July 2007 Archives

Limited offer! Act now! That’s the pitch from spirited little Spirit, the South Florida carrier that’s seeking southward growth. Moving to establish itself as the first truly low-fares airlines between the US and the Caribbean, Spirit is asking cities that want its service to ask for it. Literally. The airline, based in Miramar, has told cities that want its brand of unbundled ‘ultra low fares’ service to submit highly detailed proposals to it by the 10th of August; it will select up to 10 new routes from its Fort Lauderdale hub and as many as three new international US gateway cites for flights to start in the summer of 2008. “Spirit Airlines is particularly interested in cities that are underserved by their existing air service, whose fares are overpriced, and cities that have the ability to provide a low cost of doing business”, it says. The application should have details on the local market, on demand and above all on public-private partnerships - which include airport incentives. Its site for information and applications makes its point: adioshighfares. But the carrier stresses that it is not looking for deals from cities but for market opportunities.

Do you know the way to Santa Fe? One of the most beautiful cities in New Mexico and arguably in much of the Southwest, it has long depended on its nearby neighbour, Albuquerque, for airline connections. The little city in the mountains, a retreat for artists and increasingly for the wealthy and for well-healed tourists, now has only turboprop service, and only on Great Lakes. Most visitors fly into the bigger city some 50 miles away and then rent a car. The city elders decided that they’d like direct access to some of the bigger sources of tourism, and spent more than $5 million to get the airport’s runways extended to include safety overruns. In June, the airport won FAA permission to handle planes larger than 30 seats. The elders also decided to offer incentives, and within weeks, both American Eagle and the Delta Connection announced service.

Eagle will add flights to DFW and Los Angeles, and Delta’s ExpressJet connection contractor will fly to LAX and Salt Lake City. Both regional-jet routes start in December, the prime tourism and skiing season. Both services depend on the city’s wise men and women agreeing to incentives. If the routes do in fact start, this could be an interesting case study in RJ-versus-big jet competition, especially since the dominant carrier at the big airport in Albuquerque is Southwest, with more than half the boardings. How much more will people be willing to pay for direct service into Santa Fe on an RJ?

Southwest Airlines made a teeny, tiny move toward in-flight entertainment by agreeing a deal with the A&E cable network to set up a ‘micro-site’ linked to the airline’s website that lets users download A&E shows to their personal laptops or to create a CD for viewing in-flight on a personal entertainment device. Southwest chief executive Gary Kelly has told reporters and analysts that the airline is considering several forms of in-flight entertainment. This is a major reversal of the airline’s long-standing belief, as expressed by founder and former chief executive Herb Kelleher, that “we don’t need in-flight entertainment because we have our wise-cracking flight attendants for that!” Kelly also said that the airline has issued a request for proposals to equip some of its planes to with on-board broadband capabilities.

Air India will open a new chapter in its 75-year history this week with the launch of non-stop flights between India and the USA.

The carrier took delivery of its first ultra long-range Boeing 777-200LR on 26 July and will begin operating non-stops on the New York-Mumbai route on 1 August.

Below is the aircraft in Air India’s new livery, which combines its current colour scheme with the colours of Indian Airlines. The two carriers are now in the process of merging.

Ryanair – the full story of the controversial low-cost airline dishes the dirt on the airline that charges wheelchair users to rent a chair, opposes carbon trading for airlines and features everyone from the Pope to Saddam Hussein in its advertising.

Get stoned. Yep, that’s what one airline wants you to do. Silverjet, one of the superpremum transatlantic carriers is stepping up the competition with an offer that gets you a round trip between New York and London on its 100-sleeper seat jet, plus, plus, get this, a chance to see the Rolling Stones live at the O2 Arena and for one of the final shows of the bigger bang tour. The airline’s $2,500 package include the flights and a ticket to the concert, which you can book by calling 1-800-ROCK AIR or (get this) flysilverjetcom/getstoned. Please be aware that the Flight Group does not condone bad behaviour, although some of us do condone clever advertising.

