airline.
I have to say, seeing the interiors of the aircraft with what is essentially domestic first class seating today is something to behold. The fact they also spent $9 per passenger on food is also remarkable.
Slow and steady expansion coupled with perhaps some of the best on board service ever seen in the American domestic market meant the airline did quite well. They had a loyal following and passengers loved flying with them.
Of course, external events such as 11 September 2001 and more eventually took their toll. It was eventually merged into another carrier and ceased to exist.
Overall Thoughts
It’s interesting to see a carrier like Midwest Express managed to do well for so long. Offering superior on board service and amenities resulted in profits, a stark contrast to today where it seems to be the reverse.
Did you ever fly with Midwest Express Airlines? What were they like? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Featured image by RuthAS via Wikimedia Commons.
I flew Midwest Airlines for on a weekly basis for from 2005 until they stopped operations. What a sad, sad day that was. They truly lived up to their slogan “Best Care in the Air”.
I heard that there are some investors interested in bringing them back. That would be wonderful! But I hope if they do it, they do it right! Don’t do it half ass and think that the Midwest name will carry you through. Do things have to be perfect–no. Start out slowly-don’t try to take on too much at once.
Sounds like you have some excellent memories of them really. Fingers crossed that if they do come back, they do it right. Thank you for the comment!
Used to fly Midwest Express out of Omaha all the time, best airline experience I ever had. It would cost you maybe $20 more per ticker compared to the other airlines, but there was no comparison!
Sounds well worth it for the service, seat and so on. Thanks for that!
I flew Midwest regularly during the 90’s when I lived in Madison. Prior to 9/11 meals were far better than what other airlines were serving in first class– steak and lobster, BBQ, grilled shrimp and those half pineapples filled with fresh tropical fruit along with another large bowl of fruit plus multiple side dishes when special ordering the fruit plate between MKE and West Coast destinations.
Wow, that all sounds amazing, As someone who loves to eat when they fly, Midwest Express sounds like my kind of airline. What a shame they’re not around now, otherwise I’d be all over that! Thanks for the info!
I flew on Midwest Express twice!
Once was on a MD-80 Milwaukee-Los Angeles. A colleague and I flew coach, which had 2 + 3 seating. Another colleague, who was evil, tried to get Delta miles and flew MKE to LAX with a connection somewhere. We won. He lost being a slave to miles.
Another time was a few years later on an Atlanta-Kansas City flight aboard a 717. It was the first time I was aboard a 717.
Midwest Express was famous for its chewy chocolate chip cookie given to all passengers.
Looks like you won indeed! Great you got to fly Midwest a couple of times, that’s great, I was surprised they had Boeing 717s actually, so it was interesting to find out.
I’d love to be able to compare their cookie to the ones we find today on some airlines.
I grew up flying on Midwest Express, and then worked for them for several years in the corporate office toward the end. I can correct some mis-assumptions made thus far….
-Essential Air Service Subsidies: These were some markets served with the B1900D which was operated by Skyway, a separate (but wholly owned) airline than Midwest. They did have some EAS flying that was mostly in northern Wisconsin/Michigan UP plus Manistee and Muskegon, MI. The B1900 was on its way out as Midwest transitioned from using Skyway solely as a feeder to being a means to offer more frequency. They did fly the FRJ, and then Skyway was shut down and flying given to Skywest operating CRJs which opened up some more markets like a return to RDU, additional flights to PHL, EWR, etc.
-The MD80s actually originally were in all 2×2 seating for much of their time. In fact, aircraft number 813 still was in a 118 seat configuration at the end (it was the one MD-80 that was fully painted in the new Midwest Airlines scheme). Two MD-80 were in a 84 seat charter configuration – Midwest did a great charter business to the point of even operating a security checkpoint/gate over at the MKE hangars. Moving them to 2×3 was a way to increase capacity after 9/11 (still had 3 rows of 2×2 at the front sold as same cabin but just bigger seat). This was to combat cost pressures and to better compete on leisure-focused routes: 4 Florida cities, PHX, LAS. They did fly to west coast cities non-stop, but most of these did also have B717 on business-focused flying. There used to be 5 or 6 flights a day from MKE to MCI continuing westbound before 10am each day, which enabled the 717 to serve California.
