Delta and Northwest have pulled the trigger to create the biggest airline on the planet. Will others follow? I think so. Of course, the conventional wisdom has Continental getting together with United next. Might happen, but I can’t imagine a pair of airlines being more different. Continental has a fairly well respected management team, and a young fleet of new Boeings along with a reputation for good customer service (by US airline standards). United, a not all that well respected management (whether deserved or not, I can’t say) and a hodge-podge of Airbus and Boeing narrow body jets, and if you’ve flown out of Dulles in the last decade you know where they stand on customer service. I can see it happening, but only if Continental is the surviving entity, whether they name the airline Continental or not. 

I’m not sure who is out there for American. The only airline left is US Airways, and I don’t think AA wants to touch that with a 10 foot pole. Alaska would fill a hole in AA’s network out west, but AA’s record on acquisitions isn’t that great, and I don’t know if imposing AA’s structure upon Alaska will end in a good result. It’s hard to say. American has a whole list of problems, not the least of which is its rapidly deteriorating labor situation.

American’s unions are out to get back everything they gave up in 2003 and then some. All of this as oil hits $115+ per barrel. The pilots and flight attendants have managed to elect some rabble-rousers into leadership positions in their respective unions that have bumped the rhetoric meter off the scale, so much so that I fear they are backing themselves into a corner that they can’t get out of when reality sets in and they realize that they aren’t gonna get smack as far as significantly richer contracts go.

All in all, things are dicey in the airline business right now. Stay tuned because things are going to get cute.

Click here for details. This is big news….. and bad news for the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA).

Details here.

Well, wonder of wonders, Delta and Northwest may have a deal afterall (click here). Mergers can be a pain, but Delta has a strong management team with the skills to pull this off. Now if they can get the employees on the same page, they may be on to something. Time will tell. The fleet of the combined carriers is a bit of a mis-match with Delta being a big Boeing customer while Northwest has been an Airbus buyer. The only common fleet is the 757, with both carriers’ 757 airframes powered by Pratt & Whitney engines. 

While I am a fan of Delta Air Lines and their frontline folks, their mileage program leaves a lot to be desired from this blogger’s perspective. I have no experience with Northwest’s WorldPerks program, but I can’t imagine its any worse than SkyMiles. From a service perspective, I haven’t found Northwest to be nearly as bad as they are portrayed to be from an attitude and courtesy perspective, and their customer-facing technology has always been a strong point in my opinion. So these two could make a formidable match. It’s all in the execution. We’ll see what happens.

Well, just when things start to calm down, they get crazy again. But when the bosses, bosses boss (that would be the head honcho in charge) comes to see you and asks if you’d be interested in taking a detail to a different job, what’s a guy to do? Say no? Yeah, that’s what I thought too. So come Monday, things are about to get cute in the working world of mj on travel.

I’ll be getting involved in some pretty sensitive aviation safety issues that lots of people care about, including myself. Unfortunately, given the type of work I’ll be doing, it won’t be very appropriate for me to blog about it in other than the most general of terms. But the new project will bring new travel, so I should have some good trip reports to share.

According to their website Skybus Airlines has ceased flight operations. What a week for airlines, huh?