If any of you ever needed proof that there is a God, you now have it. The FCC has ruled against allowing use of cellular telephones on airplanes. Here’s a link to a New York Times article on the subject.

I continue to be amazed at the diversity of readers of my little space on the internet.  Yes, I track my visits.  Since many of you keep coming back, why don’t you introduce yourselves sometime.  All constructive comments are welcome.  You can email me through the “contact me” link as well.

Win a chance to boost your AAdvantage account by clicking here.

AA is celebrating the debut of its new AAdvantage award booking tool on AA.com by giving away some free miles.

In my experience, AAdvantage has the best availability of frequent flyer award inventory at the capacity controlled level. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) even agrees, yielding a good result in 14 of 24 test bookings attempted by the paper. United’s MileagePlus program was equally successful.

Now there is the question of our time, huh? The latest headlines about more stranded passengers over the weekend will surely raise the volume level as the well-intentioned march on Congress begging for a bill of rights for airline passengers. Stories like this one that I found while parousing through flyertalk.com surely sound bad, if nothing else.

An unemotional review of a few facts is in order.

1) Airlines are flying more passengers than ever on fewer total seats.
2) Because of # 1, load factors are at historical highs. Average load factors above 75 percent really mean that airlines’ most popular flights are running 100 percent full.
3) Full planes make it far more difficult for airlines to reacommodate you if your flight is cancelled. This creates an incentive to not cancel, which can lead to long onboard delays. If they do cancel, it may be a day or two before you get home (see this weekend’s headlines).
4) Airlines have cut staffing to levels that just barely work in good weather.
5) Most airlines automated systems work well enough when flights are operating on time. They don’t work well at all when operational difficulties wreak havoc on schedules. More often than not, you are going to have to speak to a real live agent in these situations.

Some airlines are better at dealing with adversity than others, but all of them have “their moments” when nothing goes well. I think that several have experienced their moment this winter.

The snow/ice event that hit the northeast this weekend played havoc with airline flight schedules around the country. USAirways appears to have been hit hardest. They were late to cancel flights in advance of the storm and as a result appear to be having more difficulty recovering than other airlines. Lingering issues with a reservations system cutover 2 weeks ago have likely impacted their ability to reacommodate passengers as well.

Here are some links to news articles on the subject:

Washington Post

New York Times

CNN.com

OK.  I’ll admit it here.  I’ve never flown JetBlue.  Never needed to.  It’s not that I wouldn’t like to fly JetBlue, it’s that they are rarely flying where I need to go.  And as long as United or American fly there for the same price, I’ll take my miles and sit in first class, thank you very much.

However, is it just me, or has the news coverage of their little fiasco over President’s Day gotten just a tad out of hand?  Airline cancels flight, story at 11.  You’ve got to be kidding me.  They get pummeled for not canceling flights over President’s Day, and this morning they do exactly what everyone has been saying they should’ve done then, and what happens?  Top story!  Give me a break, and JetBlue too!

This whole “Bill of Rights” gaggle is going to make for some entertaining stuff.  More soon.  I have a day job, ya’ know?!

This will be a funny read for the less initiated in airline elite status and frequent flyer miles. You will think I must be nuts, and you would be correct. I’ll warn you now that I will jump from topic to topic and back again. But hey…it’s my blog…and since it says MJ Speaks on Travel at the top, and not….well….let’s just say a more accomplished writer, I get to ramble at will.

March can be a sad or happy time for the frequent flyer. You see, March 1 is when the elite status clocks “reset” for the new year, and you either maintain, increase, or lose altogether, your elite status in your favorite airline’s frequent flyer program. This year, I am both happy and sad. I have descended from USAirways’ top elite level, Chairman’s Preferred, to dirt. Dirt would be what I equate to no status! I am both happy and sad about that. Sad to lose the angels (and they really are angels) at the Chairman’s Preferred desk, but happy to finally delete myself from participation in the USAirways Dividend Miles program. It’s a nostalgic moment for me as the frequent flyer plan that would ultimately become the Dividend Miles program, Piedmont’s Frequent Flyer Bonus program, was the first airline miles scheme I ever signed up for at the ripe old age of 17.

The airline then called USAir bought Piedmont back in the late 1980s and promptly brought ruination to what, in my opinion at least, was the last airline based in the United States of America to actually be worth a damn. But hey…that’s a topic for another post….or perhaps a whole blog. I’ve moved on. I’ll certainly continue to fly USAirways (after their reservations system is fixed) if the price and schedule make it compelling, but I will credit that travel to the United Mileage Plus program as long as that option remains available through the Star Alliance. On a purely personal note, I’m hopeful that USAirways will manage to fix itself. I have a friend or two working there, and they are good people who deserve better than what they’ve gotten from this company.