Japan’s All Nippon Airways (ANA) has decorated a Boeing 767-300 aircraft in celebration of 20 years of flying to China, and 35 years of China-Japan friendship.

The aircraft is patched with black spots to look like a cute Panda, and the theme continues inside the aircraft.

Everything from headrests to cabin crew uniforms, deserts to napkins has been pandered!

...and the winner is V Australia! I present to you the at-long-last-here-it-is name of Virgin Blue's new long-haul arm, which will fly from Australia to the USA, and will be launched late 2008, subject to regulatory approval.

The new name was the result of a “name the airline” competition launched by Virgin Blue in conjunction with a local radio station.

The competition’s deadline was 15 June 2007, and by 25 June Virgin had eight possibilities short-listed. The names were for the airline as well as for the aircraft, and the winning entry for the aircraft was Didgeree Blue – a clever play on words if ever I heard one.

Amusing names such as Choo Choo Flying Big Blue and Randy Roo Airlines unfortunately didn’t make it on to the list.

So between 25 June and 26 July, Virgin had to choose two of the eight names. (Honestly a week would have sufficed!)

Here’s their short-list: Matilda Blue; V Australia; Australia Blue; Virgin Pacific; Amelia Blue; Didgeree Blue; Liberty Blue; and Virgin Australia.

So there you go, the new airline will be called V Australia Airlines, rather good I think - brings a twist of modernity into the Virgin name while keeping to the point.

By Isabelle Male

Occasionally we can’t help a little curiosity about the way the general press covers aviation. Take for instance a newspaper up in the Great State of Maine, noted for its potatoes, hard winters, and lonely moose. Seems that an airport up there, the Knox County Regional Airport, won a $5 million grant to build a new taxiway. The airport, not far from Rockland, has only a single 5,000-foot runway, and that, according to Representative Tom Allen, the local Democrat who won the funding, “forces aircraft to taxi backward” after landing. Only turboprops and Cessnas serve the airport, and unlike Maine's moose, or indeed its members of Congress, these planes can't really go backward.

Local papers across the state reprinted the congressman’s description without question. We intend no disrespect to the honourable gentleman, an Oxford man as it turns out, and a former mayor of the pretty city of Portland. After all, one can't really expect members of Congress to know what they're talking about. That would set a dangerous precedent. And the airport, which is in a stunningly beautiful part of the East’s northern-most state, can't be held accountable for his words. With newspapers in a state that is dependent on general aviation, though, maybe it's a different story. After all, we can’t help wondering if the Maine moose would be truly perplexed at the site of a plane taxiing backwards.

Who lies more? American and United, the world’s number one and two are about to wage a battle over which one lies more. Lies more and lies flatter, that is. They are both re-designing their premium services with long, luxurious lie-flat beds in their pursuit of the premium market. Both are particularly going after the North Atlantic business-class market, where they have lagged behind European carriers such as British Airways and Lufthansa and where the new all-premium carriers such as Eos have estabished a beach-head. United has unveiled a sleeper seat for its premium service on its Boeing 747s, 767s and 777s, while American has a new lie flat-bed for its Boeing 777 premium sections.

The two carriers are avoiding toe-to-toe battles though United claims its are the first truly lie-flat beds; it will certainly have more of them on more planes when they’re done. This is the first major upgrade to United’s premium class since the 1995-1999 redesign and includes I-pod connections, 15+ inch video monitors that are triple the size of its average video screen and other niceties. Both the American and the United beds stretch out to 76 inches. We won’t take sides, or fronts or backs, especially since we haven’t tried either, but we have to hand United a big kudos for its advertising campaign, suitedreams. Using its trademark music from the Gershwin classic ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, which the airline purchased back in the 1980s, it has some very clever graphics and illustrations.

