When flights are considered, Southwest is the fourth-largest operator in the US and the world. Its strength is obviously its considerable domestic operation, which Cirium Diio shows accounts for 97% of its services in March.

In total, Southwest plans 926 routes this month: 854 are domestic and 72 are international. Some 31 links have just started. The airline’s average stage length is 686 nautical miles (1,270 km), which is just beyond the one-to-two-hour flight sweet spot for aircraft productivity. It is about the same as Breeze’s stage length.

Southwest’s New Ten Shortest Flights In March

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Three of the entries are brand-new to the evolving carrier’s network: Chicago Midway to Milwaukee, Phoenix to Tucson, and Nashville to Knoxville. Flights on these routes began on March 5, when this article was researched and written. Various other routes began last year. Funnily enough, the airline recently announced its new longest service.

Compared to Southwest’s interisland Hawaiian operations, all of its particularly short flights within the Lower 48, as shown below, are designed for one reason: connectivity. Such hub-and-spoke-type markets, which exist to funnel passengers through Southwest’s so-called hubs-not-hubs, are the latest illustration of it.

Southwest’s New Second-Shortest Route

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At 70 nautical miles (130 km), Chicago Midway to Milwaukee is the carrier’s new second-shortest route. In fact, it is a bit more than this. Analysis of the airline’s schedule in the past quarter of a century shows that no other route, except the already-served Denver to Colorado, has been shorter. While unconfirmed, it is likely to be Southwest’s second-shortest scheduled route ever.

It connects Milwaukee to Southwest’s fifth most-served airport, which has 201 daily departures in March (double for both ways). Examining schedules shows that passengers can fly from Milwaukee and connect in Midway to reach 50 domestic and international destinations this month, which is based on waiting for no more than three hours in Chicago.

According to the US Department of Transportation, the 50 markets collectively had 10,200 daily round-trip passengers between July 2024 and June 2025. Funnily enough, Southwest is already the largest operator. It had 49% of Milwaukee’s traffic to them, which will increase further with the start of the new hub-and-spoke route.

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A Look At Flights From Denver To Colorado Springs

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At just 63 nautical miles (117 km), Denver to Colorado Springs is Southwest’s shortest-ever scheduled service. Between December 2024 and November 2025, the DOT shows that it carried 744 daily round-trip passengers (United transported 1,372 people daily). Southwest only filled 70.6% of its available seats, which was ten percentage points lower than for all its Denver routes and eight points lower than its overall network-wide load.

Unsurprisingly, virtually everyone—a whopping 99.3%!—connected to another flight in Denver. At the airport level, booking data shows that Colorado Springs’ top ten segments were Minneapolis, Orlando, Kansas City, Austin, San Antonio, Nashville, St. Louis, Dallas Love, Sacramento, and Tucson. At the city level, Los Angeles was first.