Joe Sharkey At Large

American Airlines says it will install Gogo Aircell wi-fi on more than 300 domestic aircraft over the next two years. The airline had been using the system in a trial stage on some flights since last August on 15 Boeing 767-200s, primarily on nonstop flights between JFK and San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami.

American says it will install the Aircell system on its domestic MD-80 and Boeing 737-800 aircraft fleets, beginning with 150 MD-80s this year.

The system lets passengers (for a fee, see below) access the the Internet using personal Wi-Fi-enabled devices, including laptops, smartphones and PDAs. Gogo uses the Aircell air-to-ground system, enabled by three small antennas installed outside the aircraft. Aircell’s price for the Gogo service ranges from $7.95 to $12.95 based on length of flight and whether the device is a handheld PDA or a laptop computer. Prices:

* Long Flight Pass: $12.95 – Standard price for flights longer than 3 hours
* Short Flight Pass: $9.95 – Standard price for flights 3 hours or less
* Mobile Flight Pass: $7.95 – Mobile device pricing for customers using a handheld device on Gogo-equipped flights of any length

Cell phone and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service use will not be available, American said.

As I have long noted, airlines moving into this brave new world of inflight connectivity remain very worried about the CAP (Cellphone A—— Potential). That’s the worry that voice-enabled inflight connectivity through various systems like Skype will allow various idiots to drive everyone else crazy braying into their cellphones in a very confined space with people packed shoulder to shoulder, hurtling through the sky. Thank you, American, for simply not giving in to the CAP. So far.

###

All these reporters are clucking in the media about all these airline fare sales! Cluck, cluck, cluck. And sure enough, you can find some good ones — assuming you’re going where and when the airline is selling. On the other hand, I’ve found that business-travel fares — on routes that do not depend heavily on leisure travelers — are significantly higher now than they were a year ago.

Priceline.com just put out some interesting examples showing the craaaaaaazziness in current fares. The Priceline airfare index identifies the largest week-to-week swings in average published roundtrip airfares for select markets. (Each price shown is the average of the lowest fares returned through multiple airfare searches for flights that are at least 7 days away from departure. The percentage change compares fare averages for the current week with those from the previous week. Amounts shown include all taxes and airline fees)

Portland to Las Vegas $ 233 -20%
Indianapolis to Orlando $ 214 -16%
Chicago to Phoenix $ 280 -14%
Chicago to San Francisco $ 283 -14%
Seattle to Phoenix $ 266 -12%
Dallas to Las Vegas $ 328 -12%
Los Angeles to Miami $ 350 -12%
Minneapolis to Los Angeles $ 259 -11%
Minneapolis to Chicago $ 135 -10%
Minneapolis to New York City $ 268 -9%
Houston to Las Vegas $ 314 -9%
Newark to Honolulu $ 674 -9%
Minneapolis to Las Vegas $ 279 -9%
Cleveland to Las Vegas $ 303 -8%
Chicago to Dallas $ 273 -8%
Washington, DC to Atlanta $ 262 +9%
Washington, DC to Los Angeles $ 304 +9%
Los Angeles to New York City $ 336 +10%
Atlanta to San Francisco $ 344 +10%
Detroit to Newark $ 215 +10%
Washington, DC to Chicago $ 279 +10%
Los Angeles to Washington, DC $ 293 +10%
Washington, DC to Denver $ 292 +10%
San Francisco-o Washington, DC $ 292 +11%
Los Angeles to Newark $ 378 +11%
Washington, DC to Dallas $ 292 +11%
New York City to Los Angeles $ 341 +11%
Atlanta to Washington, DC $ 266 +12%
Washington, DC to Boston $ 263 +17%
Boston to Washington, DC $ 282 +21%

###

[Photo: Volcano Ridiculer and Boy Exorcist Bobby Jindal]

Flights to and from Alaska continue to be affected by the continuing eruptions at Mount Redoubt, about 110 miles from Anchorage.