It’s happening again. Those pesky Northwest pilots are just not turning up for work, and the airline is cancelling flights, again. In late June, Northwest cancelled more than 1,000 flights in the month’s final 10 days, after which the airline decided to announce a 3% cut in its flying schedules for August so that it didn’t face the same dilemma. By some estimates, as many as 125,000 travellers were delayed or inconvenienced by the June cancellations, which brought Northwest enormous negative publicity. The end of the month is the crucial time for cancellations at any airline, because that’s when pilots bump up against their contract’s limit on maximum hours. And that’s when airlines rely on pilots volunteering to fly extra hours. (Volunteering isn’t exactly the right word, since the pilots do get paid.) Northwest simply cited high absenteeism rates, but the pilots blamed poor management of staffing planning.

Qatar (the airline not the country) came to Washington the other day and its outrageously outspoken chief Akbar Al Baker was in rare form, fending off foolish press queries and letting drop a few fertile hints here and there.Akbar (we can call him that because he was on our cover in March, 2006) said he plans a big, big US expansion after his first two routes, New York/Newark and Washington Dulles, both just begun. The daily Dulles A340-600 flights will be the first nonstops from the nation’s capital to the Middle East. The airline brought a welcome sense of humor to its advertising, including enlisting Abraham Lincoln, seated in his memorial on the National Mall, into its sleeper seat.

It’s been an awful awful summer for US air travellers and nobody knows this better than Marion Blakey, head of the Federal Aviation Administration. She warned as early as March that it didn’t look like a good summer to fly but wasn’t fully prepared for the depth of public anger and frustration. The anger, which has spurred a call for a passenger bill of rights, is real and probably justified. After all, in May, the passenger complaint rate rose by 45% as the on-time arrivals rate fell to the lowest level in the dozen years since the Transportation Department began tracking the data. At some airports, the on-time arrival rate was below the 73.6% national average, with New York City’s three main airports faring worst in the nation at a 64% average rate.

It’s perhaps an unhappy coincidence that New York is represented in the Senate by one of its most vocal, most outspoken, and most loud-spoken members, the Honourable Charles ‘Chuck’ Schumer, a Democrat from Brooklyn by way of Harvard. The other week, Chuck as he likes to be known called for Blakey’s immediate resignation because of the “FAA’s leadership failures”. Schumer, who has played a hands-on role (that’s polite for micromanaging) in the FAA’s attempts to redesign New York City-area airspace, also cited Blakey’s ongoing disputes with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union that’s angered at Blakey over her refusal to follow her predecessor’s relatively generous policy on traffic-controller pay deals. AB was lucky enough to be seated next to Blakey at a lunch a few hours after Schumer’s call, and poor Mz. Blakey was crying all the way the to door. “I’m not going to resign,” she said, explaining, “I don’t have to. I’m out of here September 13, come hell or high water. I am a one-term administrator. If nominated, I will not accept and if confirmed I will not serve,” she said, nearly convulsing in polite laughter. She paraphrased the one-term 20th century president Calvin Coolidge, who left office saying, “if nominated I will not accept and if elected I will not serve”

While the UK is under constant rainfall it is worth remembering that it is sunny somewhere in this world:

As mentioned on AirSpace(our new community platform) I think i would prefer to be in the rain though than be the pilot trying to get back into that aircraft.

The user fee battle, as the long-running increasingly shrill FAA funding debate has taken to the airwaves as well as the airways. In addition to the little pleadings that the carriers are making their in-flight magazines (see 'Seatback Squabble' blog of July 8), the airlines’ trade group, the Air Transport Association (ATA) has put a character up on the radio and You Tube to carry their case against corporate aviation. She’s Edna, a classic American waitress from a road-side dinner where nothing, not the menu the decor or the hairdos has changed since the 1960s. She has a big wig but doesn’t like big wigs - or subsidising their big private jets. The airlines are hoping that this populist appeal, the suggestion that only bigwigs and corporate high rollers fly private jets and that they don't pay their way, will gain them public sympathy. They're even posting ads inside the Washington Metro System's subway cars, though they deny that they are running an underground campaign.

Southwest Airlines found its way deeper into the wallets and laptops of its frequent flyers back in 2005 when it began nifty little service called Ding! that alerts computer users when a deal they’ve been looking or pops up for sale. It’s called Ding! because the software that Southwest lets you download is programmed to mimic the sound of an airliner’s seatbelt warning. Since then DING! has caught on, and was even recognised when Southwest won the Airline Business Strategy awards for marketing back in 2005.

