Kieran Daly: February 2006 Archives

This was going to be the first post generated in mid-air via Connexion by Boeing on a revenue flight. I wrote it on my Singapore Airlines flight back to London after the Asian Aerospace show using the free half-hour you get as a promotion at present. Sadly when the half-hour runs out the system simply disconnects without telling you, so I lost all my copy even though I was happy to start paying. Not amused. But it is a fantastic system and would certainly encourage me to fly with SQ rather than their competitors on a 13 hour flight.

Like the rest of our team out there I was tired and jet-lagged after the show and couldn't face doing it all again. So that little of moment of history passed by and this is now posted boringly from my laptop with wireless broadband while I sit on my sofa at home - something which would have seemed staggeringly cool less than a decade ago. 

Anyway, that's my sixth Asian Aerospace over. As usual in the parallel universe of journalism we're all complaining that it was a slow news week, but that's only if you discount things like the two hours we spent climbing all over the A380 for the first time (more on that next week), the $15 billion launch of Dubai Aerospace Enterprise, and a fair number of, mainly Airbus, orders. It's true though that the big companies tend not to announce big stories in Singapore, preferring Farnborough (all of five months away!) or Paris.

One of the best memories of this week is the launch of our own new Aviation Excellence Awards. It was a terrific night at the famous Raffles Hotel - a high spot being the first time we've ever had a standing ovation at one of our ceremonies - going to Thierry Fautrell who was the chief purser on Air France flight 358 which was burned out without loss of life at Toronto last year. Thierry accepted the award on behalf of the cabin crew on that flight. Vern Raburn, the CEO of Eclipse Aviation was another winner for his paradigm-shifting work with very light jets, and we enjoyed having representatives from the 169th Fighter Wing, Air National Guard in South Carolina, and Chautauqua Airlines of Indianapolis coming from more or less halfway round the world to receive recognition. The full winners' details are at the link above.

This was also an important week for us here at Flight. As I hope you've seen at our website, with a new URL www.flightglobal.com we've fairly radically rebranded the operation. You can read about how and why here. (Worth a glance just to see what very good-looking guys I and a couple of my colleagues really are.)

Between Flight Daily News and Flight International we will have produced many thousands of words on the show. I'm curious about what people who don't go to a show expect of our show-coverage. Drop a comment if you have some thoughts on that.

It's media preview day here at the Asian Aerospace show in Singapore, the usual slightly eerie pre-show atmosphere with a few dozen journalists and PR folks wandering around an exhibition site that tomorrow will have thousands of trade visitors. I've just witnessed two phenomena that are going to dominate life here for the rest of the week...

The first is the A380 practising its display and the second is the Flight Daily News operation once again rolling unstoppably into action. I'll come back to that.

The A380, as most of you will have seen here, is in SIA colours and its presence alone is a major story in Singapore. The question for show-goers however has been just what its display would include. When it first flew at the Paris show last year it had only just been cleared and the display was little more than a succession of flypasts, and at Dubai a few months later I hear it wasn't much different.

So the news is that this morning we were treated to something approaching the full Airbus routine for its other types, including something like a max-alpha flyby followed by a max power turning climb and then pushover into a descent and curved finals to land. For connoisseurs of this sort of thing - and aren't we all - it was pure magic. It's very difficult to see how anything else in the display this week is going to compete for wow factor. Here's a picture taken by Steve Nichols of Flight Daily News (he's a writer, not a photographer, as I'm sure he won't mind me pointing out.)

Going back to the other phenomenon - Flight Daily News is the daily magazine that we put out every day at all the major shows. It's an astonishing operation carried out by our long-time contractors Trident Communications. At each show from a standing start the team of writers comes together as if from nowhere, produces a hefty publication that on its best days has a word-count akin to a national newspaper, and then melts into the night like some strange band of ghostly journalist knights.

OK, I got a bit carried away there, but it really is a remarkable thing to watch, and has won numerous awards. You can read FDN's coverage of the show every day here starting tomorrow.

Safety aside, I do think there is a serious question over the impact of Ryanair's gratuitously confrontational service model on its business model.

CEO Michael O'Leary frequently likens Ryanair to America's legendary Southwest Airlines - and there's no question he based much of his model on Herb Kelleher's airline. (Ireland's bucaneering aviation community is extremely well-connected in America.) But everyone likes Southwest - even people who don't fly on it - and everyone dislikes Ryanair - even people who do fly on it.

Last night's Dispatches programme showed why. After three hours sitting on the ground in a locked aircraft, one passenger, showing Herculean self-restraint, very politely asked the captain if it wouldn't be possible for the passengers to get a non-alcoholic drink. The captain responded with a staggeringly rude, legalistic retort, revelling in his petty power, that no it was out of the question. The passenger, and I salute you sir, calmly informed the captain in measured tones that he wasn't fit to command an aircraft (or words to that effect.)