I think some of the real contributions to failure were:
-Most people had zero industry experience outside of Midwest. In fact, you had Vice Presidents who had not flown another airline since the mid-80s. I remember I bought a ticket and flew on short-lived Skybus and took photos/wrote a report. I got put in front of the CEO to review and share like I had discovered some secret way in to figure out what others were doing.
-AirTran failed in its hostile takeover attempt, so had the aircraft and slack to just plant itself on top of pretty much the whole MKE Midwest flight schedule. They were flying a plane with 117 seats which Midwest flew with just 88 (changing to 99) at the same prices.
-Midwest only marketed one-way. They only advertised and cared about the hometown market. Really outside of Wisconsin, Omaha, and Kansas City, nobody heard of them. They did not even really try to get the travelers originating elsewhere, which is a shame because they held some really valuable LGA slots and DCA slots. Those routes printed money, and at the end were basically the only ones making money.
-Midwest recognized it needed to add seats, so they took the B717 from 88 to 99 seats – to avoid adding a third flight attendant. 40 2×2 seats and 59 2×3, with the intent on upselling the big seats. Well, anybody who flew them much knew they sold 99 seats and if you didn’t pick a seat assignment, odds were about a third of the plane got a freebie upgrade. So why bother paying, especially when the 2×3 seating had great legroom, same service, and was more than tolerable for a 2 hour flight? Midwest used Sabre and spent millions for Sabre to do custom programming to build the ability to sell one cabin with two different seating configurations. It took a couple of years as well. Too little too late.
-Again, just a lack of ability and foresight to compete. The food was buy-on-board the last few years… it was still REALLY good quality! But it was expensive… and their solution for losing money on sales was to just keep increasing the price! Then they’d sell less and lose more money. Plus the service-oriented people didn’t want passengers to have to wait for food, so the crews were instructed to heat up every meal before service. So they took the shelf-life from about 3-4 flights down to just 1. Cook all the food and toss what didn’t sell. Tons of waste. It would keep all day if not cooked – Midwest had these massive and heavy dry-ice chilling machines in the galleys.
One can read the rest about the TPG/NW deal and how they quickly lost interest when NW got bought by DL shortly after. But it was so interesting to see from the inside that, in my opinion, they just did not really know what to do and were so hell-bent on preserving Wisconsin’s national airline.
This is really wonderful to read and thank you so much for taking the time to put this together. I love it when someone who was there is able to contribute and to really tell things how it really was.
Some great information there, especially with AirTran, not to mention the industry experience. You would think executives would try to fly on other airlines here and there just to keep abreast of what they were doing.
Not surprised at all on the upsell to the large seats not working. If people fly that regularly, they generally know how things work and with the concentration on the home market, people would know the airline well.
Again, thanks a lot for that, really appreciate it!
I flew them a number of times when my home base was LSE. Their product was indeed as described here. What killed them was the slow and steady reduction in essential air subsidies, since they served a lot of smaller local airports with feeder service to MKE.
Now that’s interesting, I was not aware of the essential air subsidies reducing down gradually. That would make a lot of sense. Nice that you got to fly with them – thanks for the comment, appreciate that!
Never flew them but remember them well. In my opinion their biggest mistake was the configuration of their MD-80s. They bought them for range, as the DC-9/717 couldn’t make MKE-West Coast. For some reason they thought their traditional configuration 2×2 wouldn’t work on the larger MD-80s so they configured those 2×3 for the whole plane, the antitheses of their model, seriously diluting the product. Why no one in the company felt the need to configure say 1/3 of the -80s in the classic 2×2 with the other 2/3s in the standard 2×3 is beyond me. That was the beginning of their end, at least to me.
I think once a business removes their unique selling point, they can never really recover, no matter how hard they try. At least this airline was around for a pretty long time, unlike some of the deregulation startups from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Sounds like Midwest would have been memorable to fly on!