Now American Airlines, Southwest’s giant cross-town rival in Dallas, is fighting back with something it calls the DealFinder, which you download from AA.com. The alert tracks both the route you want (e.g., DFW-Miami) and the price you want to pay. The DealFinder, which some American people are calling “the Ding Killer” or even “Dang”, will also offer exclusive deals as well. This exclusivity is intended to distinguish American's offer from fare-alerting and fare-finding services offered by some of the on-line travel agencies such as Expedia. American, based near the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, will offer 100,000 DealFinder downloads on a first-come, first-served basis. After it works out the bugs, they will be widely available. American says its offer is better, because it offers more variables, and anyway American goes everywhere. No word from RyanAir, which offers something it calls BING!, a downloadable service that alerts users to low fares.

They’re off! And the race gets tougher, with Delta already in the post position and heavily favoured by touts for the next US-China route rights award is moving to build up its bid by promising non-stop flights between Atlanta and both Beijing and Shanghai. The Atlanta-based carrier has been pushing for Shanghai rights since last year and was the first to jump in when new route rights were made available under a just-signed US-China treaty. The carrier says that the southeastern region of the United States is so underserved that it can offer both routes, to Shanghai by March (if not sooner) and to Beijing in March 2009. Delta has a few paw-erful allies in its bid: the three giant pandas donated by China to its zoo, Lun Lun, Yang Yang, and Mei Lan, put their paw prints on an on-line petition that Delta has set up on a special website.

Northwest Airlines, which is ready to fly as soon as it can, also has set up a nice little website to boost its bid for rights to fly between its Detroit hub and Shanghai. Northwest, which already has a US-China network, seems to acknowledge that Delta is the frontrunner, and says that it knows that the DoT (Docket OST-2007-28567) wants to choose a new entrant this year. The airline adds, “We’re prepared to respect the DoT’s wishes but we think the public and the DoT should have a choice. Northwest would accept China frequencies in either or both years”. But does Northwest have pandas or other Chinese gifts on its side?

At last night’s Airline Business magazine annual Airline Strategy Awards I introduced the event with a short snapshot of some of the highlights of the past year in the business.

Here is the text of the introduction if you weren’t able to be there (here I am in full flow).

“Looking back over the past 12 months or so since the last Awards ceremony it has, in many ways, been a momentus year.

I’ve selected a few personal highlights to remind us just how much has happened in such a short time.

The transfer of Lufthansa German Airlines from Moscow’s down-at-heel Sheremetyevo Airport to the sparkling new Domodedovo Airport could spell the beginning of the end for the international traffic ambitions of the Russian capital’s traditional gateway.

So confident is London Heathrow's operator BAA in its ability to deliver the airport's Terminal 5 on time and on budget that BAA director of business critical systems and IT, Nick Gaines, yesterday boasted to a group of journalists that the new facility "will not have any system integration problems".

Hopefully Gaines' confidence will be rewarded and the mass of new IT systems involved in making T5 work will indeed run seamlessly and flawlessly.

However, it takes a brave person to make such a bold claim to a group of reporters, pens in hand to take note of the comment so that if things do not go as smoothly as predicted, the comment can be thrown back at its source along with a barrage of whys and wherefores.

No this is not a golfing story. That smiling gent is indeed Arnold Palmer, one of the sport’s great and legendary figures, but this is about an airport that has a link to the links-man. The old Westmoreland County Airport, in Latrobe, near Pittsburgh, renamed itself the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in 1999, to honour the sportsman who had grown up less than a mile from the runway. Palmer had watched one of the first airmail pickups, way back in 1939, and later learned to fly at the airport, still known by its code, LBE. Despite its rich history, LBE has not always been so wealthy in service, having lost US Airways Express flights by Mesa in July 1994, during the carrier’s bankruptcy. After a lot of solicitation and drumbeating, the county persuaded Northwest Airlink (flown by Mesaba with a 34-seat Saab 340) to start service to Detroit in April 2005. After a sometimes bumpy start, the code-share carrier is filling 70% of its seats and in fact is turning away passengers.

