Stuff: December 2008 Archives

Okay, no snarky comments, no witty little quips like 'who gets the miles?' Just a little tale and a good wish. Seems a lady was on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Boston and she was eight months pregnant. For some reason, she went into labor somewhere over Canada, and the pilot asked if a doctor was on board. Two MDs answered the call, and helped the lady, a Ugandan national, deliver a six-pound child. The captain thought about landing somewhere in the big neighbor to the north, but the child beat him to the decision, and so the flight, on a Boeing 757, continued on to Logan. Our only question: will the kid be Ugandan, Canadian, or a US citizen? And will she have a Happy New Year? We hope you do.

Yes, those are storm clouds, and no the airplane doesn't have a broken nose. It has bloody nose, and so does the entire industry it represents. Air cargo is sick, and so are airlines. International air cargo fell by 13.5% in November, its largest drop since the months just after 9/11, says the International Air Transport Association. Giovanni Bisignani, IATA's director general, calls the decline "shocking" and says the airline industry is now "shrinking by all measures."

  .We were puzzled when Delta made the announcement back in November, saying it would fly nonstop to Paris from (drum roll) both Pittsburgh and Raleigh/Durham. It perplexed us in that none of the three end points was a Delta stronghold, even though the Paris end, at Charles de Gaulle, had plenty of SkyTeam feed from alliance pal Air France. But we figured they knew what they were doing and anyway these US cities really were hungry for overseas service. Pittsburgh in particular had not had a transatlantic link since British Airways and then US Airways pulled out in 2004, and RDU had only one, a daily nonstop on American to Heathrow. And we figured that RDU, based in the sunny South and certainly home to a stronger economy, could perhaps support a flight. Nope.

Given the fairly serious capacity cuts that US carriers have taken in the last few months, this is not the direction things are supposed to be going. Lowered capacity (we're tempted to call it diminished capacity, but judges, lawyers, and forensic psychologists might quibble) is supposed to produce higher revenue, but further signs of weakening demand for air travel suggest that US airlines are headed into a serious downturn. The Air Transport Association says monthly unit revenues for November rose an overall 0.4%, but were down domestically by 13.6%, year over year. This is the first significant drop in revenues in nearly five years, with Asia/Pacific unit revenues (Revenue per Available Seat Mile or RASM) falling by 5.6%, year over year. The only bright spots were Atlantic and Latin revenues, each up by 5% in the month. JP Morgan airline securities analyst Jamie Baker, noting that some Thanksgiving travel actually took place in December, predicts that December "should look less bad." Maybe....
 

Suddenly, Boston is back on airline route maps. The city, also known as the Hub of the Universe, among other modest titles, has never been humble, but no one airline has ever been able to dominate service to and from its Logan International Airport. Its traffic, long split between American and US Airways, now has a third major player, JetBlue, with the largest market share, 17%. American has 15%, Airways 15%, and the rest is divided up among others, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. So we were interested when a flurry of announcements put Logan way up on the list of happening places.

 

People carry all sorts of stuff with them when they fly, and when they go on along overseas trip to visit relatives, they like to bring something to remind the folks of home. So it probably shouldn't have been that much of a surprise when the Customs guys found something really bizarre in the luggage of a guy arriving at Washington's Dulles International from Central Africa: three charred monkey corpses (see below). And that wasn't all. Alerted by the sniffing of an alert aide (right), the Dulles Customs and Border Protection agents also found 10 pounds of deer meat and another 10 pounds of dried beef in the traveller's bags. The CPB did not say where the flyer was from. 

Left Field happened to hear Wolfgang Mayrhuber, the chief executive of Lufthansa, who was in Chicago for a Star Alliance chief executives meeting. He spoke over breakfast with reporters as news emerged that Lufthansa was not just buying Austrian but might buy SAS and after LH said it was taking over the stake in bmi that it didn't yet have. The Cologne-based carrier has been on a buying spree for several years, starting with its 2005 takeover of Swissair, now Swiss International, but Mayrhuber repeated his mantra, "We don't just buy airline to have airlines." He went on to explain Luftie's 'modular' approach:

Left Field just came back from a two-trip week, and saw the downturn first hand. On a quartet of AirTran flights, we saw empty seats up front in business class on three of the four segments, and quite a few empty seats in the back on one flight; on United, we saw one plane at at least a 100% load factor - and another at much less, with only half the seats up front taken - and some by so-called 'non-revs' or freeloaders. All of which is a thoroughly unscientific, totally anecdotal way of saying things could be a lot better. But don't take just our word for it. Read on for some far more precise predictions that will leave your Christmas outlook a bit bleak.

 

My father used to call awful, traumatic events 'learning experiences' and tell me how grateful I'd be someday for the chance to improve my life. That's sort of like telling the airlines that they should be grateful for the oil crisis that drove some good little carriers into oblivion, but in a sense, the industry here in the US perhaps should be thankful that it went through its forced diet when it did. The big broadcast network ABC News did a piece the other night in which it sort of took this line. The piece had a very smart reporter, our friend Lisa Stark, and she interviewed John Meenan from the ATA and then she spoke to Left Field. We wish we could get you a link to click on to see the piece, but here's sort of a written version with some video embedded.

It might just be true. We may have been too glum in predicting really sharply higher fares for the holidays. It seems that weakening demand has produced some deals for flights around the big travel days to the big travel spots. We keep hearing stories and have even seen a little bit of evidence. Priceline, which compiles lots of fares, says some fares have fallen nicely in just the past week, while Amy Ziff, who writes an in-house blog for Travelocity, says that the on-line travel agency's "most recent data shows a steady decline in airfares over the last five weeks, with an average price drop of $53. Softening travel demand is translating into lower prices for travellers." Those are the magic words: softening demand.

Ah for a haven. You know the kind of spot the have in mind: the little corner of the airport between the baggage ramps and the chapel where no one goes and where it's quiet and where they don't have TV's blaring or announcements that the moving stairs are about to end. Now a company has launched a contest to help locate these airport havens. And post the findings. Left Field is not sure we approve of this effort because once a secret spot is posted, it's not a secret anymore.
And we'd note that the contest sponsor is a company that makes screens to cover your laptop's screen so that people sitting near you cannot see what you're working on on the screen. A look at the entries so far is not encouraging: one lady says she likes the hustle and bustle of Washington's Reagan National in the main terminal.