Recently in Aero-politics Category

Our mother always told us that we should be grateful, either for the roof over our head or the vegetables on our plate. She probably would have felt that same way about employment. Too bad she didn't know Tom Horton, the chief financial officer of American Airlines parent AMR Corp. Horton was at the JP Morgan investor conference where people in the audience asked about labor negotiations.
They were especially worried about American and the Allied Pilots Association, where talks have at best been real unfriendly and real slow. Horton responded, "In a world where lots of people are losing their jobs and benefits, and the world looks pretty dark, well I'll just speak for myself, I feel pretty good to have a job."

Southwest began its service to Minneapolis/St. Paul, which may be big but is old news. What is new news is that the airline wasn't just welcomed by mayors, airport officials and others. One of Southwest's largest unions, the Transport Workers Union, ran radio advertisements taking note of the fact that Southwest is both the nation's most unionized and its most profitable airline. TWU represents flight attendants and ground workers on the Dallas-based airline. To listen to the radio spot, click on this link: Transport Workers Union. Also glad to see Southwest in the Twin Cities: folks with sore backs. The airline was giving out free backrubs as a promotion.Gary Kelly, Southwest's chief, was pretty chuffed, as the Brits say, in explaining the new service (above).

So, is he kidding? Or, who (m) does he think he is kidding? He is Michael O'Leary, the head of Ryanair, Europe's largest really cheap carrier. O'Leary went onto BBC to tell a morning 'chat show' that maybe Ryanair would perhaps possibly begin charging its passengers to use the lavatories on board its Boeing 737s. O'Leary had a more or les straight face as he chatted with the a.m. show, but then again he usually does.
While few are taking his potty talk seriously, O'Leary also said the other day that Ryanair would be doing away with check-in counters at all of its airports, a statement that he is still standing by - and which he repeated in the course of the BBC interview. We spoke to a few US and Asian carriers that adhere to the same really low-cost philosophy that Ryanair champions, and we found one that did not outright dismiss the O'Leary counter-culture concept. At Spirit Airlines, the 'ultra low-cost carrier' based near Miami, "we're not laughing at them," says chief marketing officer Barry Biffle.

How much? President Obama gave us a few hints about his aviation thinking with a budget outline, one that fell far short of the details a budget often has. That's understandable, since it's his first, but Obama tantalises. And promises. He does say he would increase funding for Essential Air Service, the subsidy that keeps rural flights operating, with a proposed $55 million increase over the 2009 level, intended to meet increasing demand. Last year's Bush budget had trimmed EAS to $50 million, although appropriators rejected the administration position and added about $75 million. This may help the new president avoid what had become an annual legislative charade: slashing or zeroing out EAS, then waiting for Congress, in particular the appropriations committees with their rural state members, to restore funding. The problem with this no-no, yes-yes approach is not just its inherent chicanery, but the fact that legislators, working from a base of zero, feel pressured to control their largess.

Left Field's very first guest blogger just got off the phone with Dave Cush, the head of Virgin America. The startup was just forced to release financial data it wanted to keep secret, but our guest, Air Transport Intelligence US Editor Lori Ranson, was able to get Cush to open up in an entry she calls 'Burlingame Confidential.' That's the San Francisco suburb where Virgin is based.

 

Virgin America CEO Dave Cush says he is not deterred; he'll continue his fight to keep the carrier's operating data confidential even as it was forced to release data showing a $175 million loss for three quarters of 2008.  Virgin America began its campaign to keep its operating data confidential after suffering a $35 million loss for the quarter ending in September. But Cush believes that it was disruptive to both suppliers and employees for that info to reach public hands, he said  last year. He might have added Virgin's competitors, including American, United, Southwest and JetBlue - who no doubt are now pouring over Virgin America's operational data. A quick snapshot of the data released by the US government shows Virgin America had $25 million on cash at the end of September and roughly $105 million in assets. Top performing markets in terms of total passengers for January-October 2008 were Los Angeles at 34.9 million and Las Vegas at 33.8 million. Total passenger count in Seattle, which was only launched last year, reached 24.5 million - ahead of the 23.5 million in its home base in San Francisco.

 

 

Were they very shy or what? Late last week, someone, most likely a very unhappy Southwest employee, put up a blog called 'Code Share Curse,' denouncing the Love Field-based carrier's plans for new international code sharing with Volaris of Mexico and WestJet of Canada. It was not a particularly attractive or persuasive blog, filled with grammatical and syntactical fuzziness and with sweeping statements such as 'history is littered with examples of code-shares that didn't work and destroyed carriers,' blabla.

Laws? We don't need no lousy laws....Continental Airlines president Jeff Smisek is staying couple of steps ahead of the legislators, those wise women and men of Congress who are taking yet another stab at a 'Passenger Bill of Rights' that would guarantee flyers that they could get off a plane after a three-hour delay on the runway. During Continental's earnings call the other day, Smisek said that the carrier is "implementing a new internal policy for 2009, whereby we will give customers the opportunity to get off an airplane during tarmac delays in excess of three hours, subject of course to making sure we can do that safely." We're not sure how this will work in real life (you know - the realities in which airlines operate every day) but the reaction has been interesting

American Airlines takes a very different view of mediation than do its unions. When the last of its worker groups went to the National Mediation Board this week, it was with real anger. 'American is a bunch of no-goodnicks and they should all go away and be chicken-pluckers' was the basic message. Their language was slightly less blunt, but contained plenty of accusations of bad faith, etc. The airline has a slightly calmer view of things, and its senior veep for human resources, Jeff Brundage, was ready to take to the web to explain its position. The airline, he says, joined in the request for an outside third-party referee, he says, although "we recognize that mediation is no panacea. It doesn't guarantee an outcome better for either side than might have been achieved otherwise."

 

It's a blast from the past, this idea. A group of Californians say that theirs is the way to replace San Diego's Lindbergh Field, a single runway airport that is among the smallest in captivity. They want to build a floating airport out in San Diego Bay, reached by underwater tunnels, and also equipped with cruise-ship docking facilities. Although they have from all accounts met with ridicule, their concept is neither totally new (see this illustration from the February, 1934, Modern Mechanix) nor untried. Japan has built a floating airport, and it hasn't sunk yet.

Who's happy now? Well, certainly not a lot of flyers. About one million US flyers were delayed or stranded in the days just before Christmas, when some 8,800 flights were cancelled, according to website flightstats.com. Many were in the Pacific Northwest and many, alas, were at the nation's connected-est airport, Chicago O'Hare. O'Hare delays proved that even if Chicago is no longer the nation's busiest airport, it is one with tentacles that do reach awfully far. Blame it on the weather. Snowstorms, ice, fog, and freezing temps slammed the Midwest and by Christmas Weekend, the delays had also enveloped the nation's truly busiest airport, Atlanta's Hartsfield Jackson.  We do know one person who took some cold comfort from the chaos: Kate Hanni.
The Californian realtor and founder of flyersrights.org sees the calamities as a widespread return to the bad old days of tarmac delays, the kind that set her on her crusade to begin with and the kind that set the Transportation Department to set up a tarmac delay task force.