The airlines know they have a captive audience and have long used it to sell stuff or let others offer to sell the neat stuff you see in those ‘order this gadget now’ catalogues. Now, though, the carriers are using this power to press their political case about FAA funding and the future of air-traffic control, provoking some interesting guerrilla warfare responses from their opponents, the general aviation and private pilot crowd.

American Airlines is using its free seat-back magazine to make the argument for changing the whole approach to charging airline passengers and private aviation taxes. Top executives of Continental, US Airways, and Northwest, have made pleas in their monthly passenger publications, while United simply let the airlines’ chief lobbyist, Air Transport Association chief executive Jim May, have the space. Now American, the world’s largest airline and the only US carrier with an in-flight book that comes out twice a month, is in the fray.

The latest issue of American Way, the carrier’s 350,000-circulation magazine, has the airline’s chief executive Gerard Arpey, making the pitch. Arpey’s editorial, a regular fixture in the magazine, usually talks about things such as how airlines are trying to help the environment and other industry issues, but this piece is a little more pointed. Because of the way the system now operates, Arpey argues, private aviation does not pay its way while commercial airlines pay more than their far share. “What that means as crazy as it sounds, is that the airlines and our customers (that’s you!) are paying a subsidy – to the tune of $1.5 billion a year – to the companies and individuals who can afford their own aircraft”. Arpey goes on to urge passengers to write to their legislators in Washington. UAL’s chief executive, Glenn Tilton, made a similar plea in an email blast sent to United’s frequent flyers.

Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary might not have pawned his grandmother yet, but there’s plenty he is prepared to sell aside from flights, including gambling, seatback advertising, in-flight catering, phone cards and the facility to use your own mobile phone on-board.
Now Ryanair will be selling advertising on overhead lockers on 62 of its aircraft, in a deal worth around 7 million euros.
Manufacturer of the caffeine-infused Red Bull will be the first to sign up with Fourth Edition, the company which developed and sells advertising space on Ryanair’s overhead lockers.

The UK's Daily Telegraph newspaper has done a good job analysing, some might say speculating, on whether Singapore Airlines is (or should) offloading its 49% stake in Virgin Atlantic Airways.

SIA took the stake in 1999 and has done - outwardly at least - precisely zip with it.

Annals of advertising, part 203: is this smart? Airlines will do almost anything to get their name and logo and brand out there in a favourable light, and hook-ups with well-liked products are nothing new. Still, one does raise the question of how well thought out some of these campaigns are. Take for instance a new campaign from JetBlue, still trying to regain public favour after its disastrous passenger strandings of last winter and a recent repeat fiasco in which the airline took about 24 hours to get people between New York and Fort Lauderdale. The airline has announced that it will be linking up with a new film based on the popular Simpsons television series about a dysfunctional family in a typical, mythical dysfunctional MidAmerican town. The paterfamilias, doughnut-loving Homer Simpson, works in a nuclear power plant run by the nasty, conniving C. Montgomery Burns, whose main goal is to make life miserable for someone every day. The airline, it seems, has decided to let the mythical, misanthropic Mr. Burns take the place of JetBlue founder and non-executive chairman David Neeleman. Though recently stripped of his chief executive title after the fiascos in Februrary and again in March, Neeleman still writes his blog for JetBlue, 'David Neeleman’s Flight Log'. Monty has taken over the blog "in my newest attempt to rob a man of his livelihood”. Burns goes on to denounce Neeleman and the airline, saying that they don’t make life miserable enough for passengers. Burns is outraged at the "congenial customer service and overly indulgent amenities" on JetBlue, and vows to make some big changes. We ask, is this the best thing for an airline that left thousands of people stuck on the runway for six, eight, or 10 hours? On the other hand, if it gets JetBlue to add doughnuts to its in-flight offerings...

What odds can I get on Boeing’s 787 having racked up 1,000 sales before it first flies sometime in August or September? Now that’s long odds surely.

