September 2007 Archives

The eternal question again presents itself: why is this man smiling? He’s losing his job in February, he has nowhere to go after that, and he got booted from his last job before this. Still, Fred Reid’s happiness today is both real and apparent as chats to “guests” on board the first flight out of Washington of Virgin America, the new airline he helped found. Virgin, or VAm as insiders call it, took off in August after fighting for federal clearance for more than two years; its first routes linked its home base at San Francisco International with New York, and its so Washington Dulles were the first to follow.

The airlines like paint up their planes in nifty specialty liveries a lot these days as they seek to break through the clutter and get their name across. Here are a couple of the most recent: US Airways, which used to be USAirways and before that was USAir and Allegheny before that, used to count Pittsburgh, the steel city in western Pennsylvania, as one of its major hubs. That was before the airline got bigger and the city got smaller. Not only is Pittsburgh not a hub anymore, but it’s barely in the airline’s system; when US Airways chief executive Doug Parker took questions from employees the other month, he told them that PIT, AKA PGH, was real low down the list for new service. Not likely, he said, because nobody goes there anymore.

British Airways and other network carriers were today labelled as "dinosaurs" during the Routes Development Forum in Stockholm for their somewhat muted response to the new Europe-USA Open Skies agreement.

The accusation was made by aviation consultant and former Olympic Airways chairman, Rigas Doganis, during a panel discussion on Open Skies, in which BA chief executive Willie Walsh described the current agreement as "evolution, not a revolution".

Everyone’s got a blog. Including airlines. And they reflect something of the airline’s personality. For instance, Southwest started a blog "Nuts About Southwest" a year ago and it has gained a following, much like the airline itself, for its wit, or at least attempts at wit. And at JetBlue, another carrier with a real following, founder Dave Neeleman started a sort of blog, or at least an on-line presence. Now Delta Air Lines has joined the blogosphere with an entry that comes out in the name of Lee Macenczak, the airline’s executive vice president for marketing and sales.

Some of the blog, which has the working title of Under the Wing, comes from employees, including the managing director of delta.com and of its self-service initiatives, Josh Weiss. Macenczak says that as the airline come out of bankruptcy protection, it received a lot of ideas on what it should do at delta.com/change, and thought this would be a way to keep the flow of ideas coming.

Now it's Lufthansa's turn to get in on the dressing up angle, following hard on the heels of UK low-cost carrier easyJet yesterday.

This time Lufthansa is dressing some cabin crew in traditional Bavarian garb to celebrate a lot of beer drinking at the Oktoberfest. Damn fine excuse.

But will we ever see Lufthansa chief Wolfgang Mayrhuber donning fancy dress like easyJet's Andrew Harrison? No thought not.

Not to be outdone by rival Ryanair on the publicity-seeking front, easyJet chief executive Andy Harrison (pictured, front) today dressed up as a highway robber, holding a banner likening the UK's air passenger duty (APD) to "skyway robbery".

Southwest Airlines loves free publicity, but not the kind it was getting after one of its flight attendants tussled with a young woman passenger whose outfit, the attendant said, was just too revealing and too short. The flyer, a waitress at the Hooters restaurant chain that's known more for its scantily clad workers than its cuisine, said she was outraged when a flight attendant named 'Wayne' asked her to put on something else. When she said she didn't have a change of clothes, the airline made her wear a blanket across her knees rather than become an attractive nuisance to the male passengers walking past her down the aisle or offend anyone else on board the flight from San Diego, California, to Tucson, out in the sultry Arizona desert.

This passenger, 23-year-old Kyla Ebbert, knew how get the most mileage out her short-skirt situation; within days, she was making the rounds of the morning chat shows and public opinion certainly seamed to be headed her way. Some wags pointed out that Southwest was the airline that trademarked a hot-pants uniform that it required for stewardesses back in the go-go 1970s and others wondered if Southwest chief executive Gary Kelly, noted for his outrageous Halloween costumes (right, as a cowboy gunslinger), would dress up in a miniskirt this year. After a week of hemming, hawing and skirting the issue, Southwest decided it had given her short shrift and that it should wrap up the mini-matter. Coming clean, Kelly issued a public apology to Ebbert, saying, with tongue firmly in cheek, “as we both know, this story has great legs, but the true issue here is that you are valued customer and you did not get an adequate apology.” He also said the airline was lowering fares “to a mini-skirt level”.

