Ever felt like having a warm chocolate chip cookie on a flight?
Something fresh, gooey, and to top it all off,
complimentary?
Well, if you were flying Midwest Airlines back in the 80s through the 2000s,
this dream would’ve been reality.
If Midwest sounds like an airline that you’ve never heard of before,
let me dive into the short history of the US Low-cost airline that prided itself
on its inflight service but failed to survive in a changing market.
Midwest Airlines sprouted its first roots in 1948 with the Kimberly-Clark corporation.
Ya know, the company that makes Kleenex tissues and Huggies diapers.
Kimberly-Clark had a department that managed air shuttle services
to transport its engineers and executives from Appleton, Wisconsin
to its paper mills in places like Chicago, Memphis, and Atlanta.
Later, when the airline deregulation act of 1978 came around,
K-C aviation, a company born from Kimberly-Clark’s shuttle and maintenance services 10 years prior,
noticed how often they were shuttling executives between cities
and how many airlines had stopped service to Wisconsin due to the new point to point route method.
Logically, they decided to form their own, regularly-scheduled, passenger airline to satisfy demand
and launched it under the name “Midwest Express Airlines”.
The company already had experience with shuttling passengers and maintaining aircraft,
so with high demand and the ability to offer services to the public without regulation on prices,
creating an airline seemed to be a great idea, and as it turned out, it was (for a little while)!
Midwest Express was officially founded in 1983,
just 5 years after the deregulation act.
They began operations on June 11, 1984
out of its hub in Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport
with two DC-9-10 aircraft and a Convair 580 provided by Kimberly-Clark.
Their services remained limited for a short time,
only flying from Milwaukee to Appleton, Dallas, Newark, and Boston by October of the same year.
But the airline continued to grow slowly,
and added more destinations along the east coast including New York, Washington DC,
and Atlanta after dropping the Newark service and disputing about which Atlanta airport to use.
As time flew by and the aviation industry grew,
Midwest Express added more DC-9s and MD-80s to its fleet in the late 80s and early 90s
which allowed them to expand into Florida and the West Coast of the US.
During their expansion, Midwest Express was representing itself as a low cost airline
that was filling in demand for business class tickets at a low price.
Tickets weren’t always the cheapest, but what set Midwest Express apart from its competitors
was the quality of its inflight product.
Its slogan of “The Best Care In The Air” truly represented its services.
Throughout most of its life, Midwest Express had its planes configured in a one class configuration
with a wide 2-2 leather seat layout in aircraft like the DC-9 built to carry passengers in a tighter 2-3 layout.
This gave passengers extra wide seats to sit in, and additionally,
every ticket came with spacious legroom,
complimentary gourmet meals served on china dishes,
free alcoholic beverages, and of course,
their famous chocolate chip cookies freshly baked onboard the flight after 10am.
The complimentary gourmet meals were no joke.
We’re not talking about some kind of cold loaded sandwich that barely has any taste.
We’re talking Beef Wellington steaks, lobster, shrimp arrangements,
and tons of other warm, fancy foods paired with a glass of wine or another quality alcoholic beverage.
This culinary approach cost Midwest Express around $9 per passenger in 1989,
which is equivalent to around $20 today.
Other airlines were only spending less than $3 per passenger on food at the time,
which sometimes wasn’t even included in the ticket price.
But it wasn’t just the good food that made the airline something special,
the crews onboard were known to provide a personal service for their passengers:
attending their every need and giving them tons of free cookies.
This kind of premium service is what made this little Wisconsin-based airline extremely popular among business travelers
and with many flying within the midwestern United States.
Newspaper articles written in the airline's haydays have even gone so far as to praise the airline
for offering a “first class experience at competitive coach class prices”
and “having a comfort index that’s hard to challenge".
The airline was matching the equivalent of a business class experience at an economy ticket price.
By the year 1996, Midwest Express had 24 DC-9s in its fleet
including the longer range DC-9-30 variant and around 9 MD-88s and MD-83s.
They’d also been continuing to experience slow, but steady growth as a business,
and were able to keep bringing in steady profits.
With this slow growth, the airline had opened up a secondary hub in Omaha, Nebraska in 1995
and had started their own regional airline called “Skyway Airlines” or “Midwest Express Connection”
to provide short services to smaller airports within the midwestern United States
like those in Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota, just to name a few.
These smaller services would use aircraft like the 19-seat Beechcraft 1900D
and the 32-seat Fairchild-Dornier 328Jet.
The flights would sometimes operate on a linear style route to serve smaller cities
and all planes were equipped with wide, comfortable leather seats.
They would even still sometimes serve warm chocolate chip cookies on the flight if it was long enough.
Eventually, Kimberly-Clark sold its ownership of the airline by the end of 1996,
and Midwest Express fell under the ownership of its own parent company called Midwest Air Group.
By June of 2001, Midwest Express (not including Skyway) served 28 destinations across America.
They had been profitable for 14 years as a quality, low-cost airline,
and were well-regarded in the industry.
All was going well,
until the September 11th attacks rocked the aviation industry.
Just about every airline in the world had a wrench thrown into their plans
and had to adapt to the market quickly.
Midwest Express was no exception, but the next decade would prove to be extremely challenging.
In 2002, Midwest began a long string of changes to help make the airline more efficient and more recognizable as a brand.
They started off by changing their name from “Midwest Express Airlines”
to simply “Midwest Airlines”
and then renaming their regional branch - Skyway Aviation - to “Midwest Connect”.
This was done so that people would recognize Midwest as a national carrier
and not a small regional airline due to the word “express” being in their name.
