Finally, food for thought from the DoT.
In their hunger for a new route to
Thinking it really ought to make sure it informed the bureaucrats at the Transportation Department who will make the final decision, Continental also filed the fortune cookies in the official dockets there. Or at least the fortunes. As Bruce Keiner, a
JetBlue has gamed the system well, winning four landing slots at Chicago O'Hare and someone how getting its hands on three more, marking the six-year-old discounter's deepest foray into a legacy-dominated hub. JetBlue, which had earlier sought eight slots, cut its official request in half after vociferous opposition emerged from legacies such as United, but the discounter managed to obtain (at least) three more slots. It "obtained" the additional slots under a recent FAA decision to allow airlines at O'Hare (ORD) to "trade, swap, buy, or sell" slots. But JetBlue won the four slots by getting in an application before the beginning of new FAA rules for O'Hare landing slots. JetBlue Chief Executive David Neeleman said the carrier would have up to five flights a day between Chicago's major airport and New York's JFK, its hub, plus two a day between ORD and Los Angeles/Long Beach. The flights don't start until January, when details will have been arranged.
Who says George Bush can't change things? Just hours after President Bush signed a bill phasing out Dallas Love Field restrictions under the 1979 Wright Amendment, Southwest set a major expansion there. The discounter plans to fly to 25 previously prohibited airports from Love, although flights will involve an intermediate stop or change of plane. It now flies non-stop between Love, also its home base, and 18 cities, but because of the Wright Amendment, designed to protect the then-fledging, now giant D/FW airport, those flights are limited to the states that neighbour Texas.
If you prefer going beyond the region, you'd have to change planes, often in places in Texas such as Houston that have longer distance nonstops. The law, named after the powerful but disgraced Democrat Speaker of the House Jim Wright, also kept Southwest from advertising longer distance flight or selling a single-ticket itinerary. In effect, you had to pretend you weren't really flying between Love Field and say, Chicago Midway: it was just a coincidence that you had also had a Midway ticket right next to your Love-Oklahoma City ticket, and you had to pretend that you really didn't mind spending a little while in the Oklahoma terminal. (They have really cute little souvenir oil derricks there, in case you were wondering).
As Southwest grew it began to fight the restrictions and earlier this year finally hammered out a compromise among Dallas, Fort Worth, American, and others. The deal phases out the Wright limits but for now still keeps Southwest from offering long-distance nonstops between Love and most destinations; it does allow long-distance, same-plane service -- the plane has to stop somewhere like Houston and then continue on to places like Baltimore/Washington or Washington Dulles or Manchester, New Hampshire, on the East Coast. The new routes are in a Southwest statement that also gives lotsa Love factoids: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061017/datu042.html?.v=69
For an airline that schedules multi-segment itineraries-a flight can stop three or four times - it's a no brainer. But fliers in North Texas, as they call the 'Big D' and Fort Worth and the whole darn-tooting region, win two ways, because American immediately slashed fares out of its D/FW hub on routes that compete with the new Southwest network.
Not content to let American's challenge stand without response, and perhaps sensing that American was edging it out by adding double miles to the promotion, Southwest a few days later lowered Love Field fares yet again, to the $39-$79 range. So the question becomes: how strongly will American defend its largest hub? How much of a revenue premium will it get in its largest home market for the non-stop advantage?
American chairman Gerard Arpey said that "some very price-sensitive travellers" might avoid its slightly higher non-stop fares. Southwest isn't worried because "We have very quick turns, which makes our one stop just barely a notch below non-stop".
In Hawaii, they like to talk about the Aloha spirit of welcoming newcomers. Aloha however also seems to mean 'goodbye' or 'go home' or 'go back where you came from', at least as far as airlines are concerned, because that's the kind of welcome that Jonathan Ornstein has found since he went to the islands earlier this year to set up a new lower fare interloper he dubbed go!
Go! uses Canadair RJ 50-seaters, many of them veterans of the Independence Air debacle, in a bid to undercut interisland service from the two big established carriers, Aloha and Hawaiian, and a smaller turboprop operator, Island Air; since Ornstein began go! with fares that undercut the rivals, a really hostile battle of words and press releases has been accompanied by what else - lawsuits. And nasty actions. Aloha airlines has even gone so far as to say it would no longer accept tickets from go! when flights were cancelled or delayed, and that it would no longer carry go! passenger bags when go! "is unable to carry a passenger's bags on their small aircraft".
Aloha is not alone in its anger; the other major carrier, the larger Hawaiian Airlines, sued Mesa, claiming that Mesa, which put itself forward as a potential buyer when Hawaiian was in bankruptcy, used its time kicking the tires and looking at books to garner secrets about Hawaiian's business that it later used to launch the new rival. The case is in court, where a judge says Hawaiian may have a case, but it put off ruling. Aloha has also filed similar charges in a separate case.
But this battle, as befits a 21st Century dispute, also counts the web as a battlefield, with a grassroots (webroots?) group calling itself HERO or H.E.R.O. for 'Hawaii's airline Employees Repelling Ornstein'.
Filled with negative reports on Mesa that would make proud Karl Rove or any political operative in 'opposition research', the site draws plenty of visitors, including it would seem Ornstein's camp. Shortly after the Hero site went active, go! launched a fare sale touting 'Hero' fares of $19 each way, which wouldn't cover roasting the in-flight peanuts much less salting them. The leading paper in the islands, Honolulu's Star-Bulletin, soon ran an online poll asking, "Will the entrance of Mesa Air Group's go! airline in the Hawaii market be good in the long run?" Included beneath the poll was the comment, "Multiple votes will be deleted. Note: Vote tallies may change during the week, as attempts to manipulate the voting are discovered and deleted." So when the poll ended, 'yes' votes outnumbered 'no' votes by 2 to 1.
Our friend Holly Hegeman of planebusiness.com reports that apparently the paper was alerted at some point to a corporate e-mail from Mesa management asking all of their employees to participate in the poll. After the newspaper purged all the duplicate and other suspicious responses, the poll swung over to a resounding 'No' result.
Why do people go to
Named after the river that was diverted to make place for the airport, Tocumen is a showpiece for the nation's major international airline, COPA, and the airline's drive toward the first ranks of regional carriers and indeed toward the mainstream of truly admired international carriers. The airline itself - punctual, clean, and courteous - leaves little to be desired, but its plan to be the Hub of the
The airport's arrivals area, destination for perhaps half of COPA's passengers, is standard issue
The airport, the airline, and Panamanian tourism officials rave about the duty-free shopping in the airport and on first sight it certainly looks shiny and glossy. It's miles, or kilometers, ahead of most airports in the region. http://www.tocumenpanama.aero/index.php?id=cccpageqp0qpgaleria_fotos/ But try looking for something to buy: the half dozen duty-free liquor stores have exactly the same selection of booze and fragrances, at exactly the same prices, with exactly the same displays. The fashion merchandisers -Izod and the like- are full-price counterparts of look-alike downtown stores. The electronics stores, of which there are several, are also identical in layout, merchandise, and pricing. Only one shop - and this one not a shop but a modest temporary stall - actually has Panamanian-type merchandise, and it's way off to the side. It's almost as if the authorities are embarrassed about an outlet that is a little less shiny and a lot less bland than the other merchants. So to paraphrase that old saying about
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