Stuff: October 2008 Archives

A fox in the bend house: one story that's making the blogorounds (that's the rounds of the blogosphere) comes from South Bend, Indiana. If you've never heard of it, that's okay, because it's mostly famous as the home of Notre Dame University, which is mostly famous for its football team and a few legendary coaches and quarterbacks. (The FAA acknowledges this, naming an air traffic control point above Notre Dame "Gipper" after one of the legendary coaches). But now comes word of a dispute begun by an ethics professor at the U, who says she objects to the television channel that's played in the airport. The county-owned airport plays the Fox News channel in its terminal, and ethicist's objections center on what she sees as its political bent.

Columbus: Hello and goodbye. We've been wondering about Columbus, the round town that's capital of the Buckeye State, ever since Skybus went under last April. In the months after the sudden but not unexpected collapse of the ultra-low-fare carrier after less than a year, the expected happened: Southwest regained its place as the number one airline at the airport there. So if fares went up - and it's still early for all the numbers to be in - they couldn't have gone up that much. Traffic though was down, way down, falling almost 16% in July, but that was as much a function of the economy's trembling as it was the demise of Skybus, which was swollen with cheap-seat seekers. In January, JetBlue had pulled out. Now though just in time for Columbus Day, the airport says things are looking up.

Maybe it was just too experimental, maybe it was the way it had no local feed on the UK side and maybe it was just that old Anglo aversion to most things Gallic but Air France is ending one of its (and SkyTeam's) Open Skies innovations: a non-stop flight between London's Heathrow and LAX.  The flight ends November 6, and Air France will instead begin a nonstop between Heathrow and New York JFK in next year's high season. Ally Delta has two dailies on that route. Interestingly, the news comes as Air France celebrates its 75^th anniversary.

A friend of ours from the UK liked the Air France flight because it was so empty that he was usually able to get an upgrade. It was cheaper, he says, for a French flyer to take the Eurostar "Chunnel" train from Paris to London than fly Paris-LAX. There is plenty of competition between LA and London: both BA and Virgin Atlantic fly the routes and so does American Airlines.

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