Dividend Miles has changed considerably since the takeover by America West. One could successfully argue that change was needed. USAirways was in the midst of its second bankruptcy, burning through cash and its remaining assets at an alarming rate, and probably headed for the ash heap when the America West deal came along. America West, no crown jewel of an airline itself, was in slightly better shape, but ultimately headed in the same direction as USAirways if one takes an honest look at the facts. I won’t even delve into things like hedge money, Bruce Lakefield’s (then USAirways CEO) connections as a former big-whig on Wall Street, and just plain hubris, but basically, some financing got cobbled together and a merger was born!

From a financial perspective, the merger has been a huge success. The new USAirways has turned into one of the more profitable airlines in the industry. Cheap labor (or no labor–if you were standing in line anywhere over the holidays looking for help from a real live person, you know what I mean), terminated pensions, and a pretty swell economy will do that for an airline.

But there’s this other piece of the airline business that doesn’t get a lot of sexy press. It’s the side of an airline with which I am the most familiar, we call it “operations.” And that is where the rubber meets the runway at any airline, especially an airline that is trying to merge itself with another. You see…spin artists, marketing gurus, bean counters and such don’t have much time to think about questions like… “Will the catering cart on my airplane fit on their airplane?” and “Are the engines on my Airbus the same as your Airbus?” Unfortunately, the answer to those questions and thousands more like them is usually no. Usually, the “deal” gets done first and the hard questions about actually making the new airline fly get asked later…..much later.

Now…most of the airline people I know, even the coneheads in finance and HR, are pretty dedicated people. They work hard, play hard, and aren’t real big on failing to get the job done. So tasks like putting 2 airlines together eventually get done. But oh the agony along the way. Agony like not adequately testing electronic check-in kiosks that are now utilized to check-in the majority of your Customers!!! I understand through some friends of mine that even today, nearly one week after this debacle, many USAirways kiosks remain out of service with no real clue as to when they will be fixed, and what went wrong in the first place. If the leaders at USAirways do know what went wrong, they sure aren’t sharing. I spoke with an acquaintance in management at USAirways this past week about the problems with the reservations cutover. In their defense, this individual is not an airport person, and was likely just spouting what she’d been told by someone else. But you won’t believe what she said when I queried about the problems they’d been having. I quote: “this is really no worse than a bad snow day.” Now, I wasn’t there, but I know a few people who were. And I know how to read and frequent a little website called flyertalk.com. I think I am pretty safe in saying that this debacle was one helluva lot worse than a bad snow day!

Which brings me to this. I think the senior leadership at USAirways is pretty smart. I think they are smart enough to fix this. But one has to wonder if they really believe this debacle has been no worse than a bad snow day? If they’ve started believing their own press releases, that’s a bad sign. We’ll all be watching to see what happens.

Many of you are painfully aware of the issues surrounding US Airways’ cutover to a common reservations platform early Sunday morning. Considering the challenges of an I.T. migration this large, it’s not surprising that there have been a few bumps along the way. As of this writing, their check-in kiosks on the east coast still appear to be having problems. Media reports indicate that the lines aren’t nearly as bad as they were on Sunday, but that there are still some trouble spots, especially in Charlotte and Philadelphia.

I refuse to believe that they didn’t extensively test the “old” US Airways kiosks with the new common reservations system. For whatever reason, the testing they did appears to have been inadequate.

Flyertalk.com postings (and my own review of pricing on usairways.com) indicates that there are some issues with the pricing function in the new reservations system resulting in abnormally high fares as well.

The airline finally got around to admitting that there was a problem today, and posted an apology on its website. Given some of the seemingly out of touch quotes from their spokespeople I’ve read in the media since yesterday morning, this apology is a big step!

OK…I’m not flying today, and I’m not sitting at the airport, but US Airways’ migration to one reservations system appears to have hit a snag. Check out The Charlotte Observer which has a link at the very top of its homepage about what’s happening at Douglas International Airport today as a result of the migration to one reservation system.

I always look forward to the delivery of Conde Naste Traveler, and this month was no exception. You should check out this article about a reporter’s experience working for the Transportation Security Administration.

US Airways website appears to be up and running. I did a quick booking test, and everything seemed to be working.