Of course, airline staff have the full weight of the law behind them and can behave as lousily as they like on board aircraft. But given the uniquely dysfunctional service model that the air transport industry provides 60-something years after it was invented, a bit more humility might be in order. (Some passengers behave appallingly of course. And sometimes I don't sympathise with them.)

As time goes by Ryanair has got more competition coming. Lots more. Most of it will go bust - but that's been happening forever and the phenomenon has ensured that, until recently, nobody ever made much money out of air transport. Some small UK low-cost start-ups have in fact survived and, more importantly, it turns out that there are entrepreneurs elsewhere in Europe - notably the new EU states to the east who have never known the statism of France, Spain, Italy and so on since they kicked the Russians out. They're inventing profitable new airlines, so are smart Germans and Swedes and, wonder of wonders, there are even stirrings in southern Europe. (France is another matter of course.) 

Ryanair's phenomenal growth so far has fundamentally come by re-inventing the airline operating model but, in the market, by grossly undercutting major airlines. It's a stunning achievement. But everyone else is catching up and Easyjet has already shown that you can do nearly as well without being as cheap.

Soon passengers are routinely going to have a choice which low-cost carrier to fly with. And then Ryanair will need to be liked, not just admired.

Well the much awaited Ryanair documentary on Channel 4's Dispatches programme in the UK aired last night and contained pretty much what Ryanair had cleverly already told the world it would contain. Smart move.

It was fairly unimpressive stuff - a decent 5 minute news bulletin stretched into a creaky 1 hour documentary after 5 months of covert filming. But it will hurt Ryanair.

Incidentally, Dispatches producer Steve Boulton yesterday suddenly started calling on a recent Flight International opinion piece on low-cost airlines in support of his programme. What we concluded in that piece was: "Now the Irish Aviation Authority should lead the world by commissioning an academic study of the human factors of low-cost operations." For the record, we don't share Mr Boulton's view of Ryanair and our view isn't based on the lightweight material his programme came up with.

Dispatches didn't make any safety charges about Ryanair stick, but it did highlight weaknesses in the aviation system that won't have come as news to anyone who works in it. Although the UK CAA may have told Ryanair it didn't plan any further action before the programme, I sincerely hope both the CAA and the IAA are planning on visiting the school that trains Ryanair's flight attendants after seeing the attitudes on display there. What we saw was evidence of a cavalier attitude to examinations and some weirdly inane remarks from an instructor in respect of passenger safety. I'd be having a very firm word in the ears of the individuals concerned.

The other serious issue is the checking of passports at the gate. But as everyone knows the idea is pretty nonsensical. Gate agents are not trained to recognise fake passports and are never going to be. It's nothing more than a final deterrent to the bad guys - but frankly if they've got that far then they're not likely to be caught at the gate. And it's a regulatory issue - not a Ryanair one.

The rest of the programme was a hatchet job on Ryanair's service product, supported by secret filming of staff members being rude about their employers. Well it's hard to have much affection for Ryanair's service model - but everyone, including me, flies with them at least occasionally. I don't look forward to it, but I do look forward to my week in the sun and I like the idea of giving my (fairly) hard-earned cash to Spanish and Irish seafront restaurants rather than the airline. Let's face it, in the UK you'd have to be a cave-dweller not to know what Ryanair's product is like - if you don't like it, don't buy it.

As recently written I just had some time with American Airlines' management and, in this complicated business, it was a reminder of just how simple the apparently complicated air transport business can be. Just as simple for the supposedly 'different' JetBlue which yesterday recorded its first loss.

American would just about kill to have suffered the 2005 $20 million net loss that JetBlue reported - beats its own $861 million let's face it - but it's a horrible moment for Wall Street-darling JetBlue.

Down in Texas the several hours of briefings came down to just one point in the end: American needs to get and keep costs under control, and to get passengers to pay more while staying loyal. Everything they are doing is aimed at those two goals.

We talked a lot about whether the concepts of 'low-cost' and 'legacy' carriers would still make sense, say, ten years from now.  I think the feeling was that American would never be 'low-cost' and JetBlue for example would never be 'legacy'. But they also might not be as unalike as they are today.

And lo and behold, JetBlue chief David Neelman was yesterday saying things to analysts that could have come straight from the mouth of Gerard Arpey at American. Such as that JetBlue's profitability has been trashed by fuel prices and that passengers can look forward to increased fares as a result. That does not quite accord with JetBlue's brand values.

You can bet Neelman will be taking another look at Ryanair across the Atlantic. A carrier which buys fuel at the same price (well, less actually because it proved to be a master of hedging among other things) but is still looking to cut fares and is finding other ways to take customers' money, while also making plenty for itself.