Southwest Airlines' Adopt-A-Pilot Program Enhances Educational Activities And Community Relations at Lavace Stewart Elementary School

Friday February 27, 11:00 am ET

Students Are the First Nationwide to Participate in the Bilingual Expansion Of The Program

HOUSTON, Feb. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- On your next Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV - News) flight, you won't be asked to take a test, but you might be asked to help grade a few papers. Celebrating its seventh year, Southwest's Adopt- A-Pilot program has successfully enhanced both educational activities for thousands of students and community relations for the airline.

The award-winning Adopt-A-Pilot program includes creative teaching tools and fun classroom activities, enabling Southwest Airlines Pilots to personally connect with more than 18,000 fifth-grade students across the country. This year, the free educational program is also offered in Spanish, providing translated curriculum and bilingual Pilots to mentor classes with students who speak Spanish as their primary language.

Locally, students at Lavace Stewart Elementary School held a special kick- off celebration today to welcome their adopted Pilot, Southwest Captain Richard Carrasco, with games, science discussions, and meet-and-greet activities. Captain Carrasco, a twelve-year Employee at Southwest Airlines, will use his bilingual skills to mentor English and Spanish-speaking students. A graduate of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, Captain Carrasco began his aviation career flying small planes for an oil company and working for another airline in California for five years. His love for aviation began at age five when the pilots on one of his first commercial flights gave him a tour of a new DC-9 aircraft. "I remember having a picture of a Southwest Airlines airplane over my bed in my college dormitory as a reminder of my career goals," recalls Captain Carrasco, a Texas native.

Southwest's Adopt-A-Pilot program curriculum incorporates science, math, geography, writing, and other subjects to discover more than just how an airplane flies -- the program demonstrates how education is critical in reaching one's personal goals. Adopt-A-Pilot has more than 450 Southwest Pilots who volunteer for "adoption" through this educational outreach program, all going above and beyond to find clever ways to make learning fun. During the four-week mentorship program, Pilots volunteer their time in adoptive classrooms and correspond from the "road" via e-mail and postcards. Classrooms chart the Pilot's course through an official U.S. route map, and the students record daily flying statistics sent by their Pilot in the provided Adopt-A-Pilot curriculum.

Also new this year, Adopt-A-Pilot students can log onto www.southwest.com/adoptapilot and take a virtual tour of a Boeing 737 cockpit, "visit" Southwest's headquarters in Dallas, Texas, and view streaming video segments that describe aviation careers.

Reinforcing its school-to-career theme, Adopt-A-Pilot includes a national contest -- "What's Your Destination?" -- where classes are invited to script, direct, perform, and produce their own three-minute video depicting careers each student hopes to one day pursue. The winning class will earn an educational field trip to a nearby Southwest destination.

Since it began in 1997, the Adopt-A-Pilot program has reached more than 65,000 students in communities from coast-to-coast. Southwest Airlines originally developed the Adopt-A-Pilot program in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Education, America's Promise, the Smithsonian Institute's National Air and Space Museum, and others in response to the need for community involvement in schools. National leaders such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, former President Bill Clinton, and First Lady Laura Bush have recognized the program.

In recent months, Southwest Airlines topped the monthly domestic enplaned passenger rankings. The airline currently serves 59 airports in 58 cities in 30 states. Based in Dallas, Southwest currently has more than 4,000 Pilots and operates nearly 2,800 flights a day with a fleet of 389 Boeing 737s with an average age of nine years -- one of the youngest pure jet fleets in the domestic airline industry. The carrier will begin service in Philadelphia on May 9, 2004.

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Source: Southwest Airlines