Posted by Seth on December 19, 2011 under Flying, News | 
Millions of dollars have been spent to learn the answer to this question. Thus far, all indications are that it is not possible. But that doesn’t stop folks from trying. Apparently there is another billionaire out there looking to become a millionaire, because someone is apparently going to give it a another shot.
Odyssey Airlines is the supposed name of the upstart which is expected to launch operations between London‘s City Airport and New York City‘s JFK with a Bombardier CSeries jet in an all business class configuration. This service would compete directly with the twice daily service offered by British Airways on Airbus A318 jets, with the added advantage of not requiring the fuel stop in Ireland on the west-bound leg.
The operation would launch in 2014 or 2015, assuming the timeline for the aircraft deliveries doesn’t slip. Oh, and there is apparently no one out there who actually works for Odyssey Airlines, so none of these details can actually be confirmed, but that hasn’t stopped many from reporting on the potential.
Breaking into the aviation market is horribly difficult and expensive. Doing it on one of the most heavily trafficked routes – NYC-LON – where there are something like 30 daily frequencies split between at least 5 carriers is even more challenging. And doing it in an uncertain market where fuel costs are significantly higher than they were last time a couple upstarts tried to break in is almost certifiably crazy. On the plus side, the new aircraft will have lower operating costs, but that doesn’t come anywhere close to guaranteeing success.
Also of interest is that the company involved has supposedly ordered 10 aircraft. That’s way too many to operate only on the NYC route so it can be presumed that there might be other routes considered as well. I can think of a few others in the same range that would be likely candidates, but they are also heavily contested and there isn’t a whole lot of room on the margins to make it work.
Don’t get me wrong – I hope it actually launches and that I get a chance to fly on Odyssey. But, much like Maxjet, SilverJet and eos before them, I don’t expect that opportunity to last long.
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Posted by Seth on September 28, 2011 under Flying, News |
The United Kingdom has long been known for a rather brutal tax known as the Airline Passenger Duty ("APD") assessed on departing passengers. The fee is variable based on the distance of the flight and the cabin of service, with premium cabin passengers paying twice as much as folks riding down the back and the cost for travel to the USA at £120 (~$180 these days) up front. The tax is, depending on who you ask, designed to offset the environmental impact of all the flights or to simply discourage people from flying.
Apparently, however, rather than meeting either of those goals in Northern Ireland is has a different effect: It drives traffic across the border to the south. Departures from Dublin incur minimal taxes (~$5 these days) and shuttle service between Belfast and Dublin is cheap and readily available. The net effect is that passengers are simply skipping out on flights from Belfast and the British Treasury is getting none of the cash.
That’s changing now as apparently someone finally realized that it is possible to tax a product out of existence. The government has chosen to slash the long-haul APD for flights out of Belfast. Currently the only service affected is a daily flight between Newark and Belfast on Continental Airlines which was apparently in danger of disappearing. That service will remain, in part thanks to this change,
…maintaining Northern Ireland’s vital economic air link to North America, and Northern Ireland will gain a fresh opportunity to develop other long-haul routes to the rest of the world.
The APD for long-haul flights will be reduced to match the short-haul rates. That’s a difference of £48 for economy class passengers and £96 for folks up front (passengers will be charged £12 or £24).
No word yet on whether Continental will be letting customers save some money thanks to this tax cut or if they’ll be raising their fares to compensate for the cut in the taxes and pocketing the difference for themselves. I’m betting on the latter.
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Posted by Seth on December 3, 2009 under News |
Well, they haven’t up and moved out of the country yet, but Aer Lingus is still doing what they can to cut costs, mostly but announcing a bunch of route cuts and the associated job redundancies that would go along with them. The Irish carrier announced today that, "in the absence of real cost savings being delivered from all employee groups," they will "have to resort to other measures."
Those other measures seem to include cutting a number of routes and up to 1,000 jobs across the company. Of course, there are no specifics being released yet on exactly what routes or jobs would be cut and another meeting of the board is scheduled for Friday. Either decisions will be made then or this is more brinksmanship with the unions. Or they’re just bored and trying to have some fun on a Thursday afternoon. I doubt it is that last one.
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Posted by Seth on November 28, 2009 under News |
It is hard to tell if this is a negotiations ploy or a serious move, but Aer Lingus appears to be making overtures towards moving their base of operations out of the Republic of Ireland. The Irish carrier has applied to the CAA in the United Kingdom for an operating license. Should the license be granted it would be possible for planes that are currently operating under an Irish license to be transferred to a newly established company in either Belfast or London to operate from there. Even more importantly, however, is that the “new” company would need to hire a whole bunch of new employees and the old company would have no planes and would simply dismiss all their employees. Folks who want to continue working for Aer Lingus would then reapply for their existing jobs at the new company.