Today Boeing lists 584 firm orders for the 787 on its website, which rises to 636 if you include the 52 ordered by lessor ILFC at the recent Paris Air Show.

But how about 1,000 orders by the time it enters service with launch customer All Nippon Airways in May 2008?

Come on any takers? Yes plenty, but at incredibly short odds. In fact most self-respecting bookmakers would have done the decent thing and closed their books on the subject.

Qatar has thrown the party to end all parties in New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, just off Broadway.
Qatar was obviously hoping for a glamour injection, with celebrities such as Donald Trump (check out that combover! He is pictured, top, centre, with his wife Melania, left, and actress Gayle King), Julianne Moore (pictured bottom right), Maggie Gyllenhaal and Chloe Sevigny in attendance. And no expense was spared with Andie MacDowell as master of ceremonies (pictured top and bottom left) and Diana Ross providing entertainment.

Air traffic controllers, never a group to take things lightly, are fighting back with their tongue firmly in cheek (and ankle firmly in view) in their latest squabble with the their boss, the Friendly Aviation Administration. The controllers union, NATCA, or the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, doesn’t have the right to strike, so they have to make their arguments another way. Right now they're exercised over an FAA dress-code crackdown in which, reportedly, non-union supervisors have disciplined and even sent home controllers who show up in outfits that don’t meet the FAA dress code standards. By some reports, the matter has gone pretty far with guys and gals being dismissed or sent home because of the colours of their trousers or the type of inseam they have. Well, the controllers are fighting back and some of them, some of the guys at least, have begun showing up for their duty shifts in dresses. Yes, nice business-like dresses that were designed for the opposite gender. We don’t know how the FAA will respond; the agency has said in the past that it only wants a professional dress code no more restrictive than those in most business offices. (NATCA’s predecessor, PATCO, struck in 1981, prompting then-president Ronald Reagan to fire some 11,000 members. Maybe that’s worse than being sent home without a day's work.)

Why don’t these guys take a hint from Alaska Airlines? The Seattle-based carrier spent the other week dressing up its cabin crew in vintage costumes reflecting the airline’s history as it enters its 75th year. Among the most interesting are these Russian Cossack-style outfits, from the days in the 1960s when Alaska was flying regularly to the far eastern Soviet Union. These flights included samovars for in-flight beverage service as well as other touches of imperial Russia. On the other hand, people showing up in Russian-themed outfits at US government installations could send the wrong signal.

Which one is the Texican? Well, the tall fellow represents the Lone Star State, and the chap in the 10-gallon hat is in fact a Hibernian, namely Willie Walsh, the head of British Airways. He’s talking with Jeff Fegan, the head of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport as they marked a major event: DFW became the first US airport to take advantage of the new US/EC open skies policy as BA announced it will move its DFW/London flights from Gatwick to Heathrow, effective next March. Walsh, who accepted the big hat and some cowboy boots, total capacity at least 10 gallons, said that the daily DFW flight fills about 70% of its seats, and he expects to do even better with the network effect that Heathrow will give it. BA is also moving its other Texas flights, from Houston’s Bush Intercontinental, from Gatwick to Heathrow as well. Fegan even flew to London to announce the move, which he said was “incredible news,” a major event and a big deal. He said BA will get free landing fees for the first year and half-price deal the second year because the service counts as a new route.

American Airlines, which happens to have a fair-sized operation at DFW and even has its headquarters there, had no announcement about moving its DFW flights from Gatwick to Heathrow, but Fegan dropped a subtle hint: "we estimate that if a fourth daily flight to London were added at DFW, it would generate more than $170 million to our economy every year".

Monarch is getting down with yoof culture again, with the launch of a viral campaign to promote its flights to the Spanish party island of Ibiza today.
The campaign is set to build on Monarch’s April collaboration with record label HedKandi, which set out to tap into the youth market. As part of that partnership, Monarch unveiled a HedKandi liveried Boeing 757 to mark the launch of flights and the start of Hed Kandi’s flykandi season. Adding to that package, the airline has now partnered with Clubtix.co.uk to offer its customers tickets to Ibiza events.