Northwest Airlines has taken another type out of its fleet, taking the last Boeing 747-200 ‘classic’ out of regularLY scheduled service with its final operation on the Tokyo Narita to to Saipan to Seattle route. The plane arrived in Seattle on time as Flight 8 and continued from Seattle to the Northwest home base of Minneapolis/St. Paul as Flight 170, and was then retired. The 430-seat plane, N624US, was built for Northwest in 1979. The airline’s two remaining 747-200s will continue to operate for some 18 months as charter aircraft. Northwest replaced the 747-200 with the Airbus A330 on the Tokyo Narita-Saipan route.

Air France-KLM assembled journalists from all around the world at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport last week to showcase the new technology it believes will help to make Amsterdam Schiphol and CDG "Europe's most attractive dual hub system".

The airline's chairman, Jean-Cyril Spinetta, is pictured here (centre) during a demonstration of how to check-in using a mobile phone.

I took part in a similar demonstration and to give me a precise idea of how it works, I was checked in there and then for my flight back to London later that day. I can attest to it working, but was a bit miffed to discover as I boarded the aircraft that my seat was right at the back while my fellow journalists who did not check in remotely were seated much further forward!

Air France-KLM aims to be the first airline in the world to allow passengers to use mobile phones in-flight, according to executive vice-president of marketing and network management, Bruno Matheu.

The carrier plans to carry out a six-month trial early next year on-board an Airbus A318. In the first three months passengers will be allowed to use their mobiles to send text messages and emails, and in the second three months they will be able to annoy their fellow passengers by shouting "I'M ON THE PLANE!!" into their mobiles.

Questionnaires will be handed out to those lucky (or unlucky?) passengers who happen to be on the mobile phone trial aircraft to find out how they felt about it. Cabin crew will also be questioned on how it affected their ability to carry out their jobs.

At the moment, one in three Air France-KLM passengers use e-services to check-in. Matheu says the carrier aims to increase this figure to three out of four by 2009.

Statistics do not of course lie, so the news this morning from BAA that the much maligned Heathrow Airport saw passengers numbers positively boom by 6.5% in August, compared to the same month in 2006, comes as welcome news for the UK airports group.

The results will bring much comfort to BAA, which has taken such a massive press battering for service deficiencies at Heathrow and Gatwick.

Overall, BAA’s UK airports handled a total of 15.2 million passengers in August, an increase of 5.9%, making it BAA's busiest month.

M-1, I-95, greenway, expressway, turnpike, parkway. You name it, they hate it. These are all roads that stand between cities that should be an easy drive, city pairs like New York and Washington, Los Angeles and San Diego, and other city pairs that are as suited for the car or even the train as for the plane. But they’ve become better known as Heartache Highway, the Road of Regret, or I-Shouldn’t Have. Out on the West Coast, the Horizon Air unit of Alaska Airlines says that the auto-captive road warriors between Seattle and Portland, Oregon, are fed up enough with the hassle of their Trail of Tears, I-5, enough so that the Horizon Air shuttle is competitive.

Airlines often look at their hub airports with considerable paternalism, if not outright possessiveness and can get defensive if not outright testy if another airline plans a foray into their home territory. So when American announced an early September start-up to new flights between its growing New York LaGuardia operation and the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport, the big player, at MSP, Northwest Airlines, got ready to respond. It announced that on the same day as American begin the LGA/MSP flights, it would begin nonstops between New York LaGuardia and (you guessed it) the American Airlines home base of Dallas/Fort Worth. The inaugural day rolled around and the American flights are operating but Northwest quietly cancelled its planned incursion into American’s home base. Take that, red-tailed barons of Northwest.

C'mon, who really believes Alitalia has a chance of surviving? Is it a meek Christian ready to be mauled and mashed in Rome's Colosseum, or a bold gladiator, poised to fight for its right to exist.

Frankly, it's amazing the airline has lasted so long in its current form and with its current cost base.

Everyone complains but no one does anything. Well, one airline maintenance department has finally found a solution: placate the gods. Nepal Airlines found that the sacrificial goat – literally – was the answer to a problem with one of its Boeing 757s. The plane’s deicing system wouldn’t activate after hours of trouble-shooting and repeated repair attempts. So officials at Katmandu’s dominant carrier, also known as the lion of Tribhuvan International Airport, did what any logical person would do when logic doesn’t work: they reverted to the old ways. They found a pair of goats, one white and one black, and sacrificed them in front of the plane. Presto, problem solved. The plane took off for Hong Kong, no problems.

Cathay Pacific’s strategy of building its network around the hubs of Hong Kong and Beijing is the key to its continuing success, says Tony Tyler, the newly installed chief executive of Cathay Pacific Airways.

He was speaking here at the AsiaExpo centre during the opening Congress session at the Asian Aerospace exhibition.

“Hubbing is what it’s all about,” says Tyler, with Cathay Pacific focused on Hong Kong International Airport and partner Air China developing Beijing International Airport.