I would hope that Louisiana’s inimitable governor (and aspiring future Republican presidential candidate) Bobby Jindal has gotten down on his knees and prayed for the end of the volcanic fires and ashes, perhaps sacrificing a virgin goat in the process — science not having been on his agenda recently when he ridiculed as wasteful and silly a provision in the stimulus package that would have spent some money on scientific research to better study patterns in volcanic eruptions.

The preternaturally grinning Jindal denies evolution and has previously reported a personal experience in casting out demons, saying he performed an exorcism on a devil-possessed friend that also cured her of cancer, yessir, did too.

(Lookit that account linked to above on the Jindal exorcism, in a Talking Points Memo from last June. Maybe I’m just an old street reporter, but I started imagining the “possessed” girl’s view of the incident, as recounted in a police report on a charge of felonious assault, gang attack, imprisonment, and choking and attempted smothering “by the use of a Bible pressed to victim’s face until said victim was forced to say the words “Jesus is lord.”)

Anyway, I hear Jindal the devil-chaser is holding off on planning any campaign trips to the great state of Alaska till he sees if the sacrifice of the virgin goat appeases the angry Mount Redoubt Volcano god. Meanwhile, his staff is looking for a second virgin goat to sacrifice to appease the sleeping, but more proximate, Mississippi River levees god.

###

Alaska Airlines is resuming a limited number of flights to and from Anchorage after operations were stoppped by volcanic ash in the air from the eruption of Mount Redoubt, which is in the Aleutian Range about 110 miles west of Anchorage.

What was it, a month ago when Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal was publicly ridiculing the portion of the president’s stimulus package that would fund the study of volcanic activity? Or, as Jindal put it, waste “$140 million for something called volcano monitoring.” The inimitable Jindal added, “Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.”

###

When does this bottom out?

Amid reports that international air travel plummeted 10.1 percent in February, Air France-KLM announced today that it expected a $268 million loss for this year, six weeks after it had predicted a profit for the fiscal year — which ends Tuesday.

That sudden reversal of fortune shows just how tough the international business-travel travel market has become for airlines that depend mightily on it. Reuters today quotes aviation analyst Stephen Furlong: “The downturn is global and the downturn is most exposed to falls in cargo and premium traffic.”

The falloff in premium traffic, business-class and first-class tickets, has been staggering to airlines who only a year ago thought the revenue growth in the front of the planes would never end.

Yesterday, the International Air Transport Association said that world airline data for February show a “continuing deterioration in demand.”

Passenger traffic fell 10.1 percent overall. So far, airlines have not been able to reduce capacity quickly enough to adjust to the plunge in demand. Revenues, reflecting cheaper fares occasioned by the decline in demand, are off sharply across the board. The IATA is predicting that world airline revenues will fall 12 percent this year, and that may well be an optimistic number.

And, as I keep saying, the system is shrinking, shrinking.

“The priority for airlines around the world is survival — conserving cash and adjusting capacity to meet demand,” said Giovanni Bisignani, the CEO of the airline trade group.

##

Southwest Airlines’ bold move into New York is moving ahead, with a bankruptcy judge green-lighting its purchase the sale of 14 slots there that are among the assets of bankrupt ATA Airlines, it says here in the Dallas Morning News.

Used to be, major airlines would pounce like lions when uppity competitors like Southwest tried to nuzzle into major new territory. Southwest, whose service is widely anticipated in New York, seems to believe it can handle them. Note the recent move into Minneapolis-St. Paul, for example.

###

—It’s such a great time for leisure travel, if you’re flexible. Check out FareCompare.com, Kayak, and all the others. Amazing fares. … if you’re flexible. And hotels, check out the four and five-star bargains. Utterly amazing.

—In general (and here with regard to good hotels, corporate meetings, and even business airplanes that have a sensible purpose) Everybody’s mad and got their pitchforks out, but let’s remember what happened After the Bastille got stormed. The Terror and Napoleon and all of that. Not to mention the Congress of Vienna and WWI and Hitler, all connected dots …

–Does anybody bookmark that simpleton Drudge anymore? I sure don’t.

