Channel 9

Flight 1549 Details

Scott McCartney has some interesting details on the operational procedures after the A320 ditched in the Hudson.

Within 30 minutes, Sully called in to the operations center. The official answering the phone said, “Sorry, captain. I can’t talk to you now. We have an airplane in the Hudson River,’’ according to Capt. Bular. Capt. Sullenberger said, “I was flying the airplane.”

US Airways patched Capt. Sullenberger’s call to an office at headquarters where Capt. Bular and Chief Executive Doug Parker talked with him, all within the first 30 minutes of the accident. Capt. Sullenberger told them he had gone through the cabin twice and believed everyone was out of the plane.

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Twitter

As you’ve likely seen on the news , Mount Redoubt has erupted in Willow, Alaska.  Volcanic ash makes flying difficult and as a result has severly impacted Alaska Airline’s operations.  Alaska is commonly at the forefront of utilizing emerging technologies and in line with that reputation, customers can check for operations updates on Twitter .

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Speculation

Two fatal and terrible crashes over the past 24 hours and the speculation is rampant.

First, the private, single engine plane crash in Montana.  Charlie Gibson just hinted that the plane was too heavy for its approved operation because there were 14 people on board.  Nevermind, that those people were mostly kids.  Could the extra weight of ski luggage contributed to the crash? Sure.  But, given the fact that there was no voice recorder, it will be some time before the investigators know what happened.

Second, the MD-11 crash prompted an immediate article from the Wall Street Journal on the plane’s airworthiness.  (Click here for the devastating footage .)  The plane has been cited for control issues in windy conditions.  But, it’s prudent to wait and see what the investigators can uncover.

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Managing Annoyances

Running an airline is difficult.  Anyone of a million things can go things wrong.  Two travel anecdotes from yesterday:

1. A friend of mine flew ORD to EWR on Continental.  The plane pulled up to the gate on time at EWR.  Everyone got up and removed their luggage from the overhead bins.  One problem: The Jetway wasn’t working.  This happens and is usually fixed relatively easily.  But, not this time.  After a hour, the pilot decided it wasn’t ever going to work and had everyone restore luggage and buckle up to move gates.

Is this really Continental’s fault?  No, it is a EWR problem.  But, this likely delayed a flight and pissed off a bunch of otherwise happy customers.  In a tough economy these "annoyances" are hard to swallow.

2.  I flew PIT-ORD-SEA last evening.  The ORD-SEA flight boarded late, the as we were getting on the pilot came on and let us know we would be landing 30 minutes early due to smoother than usual operations at ORD and favorable winds.  Then, almost instantaneously the 757 developed two minor but annoying mechanical problems.  A seat in row 30 broke on an oversold flight.  At the same time, the engine bleed that controlled the cabin’s air flow stopped working.  In sum, a 757 full of people sat in heat for 1 hour to fix a seat.  Various questions, such as, if the seat was broken, why let us board?  And, why don’t we just bump a passenger to the 8 PM flight and move on? Either way, we waited both out and lost 1 hour.  It was annoying, but the experienced flight attendants handled it well and provided free drinks to those who ordered liquor.

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Sun Country Flies On

Back in October, as the world was falling apart, so was Sun Country.  We documented it a bit here at Channel 9.  Despite prediciting its ultimate demise, the airline has survived.  Just this week it was awarded exclusivity on the Dallas route  to the new Branson, Missouri airport. It will also serve the Minneapolis – Branson route.    And the carrier is adding back service to Boston.

The Dallas-Branson service will mark the second route served directly from DFW.  It also flies to Cancun.

A couple other observations:

The airline offers just one fare for coach and one fare for first class.  However, you can opt-in to its "UFlex Change Fee Protection" for a mere $25.  The program allows the customer to "change the time, date, destination or name on your reservation up to three times without paying the change fee cost."

Also, since October they have update the website and now there is a fun song that plays when you hit the site.  Since Sun Country airlines has a leisure customer segement, I think this makes perfect sense.  People want to have fun on their vacation so integrating Sun Country in to that game plan should make the customer more comfortable about buying.  Or, at the very least, have a positive impact on the carrier’s brand image.

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Flying Car

This is just plain cool. Check out pictures at the company website.

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InMotion Rental

Nothing groundbreaking here, but my Itunes movie didn’t download in time for my PHX-PIT flight on Southwest yesterday.  While looking at overpriced DVDs at InMotion, the terminal entertainment store, the sales representative told me about its rental program.  I paid $5, she handed me a DVD and then I dropped it in a dropbox after hours in PIT.  Aside from the DVD requiring a nice cleaning from my t-shirt to function, the rental was great.  Just something to keep in your back pocket in case your Ipod battery is dead.

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MLB, Airlines and the Recession Depression

In the past week we’ve seen doomsday stories appearing in the press about airlines.  As the OTR pointed out yesterday, the big question is whether or not the airlines can trim capacity to meet reduced demand.  As the economy worsens, Major League Baseball is in a similar situation:

Major League Baseball has warned club businesspeople that attendance is expected to be down 17-20 percent in 2009, and that it could be worse, especially for franchises such as the San Diego Padres, Toronto Blue Jays, Detroit Tigers, Cleveland Indians, Houston Astros, Colorado Rockies and others that could be seriously impacted by the recession.

Revenue management techniques are increasingly utilized in baseball to maximize profits for premium games (i.e. when the Cubs play the White Sox) and increase volume for those less popular matches (Wednesday afternoon Pirates vs. Nationals games).  Still, baseball owners can not remove seats from the stadium to match the supply with demand (nor would it really save them money.)  They can close off sections to reduce the variable costs of having security, but that only goes so far.  The real savings comes from reducing the cost of the product.  Or, in baesball terms, trading high priced talent for a group of unproven young players.  The real issue for this year, though, is how many teams are going to be buying?  As the economy hits, it’s likely the big market teams will look for less expensive options to make a run for the playoffs than in the past.

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Choppy Seas

Yesterday British Airways announced ,"lucrative premium traffic fell further in February, but, due to capacity cuts, proportionately it filled more seats."  Nice try BA.  The press release carried more details, "BA’s premium traffic dropped 20.2% on the year, with non-premium traffic off 5.5%. Premium traffic in January fell 13.7% year-on-year. BA generates a significant amount of its profits from premium travelers, particularly on transatlantic routes."

The last line in the CNN article nails the issue.  Premium traffic represents BA’s profit.  Without the premium traffic there is no money.  These numbers also highlight BA’s perlious position with its investments in Openskies and the A318s from London City to JFK.  With premium traffic continuing to fall, BA is going to have make some difficult decisions about the future of these ventures.

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Turkey Crash Update

Preliminary reports suggest that a faulty altimeter contributed to the crash last month.  Given the misty weather, the plane was on autopilot.  As the airplane descended the faulty altimeter recorded a false -8 feet reading causing the engines to shut down as the autopilot thought the plane would have landed at that height.  The pilots realized but were unable to restart the engines before the plane crashed.

Given the plane was still in the air, Boeing should likely look at some system redesigns to prevent this from happening again.

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