Joe Sharkey At Large

Overall air travel is down during this Thanksgiving holiday period, but bad weather (ice, snow, heavy rain) has caused major snarls at airports in the East and Midwest today.

The New York-area airports, natch, are the biggest mess, with delays of up to four hours at Newark and over two hours at Kennedy and LaGuardia, according to Flightstats.com.

Also reporting big delays: O’Hare, Denver, Orlando, Boston, Miami and Louisville. As the early evening peaks arrive, the delays are sure to ripple to other airports. Lighter-than-usual Thanksgiving air travel aside, the Sunday after Thanksgiving is traditionally one of the busiest travel days of the year.

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The two luxury hotels that were among the targets of terrorists in Mumbai have posted Web sites with helplines and updates.

Here’s the Taj Mahal. And here’s the Oberoi.

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[Above: A G-IV cabin]

General Motors evidently got the F.A.A. to keep the public in the dark about the use of at least one of its corporate jets, Bloomberg reports today.

That would be the leased $50 million G-IV jet, tail number N5116, that the GM chief executive, Richard Wagoner, flew into Washington on Nov. 19 to beg Congress for a $25 million industry bailout. The top dogs at Ford and Chrysler, Alan Mulally and Robert Nardelli, also swanned into the capital from Detroit that day in their own companies’ private jets.

Information on the movements of all aircraft, including private jets, is usually readily available at Web sites like Flightaware.com

Bu movements of the GM aircraft, which last visited Washington on Tuesday, could no longer be tracked publicly after that.

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Terrorists attacked the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels, several other tourist and business-travel locations and a train station in Mumbai, India. More than 60 people have been killed.

Here’s the AP report as of mid-afternoon Wednesday. A more timely BBC report put the number of dead at over 80. Unconfirmed wire-service reports say that terrorists are holding hostages at both five-star hotels.

Here’s the current report in the Times of India newspaper.

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The strange saga of Eclipse Aviation, which filed for bankruptcy this morning, citing debts of more than $770 million, has not been fully told yet. Not by a long shot.

Explanations are required — for employees at the Albuquerque, N.M. plant, for customers who put down money for orders, for customers who already possess one or more of the approximately 250 Eclipse 500 jets that have actually been delivered since Eclipse announced its start-up 9 years ago.

Originally, the Eclipse 500 very light jet was priced (and heavily promoted) at $775,000. That price was $1.35 million early last spring, and Eclipse raised it to $2.15 million in May.

A year earlier, Eclipse was claiming nearly 2,700 orders and options — 1,400 of them accounted for by DayJet, the air taxi enterprise that went out of business in September with 28 Eclipse 500s on hand.

There are a lot of numbers to add up — or subtract. Lawsuits have been filed. A blog, Eclipse Aviation Critic, has been diligently following the saga.

In all of this, with all of the manufacturing and certification problems, where was the F.A.A.? Oh, I forgot. In the tank.

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Eclipse Aviation, which blazed the way for the manufacture of cheap very-light jets, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware today.

Eclipse said it would seek court approval for debtor-in-possession financing and
the sale of “substantially all” of its assets under Section 363 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.

Eclipse announced an agreement to sell its assets “for a combination of cash, equity and debt,” to an affiliate of ETIRC Aviation of Luxembourgh — “subject to higher and
better offers.”

Eclipse described ETIRC Aviation as “a principal driver” of the very-light jet industry in Europe. ETIRC is Eclipse’s major shareholder and its chairman, Roel Pieper, has been the acting CEO of Eclipse since July 2008.

Citing “unprecedented economic challenges,” Pieper said that the asset sale would “position the business for aggressive global expansion.” He did not elaborate on whether there are potential plans to resume production of the $2.15 million, five-seat Eclipse 500 jets.

ETIRC Aviation appears to be is a distributor and marketer, not a manufacturer. Here and here.

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Walk-up business class fares cost about $9,200 roundtrip between New York and London (and about half that for corporations that negotiate high-volume discounts). As traffic falls, many airlines are discounting.

But British Airways moves aggressively into major cost-cutting tomorrow when it will start offering its Club World business class at roundtrip fares between the U.S., Canada and London starting at $1,998 between JFK and London.

First class roundtrip travel also is available starting at $3996 from New York to London. First class on B.A. can cost over $12,000 walk-up.

British Airways said that comparable prices for Club World and first class will be available from all 22 North America gateway cities to London and most major cities in Europe. The sale fares will be available from tomorrow, Nov. 25, through midnight Monday, Dec. 1 for travel from Tuesday, Dec. 2, though Sunday, March 22 — with no blackouts.

