Southwest Airlines has announced plans to complete long-overdue construction on its expanded Dallas headquarters, after it was stalled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Builders will be working on the final 127,588 square feet of the building, home to its Leadership Education and Aircrew Development (LEAD) Center. Construction on the project, which is expected to cost around $13 million, is estimated to finish in 2024.
Southwest Airlines first began expansion of its campus in 2018, with the addition of the 414,000-square-foot space. The outer shell of the development was completed, but about a third of the interior was left unfinished due to the pandemic, leaving the aforementioned 127,588 square feet to be completed.
“While we’ve expanded the building, the build-out of many of the floors inside was put on hold at the beginning of COVID,” said Dan Landson, spokesperson for Southwest Airlines. “Now that air travel demand is returning, we’re moving forward with the finishing of the interior spaces, which will add space for our new hire training classes.”
The part of the development dedicated to the LEAD Center, when completed, will house an eight-bay flight training center for simulators, classrooms, support rooms, and other infrastructure.
The headquarters’ training center is hoped to bolster the number of in-air and other staff in Southwest’s employ. The company has been in dire need of employees since losing a large percentage of its workforce over the last two years due to COVID-19. Despite receiving $66 billion in federal payroll support, from February 2020 to the end of 2021 the airline’s staff dropped from 62,000 employees to 56,000.
“We need pilots, we need flight attendants, we need ramp staffing, and you need the appropriate amount of buffer in all those areas until we sort of see our way past COVID and understand what more normalized staffing more normalized behaviors, more normalized sick leave looks like,” said Gary Kelly, Southwest Airlines executive chairman and former CEO.
The airline estimated at the end of last year that it would need to hire 8,000 employees in 2022.
