Southwest has a creative solution for excessive cabin heat | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

Established in the 1960s out of Dallas, Southwest Airlines (LUV) eventually expanded to a nationwide network with a heavy presence in cities that can reach especially high temperatures in the summer.

For example, two Southwest bases, Phoenix and Las Vegas, each saw more than 100 days in which temperatures reached over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) in 2024.

When weather is that extreme, air crew members can face dangers that do not occur when temperatures are lower.

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A shocking Washington Post report from 2024 showed that the airline recorded at least 20 flight attendant injuries from soda cans that exploded due to excessive heat last summer. In most cases, the can deformed and broke as the flight attendant was pouring from it (no passenger injuries have been recorded as of date).

“Our summers are extending, and that product is under that intense heat for longer periods of time,” Steve Land, who oversees food and beverage deliveries at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, told CBS news.

Southwest addresses dangers of exploding soda cans

With the summer season now in full swing, Southwest has addressed the issue of exploding soda cans by buying 60 refrigerated supply trucks for transporting drinks to the airline’s Boeing 737 (BA) planes.

It will also use heat guns to track temperatures of its soft drink stocks and toss out ones that have overheated before they are handed out.

“Once it got up to 105, 110 [degrees], you started hearing the cans before you even saw them — you could hear them deforming,” Jake Stoddard, another ground worker in charge of delivering food to Southwest planes, described to CBS.

“When it was 115, 120, half of your stock would be deformed, so yeah, it was bad.”

As first reported by Simple Flying, the supplies will be sent to Phoenix Sky Harbor International and Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas; the order will set the airline back several million dollars.

The trucks will also double as cooling units that tarmac crew can enter for breaks from the blazing sun.

Overheated metal cans can become a danger aboard an airplane.

Image source&colon; Shutterstock

Southwest ‘taking steps to keep onboard beverages cooler,’ airline says

“We’re aware of the issue and have been taking steps to keep onboard beverages cooler, especially in our airports experiencing extreme temperatures,” a Southwest representative said to Simple Flying in July 2024. “It’s a cross-functional effort between our airport teams and those in the air.”

More on travel:

Extreme heat has become an increasingly consistent issue for airlines as changing temperatures affect everything from which flights travelers take. For instance, statistics show that many are opting away from previously popular places like southern Spain and Italy during the summer months.

“Our goal is to give enough lead time so dispatchers and other decision makers can make proactive operational decisions, rather than waiting for something to happen,” Delta (DAL) ‘s chief meteorologist Warren Weston said in an interview in 2023.

“The impact of climate change has humbled us all,” Rick Cotton, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said in another interview on the subject.