Partially correct. There is no reason that the entire family should be allowed to board with the lap child/infant etc. So SW could allow ONE parent for each child under two or in a car seat and be in compliance with the regulations. (No the regulations don't say that your 5 year old has to sit with you!) I think that the compromise of allowing one or two parents with each child under 6 is fine. No if you and your parents, cousins and hangers on are coming along you don't ALL get family boarding with the one 3 year old and if you try to "save seats" you can easily find out that you are now left with just one parent next to the 3 year old as the rest of us ignore your rude behavior. Trust me, business travelers love to upset the "entitled seat savers LOL"
(And of course SW has NO planes with a "single-side seat row")
Never said that there was. SWA *customarily* allows nuclear families (2 adults and all their children) to board together when one of the children qualifies, but they don't guarantee it. I have seen many situations on crowded connecting flights where only one adult per qualified child was allowed to use FB. FTR, I hate seat savers as much as the next FF (I said that I traveled frequently on SWA with my children, and I do, but I travel even more frequently without them.) IME, it is now pretty standard on the MCO routes for the gate agent to remind people that Family Boarding is for PARENTS traveling with young children only, and that the other adults in the party must board with their letter group.
Again, it's about profit. Other airlines may choose to make money on seat assignment purchase fees, and SWA chooses to make money on faster turnarounds -- it's a legitimate business policy choice. Any policy that reduces the opportunity for passengers to delay boarding feeds the bottom line, and SWA has determined that letting entire nuclear families who have a child under 7 in the party board together MOST of the time saves the most time when boarding. If they lose you as a passenger, so be it; even as a FF, the loss of profit from one person's business fares pale beside the downstream cost of delayed departures.
SWA does, of course, have planes with a single-side seat row; every commercial passenger plane in existence does. What I meant was "all of the seats in each numbered row that are on the same side of an aisle". On SWA's fleet, excluding the exit rows, there are always 6 seats in each row, three seats on either side of the aisle. Thus there are 4 oxygen masks available for each single-side seat row, and a total of eight for the entire numbered row. You are not allowed to hold an oxygen line across the aisle because it impedes movement of the crew, so if you have two adults who each have a lap-carried infant both trying to sit in Aisle 7, they will have to sit like this if they want to sit "next" to one
another: "7A 7B
7C aisle
7D 7E 7F" (Red denotes the seats they are sitting in.) Even if they are total strangers, each one will have to sit somewhere on the opposite side of the aisle from the other if they are both in the same numbered row.
Early Bird check in! Not early boarding!!