Travel must be purchased seven days in advance of travel. Minimum stay is one Saturday night, with maximum stay 11 months. Fuel surcharges are included, but taxes of approximately $260 and the $2.50 Sept. 11 Security Fee are additional.

Sample fares (Club World, followed by first class)

Origin city to London Club World First
JFK&Newark $1998 $3996
Boston $2197 $4396
Philadelphia $1998 $4196
Washington, D.C. $2197 $4396
Baltimore $2197 N/A
Miami $2698 $4696
Orlando&Tampa $2698 N/A
Atlanta $2398 $4396
Chicago $2598 $4596
Dallas/Ft. Worth&Houston $2598 $4596
Denver $3098 N/A
Phoenix $3098 $5096
Los Angeles&San Francisco $3298 $5296
Seattle $3998 $5995

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I was amused by the phony baloney from the White House last week in announcing that military air-lanes would be turned over to commercial airliners during the holiday season to help alleviate crowded skies. Now there’s an inane solution in search of a non-existent problem.

I’m in dark-sky Tucson where it’s 4.45 a.m. as I write this (I have a plane to catch), and the only thing I see in the sky right now is the stars.

Seriously, air travel is down sharply. It is down because of announced and unannounced capacity cuts, and because demand has fallen well below expectations.

Here’s one example: Los Angeles International Airport says that it expects to handle 14.3 percent fewer passengers during the 10-day Thanksgiving holiday from today through Nov. 30.

Meanwhile, good news for travelers beyond less-crowded skies. Those fare sales the airline stock market analysts (now, what a job that is) said weren’t going to occur are continuing well past the holidays.

Southwest Airlines just extended its winter sale — with one-way fares from $49 to $159, depending on day of travel — through Dec. 4 for travel from Dec. 12 through Feb. 28.

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Breathing new life into the term “corporate pantloads,” top executives of the three Detroit automakers each flew to Washington on private jets to ask Congress for a total of about $25 billion in bailouts.

Good for the news organizations — here, — that saw this for the helluva story that it was. I do not see any phony populism in the outrage over this one.

Granted, there are times when a corporate jet makes sense in terms of productivity. Usually, this would involve the case of a solid, well-run company that needs top executives — as well as management and technical teams — in efficient motion and can justify the expense on the bottom line. Said company would not be sending said executives to Congress to whine for taxpayer bailouts.

This was similar to, but I would argue even worse in tone-deafness, A.I.G. spending $500,000 on a St. Regis hotel for a sales retreat a week after it got its own multi-billion-dollar bailout from taxpayers. At least the retreat, as bad an idea as it was to go through with it, had a viable bottom-line purpose.

It takes a few hours to fly from Detroit to Washington. These Detroit characters swanning through the skies in their executive jets on a mission to beg for a taxpayer bailout in these awful economic times represents a big fat black eye for the business-aviation industry — currently involved in major efforts to dissuade government from raising landing fees and taxes and from cracking down more on private-jet security.

I can’t wait to see the reaction from the arch-enemy of business aviation, the Air Transport Association, which represents commercial airlines and insists that business jets essentially get a free ride on taxpayers’ backs.

And by the way, does anybody know exactly which models of business jets our Detroit worthies flew in?

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For weeks, I’ve been reporting incrementally, here, in the paper and in the current Institutional Investor magazine, on a story that is really sneaking up in travel: the fact that the hotel business is in a very bad tailspin.

It started at the mid-level hotels in late summer as business travel fell off, and suddenly smacked the luxury hotel brands upside the head in mid-September, and worsened since.

People in the hotel industry, which is generally a pretty happy business, full of optimists who really love travel tell me they have never seen anything like this.

Smith Travel Research reports today that revenue per available room (called Revpar, it’s the basic measurement of hotel performance) dropped a startling 13.2 percent during the week of Nov. 9-15, compared with the comparable week last year.

Average occupancy rates fell 11.6 percent and average room rates (which haven’t yet shown a sufficient drop that directly reflects the malaise) fell 1.7 percent.

Leading industry forecasters are scrambling daily to keep up with the bad news. Smith Travel, which stays right on top of these things, said the latest Revpar decline was “certainly worse than we expected.”

I’m in Tucson, holed up in the beautiful desert. My wife is back east till the weekend. She was on the train into Manhattan this morning sitting near some very anxious Wall Street types who were discussing the collapsing Dow.

“Well, how low can it really go?” a woman asked.

“To one,” a guy replied.

So the good news is that the Dow Jones average closed today a whopping 7551 points above the potential low. Whew.

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