—”They Call Him `Mister Lucky-san’”: Off the ya-can’t-make-this-up beat: In Japan, 93-year-old Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who was on a business trip to Hiroshima when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on that city, killing hundreds of thousands, on Aug . 6, 1945, managed to get home in two days, though with serious burns. Home was, yup, Nagasaki, where he was when the U.S. dropped the second atomic bomb on Aug. 9. The Japanese government last week finally certified him as a survivor of both bombings, though his compensation, and coverage for funeral costs, will not increase. Mr. Yamaguchi is 93 and, to me, a symbol of the indomitable human spirit to survive, and may he do so for many more years.

[UPDATE: That last item was phrased inappropriately, in the glib “They Call Him Mr. Lucky-San” lead-in. Rather than just rewrite it and make it disappear, which I consider weaselly on a blog except to fix typos and obvious dumb mistakes, I should say that Mr. Yamaguchi was not all that lucky at all, my smart-assedness aside. Profoundly injured, and struggling for the rest of his long life with the effects of radiation poisoning and burns, he said recently of his recognition as a survivor of both horrific bombings: “My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation of the horrible history of of the atomic bombings even after I die.”

As someone who blithely survives physically unscathed today despite an incredible mid-air collision, I should know not to be glib about luck, fate and the consequences.

###

Many media accounts miss the point about the hideous violence in Northern Mexico — that is, the places where a lot of Americans do business or visit for leisure.

I’ve been there recently. Downtown Tijuana and Ensenada are bereft of tourists. So is Nogales. Great, nice-to-visit Mexican towns all. No business.

The drug-gang violence, as I have written, is staggering on the border areas, where 7,000 people have died, many in massacres, in a year.

In the northern Mexico, in an indication of how pathetic the problem is, shrines to the possibly mythological early 20th Century Mexican Robin Hood, one Jesus Maleverde, can be found anywhere in the hills outside of any town.

Saint Jesus, you see, has become the patron saint of drug gangs.

I took that picture above on a routine drive through Baja California, not long ago with a couple of American guys who work for a coastal environmental group.

The shrine was inscribed with graffiti from drug dealers thanking Saint Jesus Maleverde for the good quality of the crop and the pretty good business environment prevailing, not to mention his benevolence toward the drug lords.

So business travel and tourism on the Mexican side of the U.S. border is horrific. Violence is spilling out (to a very small and limited degree) onto U.S. border areas, reaching into drug environments as far as south Tucson. Get into a jam with a drug gang in south Tucson and you may well have a visit from an uninvited person.

But now the media puritans are shrieking that “addiction” in the U.S. market is driving the disaster. Addiction to what, I ask?

What “drugs,” specifically, are we talking about here?

Heroin? Cocaine? Meth?

Uh, for the most part, the drug in question, the drug behind all of this mayhem, is that devil crabgrass, marijuana.

Reefer Madness! We can’t venture into the Mexican border areas because of … marijuana gangs? Mexico is about to become an out-of-control state because of pot?

Myself, I stopped smoking pot after fiddling around with it in the 1970s — and for a very good reason. Pink Floyd sounded great, and even Saturday Night Live seemed funny (your brain on drugs!) — but pot gave me the munchies to the extent that, had I continued, I would have become one of those great big 1,000-pound fat guys that on occasion turn up in photos in the New York Post being hoisted by tow-truck from their beds.

Still, let’s remember: Most of this carnage in Mexico, and a lot of this hysteria on our border, would end if we focused on the actual problem and looked at the option of simply decriminalizing that devil crabgrass marijuana.

Man.

###

In a careful worded update today, The National Transportation Safety Board clearly indicated that pilot error, not wing icing, was probably the cause of the crash of Continental Airlines flight 3407, operated by a regional-airliner subcontractor, Colgan Air, in which 50 were killed on February 12.

The crash occurred as the plane, a Bombardier Dash8-Q400 turboprop, went out of control while on approach to the airport in Buffalo that night.