The livery of Midwest also received an update,
changing from the letters “M-E” on the tail to a golden wing design meant to represent the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Then to save money on jet fuel, which was rising quickly at the time,
they announced they would be replacing their DC-9s with Boeing 717-200s.
The MD-80s of the fleet were also downgraded to the 2-3 seat layout to increase the number of seats onboard
and the airline began a slow retirement of the type.
A buy-on-board meal service was introduced to flights in 2005,
giving passengers the choice of purchasing drinks and breakfast, lunch, or dinner meals
separate from the price of their ticket.
But despite these drastic changes to the seating and meal service,
Midwest continued to serve their fresh, on-board-baked, chocolate chip cookies on most flights.
Two years later in 2007, with ticket prices becoming a more important factor in aviation,
Midwest decided to introduce a new inflight product called “Saver Service” on their 717s.
This new ticket decreased the width of their economy seats to a 2-3 configuration
and increased the pitch of the traditional “Signature Service” seats in the front of the plane to 36 inches.
The same amenities were provided to all passengers in either class.
With all these changes to try and bring back profitability that they’d lost a few years ago,
a few investors thought that the Midwest brand was worth saving.
AirTran Holdings, the owners of the now defunct AirTran Airways,
tried to buy the company but were unsuccessful.
However, Midwest eventually sold to Northwest Airlines and the private equity company TPG Capital,
and the acquisition was finalized in February 2008
for a buyout of $450 million dollars with stakes of 53% and 47% respectively.
This was good for the airline at first, but this move also started their final downfall.
The good part is that Midwest had already formed a codeshare with Northwest a few months prior
which gave them access to 250 new destinations on Northwest and their international partners
which allowed passengers to connect to flights to Hawaii, Europe, and Asia.
But with the addition of the codeshare (and the acquisition) on Northwest Airlines flights,
Midwest lost their independence as a company.
Their regional branch, “Midwest Connect”,
was discontinued in 2008
and regional airline operations were outsourced to Skywest Airlines and Republic Airways,
who were already partnered with Northwest.
Later during the same year in 2008,
Midwest announced it would outsource all flight operations to Republic airways
and would give up its leases on the 25 Boeing 717s it had in its fleet
which they hoped to bring back in the future (but never did).
Republic would operate just 12 Embraer E170s (and eventually more) with the Midwest connection name.
Eventually, Northwest merged into Delta airlines,
and Midwest Airlines was sold to Republic Airways for $31 million dollars in 2009.
This left TGP Capital and Northwest airlines with a loss of $419 million dollars!
Midwest operated as a subsidiary of Republic Airways
and flew with 25 E170s and E190s to a few regional destinations.
Midwest’s last 717 flight operated on November 2nd 2009 full of employees,
and on the next day, Midwest’s FAA operating certificate expired
and they officially ceased to exist as an independent airline.
Still a subsidy of Republic Airways, in April 2010,
Republic Airways Holdings, the parent company of Republic and Frontier airlines,
announced they would merge the Midwest brand into the Frontier Airlines brand under Frontier’s name.
This briefly added 5 A319s into Midwest’s fleet (and the EMB135).
But this marked the end of the line for Midwest Airlines, and in November 2010,
Midwest’s website had already been shut down and redirected to Frontier’s website,
and Midwest’s flight code of YX was officially retired.
Surprisingly though, Midwest’s famous chocolate chip cookies outlived the airline itself.
The cookies were served briefly on Frontier Airlines flights and sold in Milwaukee grocery stores,
but the service was discontinued in 2012, even after a “Save The Cookie” campaign.
A few Republic Airways aircraft even retained their Midwest livery,
but all traces of it were gone by 2013 when the aircraft were either sold or repainted.
So looking back on all of Midwest’s history,
it’s safe to say that the changes in the aviation market after the events of September 11
and rising fuel costs greatly contributed to their downfall.
Midwest was also trying to survive in a world
where airlines were merging left and right to survive in the market.
One could say that it might have been “inevitable” that Midwest would find itself
being acquired by some other airline due to the company’s size and limited demand.
But before everything went haywire in 2001,
the company was performing very well with a healthy passenger base
and an extremely competitive inflight product which was hard to match for the same price.
However, even though Midwest Airlines is long gone due to forces out of their control,
there have been some recent talks about bringing the airline back!
In 2017, Greg Aretakis, a former executive,
announced his intentions to bring back the Midwest Airlines brand to Milwaukee
under the same name “Midwest Express Airlines”.
Investors were persuaded to join in 2018, and in 2019,
it was announced that Elite Airways would provide flight operations to Grand Rapids, Cincinnati, and Omaha from Milwaukee.
A giant press conference was held at Milwaukee Mitchell Airport
and representatives of the airline handed out free chocolate chip cookies to passengers.
This looked very promising for the airline, but then COVID-19 happened.
The new Midwest Express cut ties with Elite on a breach of contract in March 2020,
and as of today, we are left waiting as to when the airline will officially relaunch.
If the airline does relaunch,
hopefully it can successfully follow the current Ultra Low Cost trends of the aviation market.
Or well, whatever kind of service the airline decides to bring back,
if it’s unable to keep up with the market, it might reach the same fate as its predecessor,
and we’ll have to say goodbye to the fresh, warm, onboard chocolate chip cookies a second time.
Hey, thanks for watching everyone!
This airline was really fun to research and I hope I got all the details right this time.
If any of you watching have ever flown Midwest Express or Midwest Airlines,
feel free to share your experiences in the comments below,
and include the part about how delicious those chocolate chip cookies were!
Also, if I missed any facts you feel are important about the airline, please share them in the comments as well!
If you liked this video feel free to like and subscribe and as always, stay safe and have a wonderful day everyone!