David Field: April 2007 Archives

Finally, after months in bankruptcy, millions in debts wiped out, thousands of jobs and careers lost, lives upset and displaced, the important Delta story is out: the airline has redesigned its logo, the triangular Delta-shaped logo known since the dawn of the jet age as THE WIDGET.

The South, Delta's home territory, has been abuzz with rumours of a redesign for weeks with Delta loyalists either denouncing or praising the bootlegged images on the web. This speaks volumes about the relationship Delta has long had with its neighbours, a group of people who are fiercely loyal to the carrier when outsiders criticise it - in large part because they want exclusive rights to dump all over Delta.

Pinnacle Airlines and Phil Trenary have had some bad news (and some good news) since visiting with Airline Business in April: Pinnacle will lose 17 regional jets it was to fly in Northwest Airlink service because it failed to negotiate a labor agreement with its pilots union by 31 March. Back in December, Northwest had notified Pinnacle that it must meet that deadline or risk losing the jets. "Northwest put an unreasonable deadline on us getting a new contract", Wakefield Gordon, chairman of the Pinnacle pilots union, an Air Line Pilots Association local, told the newspaper in Memphis, the Commercial-Appeal. "We didn't make the deadline, and we lost the airplanes".

Pinnacle will continue to operate its 124 CRJs for Northwest and, it explained in a regulatory filing, Pinnacle is entitled to the full amount of its unsecured $42.5 million claim in bankruptcy proceedings because the planes were not committed to Pinnacle on a long-term basis,. It plans to sell that claim quickly and then apply the proceeds to the bottom line.

The company and its pilots have been negotiating since February 2005 and in mediation since September. Until late in December when Pinnacle signed a new deal with Northwest, it had been flying solely as a regional carrier for Northwest. The deal let it seek other customers. It also gave Pinnacle 17 additional 50-seat regional jets, with the stipulation that Northwest could take them back if Pinnacle and its pilots did not have a deal by 31 March. Northwest will start reallocating the planes to its Mesaba subsidiary in September.

Just before Jeff Smisek, president of Continental Airlines, walked in to the Airline Distribution conference, the audience was asked: please turn off your tape recorders or other recording devices. Uh oh. What was this guy afraid of? To the journalist, this is usually a warning sign that the speaker is a little (or, actually, a lot), uncertain about what he'll say or sometimes that he's just a dud, a highly-scripted, dull-tongued figurehead. Not this guy, not Jeff. The number two at the world's number five airline presents a blend of extraordinary candour and optimism that you really want to be there to catch, and is someone to be heard in person rather than second hand. So we'll just offer a few of his more pointed points:

On low-cost long-haul, a topic much in the news with reports that Ryanair may offer obscenely low transatlantic fares, Jeff says, "there already is low-cost across the North Atlantic. It's called coach. It's not our market and will never be our market, though it's possible, I suppose".

Low-cost domestic competition: "over time, airlines grow up, their planes get older and so do their employees. Real airlines have real costs." Continental, he says performed an analysis in which it took JetBlue's wage scales and applied Continental's average seniority, and then took JetBlue's maintenance costs and applied them to Continental's aircraft age, and found that it would have been $750 million to the better. "There will always be new entrants. But low-cost carriers, like children, all grew up."

Everybody's going green. Spurred on perhaps by public attention gained by European carriers that have introduced carbon offset schemes to great media attention, Delta Air Lines became the first big US carrier to offer such a plan, in which passengers assuage their angst over airliner emissions of carbon dioxide and other toxics by making an extra payment that will go toward a project that "offsets" these emissions. British Airways and SAS have begun similar schemes, and Silverjet, the small premium service UK-US carrier, has been "carbon neutral" since it began service. Other travel companies such as Orbitz, the on-line booking service, are offering similar plans.