“The circumstances of the crash have raised several issues that go well beyond the widely discussed matter of airframe icing” said the NTSB acting chairman, Mark V. Rosenker. The preliminary investigation shows that while icing conditions may have been present, the aircraft’s de-icing system was working properly and that tests show that “icing had a minimal impact on the stall speed of the airplane,” he said.

Instead, the plane appears to have spun out of control when whichever of the two pilots had the controls responded incorrectly to a “stick shaker” signal on the yoke by pulling the nose up sharply — a mistake that put the aircraft out of control. Seconds later, it crashed.

###

Let’s get to the takeaway first: Enjoy those cheap fares (“Not valid on routes where competition is scant, valid only on routes where airlines are desperate to hold onto market share and fill seats, Saturday night stay and other onerous restrictions reply,” as the TV commercial hucksters say in rat-a-rat voices).

The the airline industry is currently shrinking itself and doing everything else possible to get people into seats at higher prices.

It’s going to take them a while, and it’ll be ugly. There will be casualties, as they say. But by this time next year, once the airlines get traction with an economy that is probably going to start improving by the third quarter, my prediction is that our national air-transportation system will be smaller, costlier and less convenient than at any time in decades. And some form of federal re-regulation is coming back, too.

Right now, airlines haven’t been able to shrink capacity fast enough to match the totally unanticipated sharp plunge in demand that began manifesting itself with the economic collapse last fall. They’re working on that, rest assured.

In a report today, OAG, the air-schedule-data company, says world airlines had 6.7 percent fewer flights scheduled for the first quarter compared with the 2008 first quarter, which OAG says marks the first downturn in flights since 2002, when the industry was still staggered from 9/11 and the aftermath of the dot.com bubble-burst.

Within North America, the number of flights is down 8.7 percent, with a capacity reduction of 7.7 percent in the first quarter.

Flights, capacity and demand on the key North Atlantic routes are all off sharply. This is very bad news for domestic airlines that bet heavily on growing revenue (especially premium-cabin revenue) on these routes, where they had sharply increased capacity in recent years. They’re now reducing that capacity.

Meanwhile, the International Air Transport Association today sharply revised its forecast for airline losses this year. The world airline trade group says that global airlines are expected to collectively lose $4.7 billion in 2009.

That’s a revision of the last forecast by IATA, which said in December that the world’s airlines would lose $2.5 billion this year.

“2009 is shaping up to be one of he toughest years the airline industry has ever faced,” Giovanni Bisignani, the head of IATA, said in a press conference today in Geneva.

Fuel prices have come way down from the night-shrieking peak of almost $150 a barrel last July (but they’ve been bobbing up lately, to over $54). The airlines’ main problem this year is the plunge in demand.

And for the airlines that made those big bets on premium business-travel, the news keeps getting worse. Premium traffic was down 16.7 percent in January and there are no signs that it’s recovering.

The good news (good for U.S. airlines, not so good for customers now getting used to cheap fares on selected routes) is that airlines in North America will out-perform those in the rest of the world this year. Said Bisignani: “Why? Because they cut capacity early … They will basically break even.”

(Today at a gathering for the media in Tempe, Arizona, US Airways said it has positioned itself well enough that even if passenger revenue drops 15 percent this year, it expects to earn a profit for 2009.)

This year, most U.S. airlines will continue cutting capacity and routes to reduce supply in line with demand, and ultimately reclaim pricing power. That’s going to be the hairy part, in a fiercely competitive environment where it’s clear that not all airlines currently flying will survive.

Expect two things:

1. They will continue shrinking the system strictly on yield-management principles, cutting service where the yields are lower, basic national air-travel needs aside.

2. At some point, the federal government will start paying attention to the growing crisis in air service in many areas of this country, and the feds will get involved with some form of re-regulation.

We’ll see how that all works out. But no matter how you cut it, fares will eventually go up.

Meanwhile, it’s a wonderful time for leisure travel. Assuming you’re flexible, the fares (and hotel deals) are spectacular.

###