Southwest may stick with cattle-call seating

Keep those cattle prods handy, folks. Low-cost king Southwest has yet to determine if it will abandon its first-come, first-served boarding approach and begin offering assigned seats,

reports

the

Baltimore Sun

(free registration required). The newspaper says that the airline will not make a decision until at least 2007.

You'll recall that earlier this year Southwest

created quite the stir

by announcing it would

test assigned seats

. The experiment yielded mixed results according to Southwest CEO Gary Kelly. "Some boarding methods were a little faster, most were a little slower," he told reporters last week.

The airline now plans to conduct more research, including customer surveys, before it proceeds.