The Delta plan lets travellers pay a voluntary surcharge, and this fee ($5.50 on a domestic flight and $11 on an international roundtrip flight) goes directly to the Conservation Fund. The fund then uses the funds to plant trees in areas where the trees would help the environment. The organization has already planted 30,000 acres in such 'carbon sequestration' projects, planting nine million trees that will capture about 13.5 million tons of carbon dioxide over 100 years, Conservation Fund President Larry Selzer said. He says the donations equal the approximate cost of offsetting the carbon dioxide produced by an average domestic or international trip, and would typically pay for planting one or two trees. He said the fund expects to concentrate re-forestation efforts in Gulf Coast and lower Mississippi forests damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Midwest Airlines is relying more and more on its trademark chocolate chip cookie, which it bakes on board as part of its 'best care in the air' branding. The cookie is now a weapon in its arsenal against the unfriendly advances of AirTran Airways. AirTran has been trying to buy Midwest since last year, and has raised its offer three times; the Midwest board rejected AirTran's $389-million 'final' offer last week, and is now lining up votes for its 14 June annual meeting at which Midwest shareholders will be asked to affirm that rejection. The airline, based in Milwaukee, has just created a new website, savethecookie.com, to let its loyal customers and shareholders register their opposition to an AirTran takeover with an on-line petition, a share-with-a-friend function and a booking tool.

In a bid to attract more of the people who make more of the purchase and travel decisions than you would think, American Airlines has became the first major carrier to devote a part of its website exclusively to women travellers. Like most other major US carriers, the airline already has programs and websites for Spanish-speakers and marketing plans for gay and lesbian travellers. This site, aa.com/women, is slightly different, because it is intended to be a little more than just a place to sell things to people. The airline wants it to be an on-line community and one that its users help shape, says Nora Linville, who is American's first director of women's sales and marketing.

It came about as American realised that more and more of its best customers, the high-paying business flyers, were women. The airline's traffic breaks along gender lines 52% male, but the 48% who are female has seen rapid growth as the workforce has changed. The percentage of women business travellers in somewhere in the high 20s, American officials say. American communications director Mary Sanderson says that if it can attract 2% more women travellers, it stands to increase revenues by as much as $94 million.

Readers' reactions to incidents in the news sometimes tell more than the news itself. Take for instance, the incident in which a Northwest Airlines flight was cancelled after FAA and police at Las Vegas McCarran removed the pilot (yes the pilot, not a passenger) when flyers boarding the Detroit-bound plane overheard the captain screaming, yelling and cursing into his mobile phone while standing in the cockpit door to "greet" them. As his rant went on, the unidentified captain stepped into the forward bathroom and continued the tirade, which passengers still heard. When one passenger complained, the pilot lashed out and with another round of curses, one passenger told CNN, the all-news network. An FAA official said the police removed the pilot, after which the airline cancelled the flight and reacommodated the stranded passengers.

The loudest sound heard in Washington right now in applause in response to the regulator's decision not to allow cell phones (mobile phones in the UK parlance) to be used in US airliners or airliners operating in US airspace. As the proposal to allow on board mobile yakking advanced over the last four years, the major beneficiaries seemed to be stand-up comics who incorporated it into their routines and even authors like the two women who wrote 'Jerk With a Cell Phone: a Survival Guide for the Rest of Us', or the even the regulatory body in question, the Federal Communications Commission, which posted a little info site for kids explaining the dangers of in-flight mobile phone use.

The issue seemed to be coming to a head in February when Carnegie Mellon University, a noted technology centre in Pittsburgh, produced a very detailed study arguing against allowing the use of mobiles in-flight.

In the city that beer made famous, it's a rite of spring, throwing out the first ball of the big-league baseball season, an American festival. They take the sport very seriously, especially in the gritty industrial cities of the old Midwestern rustbelt, cities like Milwaukee. The Wisconsin city, which is no longer either gritty or industrial but a booming centre of hi-tech and medicine, is also home to Midwest Airlines, and the airline takes its hometown seriously. Seriously enough to try to change some of its hometown habits, adding its famous 'baked-on-board' chocolate chip cookies to the traditional beer and bratwurst at Milwaukee Brewers ball games. The ball team's name reflects another tradition of this city, one one of the nation's two major beer-brewing centres. (The other is St. Louis, which hasn't had an airline since TWA died in 2001 but is home to Anheuser-Busch, the brewers of Budweiser.) So Midwest, the airline that used to known as Midwest Express, has gone to its city's ballpark with cookies and will be selling its signature cookies during every home game at the city's Miller Park, named after another Milwaukee institution, Miller Brewing. Fans will get three of the cookies, still warm, for $3 in a little stay warm package.

The airline will also give away 30,000 seat cushions designed to look like the all-leather seats on Midwest planes. The airline's cookie mascot, Chip, will also be at games at the ballpark, competing with the team mascot, a brewer, and other mascots, who are locals dressed up like German sausages.