Obviously the move would be a huge blow against the labor unions, the same groups that Aer Lingus is currently locked in rather contentious negotiations with. So maybe this is posturing and maybe it is for real. But reading this bit in the article was particularly interesting:
Aer Lingus has a huge issue with it long-haul pilots, who make up to $500,000 a year on the Atlantic route and have golden pension plans as well. Ryanair pilots, by comparison, are only paid half that amount.
Making half a million a year is a quite posh salary level. Of course the implication that the Ryanair pilots are making a quarter million annually seems high so I’m not sure that the other numbers are really legit. But that’s an awfully large salary base to handle with the current financial woes that many airlines are facing. Even in good times I’m not sure how it was profitable to fly while paying out salaries at that level.
Supposedly there is a deadline in the coming week for negotiations with the unions to be successful in identifying cuts or there will be layoffs and route cuts. And there is no timeline on the application for the new operating certificate. Lots of fun in the Isles with plenty more on the horizon. Still, having the flying shamrock actually being a British company baase would be just plain strange.
Posted by Seth on November 25, 2009 under News |
There was a somewhat surprising announcement out of London this morning from regional airline bmi: they’re making some rather significant cuts to their fleet, destinations and staffing levels. There will be a loss of nine aircraft in total – over 25% of the fleet. Two of the planes beign removed from the fleet are A330s. This essentially kills any chance of longhaul service coming back to the bmi fold.
Destinations being cut include Kiev, Ukraine; Tel Aviv, Israel, Brussels, Belgium and Amsterdam, Netherlands. The Brussels route will be picked up by Star Alliance and Lufthansa Group partner Brussels Airlines. There is no indication that the other destinations will see service restored via a partner or other means. Most of these cuts take effect in the second week of January 2010.
And then there are the job cuts. The carrier expects to trim about 600 employees from their ranks and did not rule out additional cuts in the future. Not good at all for those affected by these cuts.
Looking past the cuts there is a rather glaring question out there: What is left of bmi? Sadly, the answer seems to be not all that much. They still hold a ton of slots at London’s Heathrow airport but even the value of those is dropping lately. Still, with the carrier now quickly rolling into the fold of the Lufthansa group (the new CEO either just started or is starting very soon) it makes a decent amount of sense to shift what few viable assets there are around in the organization to places where they make the most sense. Sure, bmi still offers a reasonably competitive regional network around the British Isles and Ireland, and they also have some decent coverage into the Middle East and former Soviet states. And they’ve got pretty decent connections from Heathrow to other Star Alliance partners. But they’re still a small fish in a big pond and having trouble remaining competitive.
Could the carrier remain as a holding company for the slots, slowly doling them out to other airlines in the Lufthansa group (or selling them for real money)? Few to zero direct operations but most of the routes would still be covered and customers would still have options within the alliance.
Things aren’t looking particularly great over at Donnington Hall. They haven’t been for a while now and it doesn’t seem that they’ll be turning a corner anytime soon. Not good at all.
I’m not panicking about my stash of points in their program. Yet. But I am looking at cashing in a couple redemptions sooner than not just to hedge my bets on their rather advantageous reward chart. The points won’t just disappear but the Miles+More scheme isn’t as rewarding for me.
Posted by Seth on October 28, 2009 under News |
Calling it a “Strategic Plan to Strengthen Core Network,” US Airways announced a series of cuts today that will significantly change the way the airline operates. They are dropping several destinations and closing a few crew bases. As part of these changes they expect to remove about 1,000 employee positions.
On the Domestic US service front the most significant change comes with the cuts as Las Vegas. US Air will be reducing service there to 36 daily departures in the next 3 months. As recently as April 2007 the airline operated 131 daily departures. In April 2008 that number dropped to about 100. Today they’re at 64 and in February only 36. They’ve apparently decided that there is no more money to be made in Las Vegas so they’re cutting to the bone. The Las Vegas hub used to be a cornerstone of the America West network. It has fallen mighty far mighty quickly under the US Air brand name.
On the international service front the cuts are equally dramatic. US Air never was a big player in the trans-Atlantic market but they’re basically giving up completely now. They’re cutting service between Philadelphia and Birmingham, UK; London-Gatwick; Milan;Shannon, Ireland and Stockholm, Sweden. In addition they are formally returning the slots for the Philadelphia-Beijing service that the DOT awarded them and which were never actually operated.
With these cuts there are now a few wide-body aircraft sitting around with nothing to do. US Air announced just over a month ago their intention to refit their long-haul aircraft with a new premium cabin. One has to wonder now if those plans are still going forward, especially if they no longer will be operating the routes where the premium cabin can generate the revenue to justify the costs of that seating layout.
The one bit of good news coming out of the announcement is that the Shuttle service amongst New York’s LaGuardia, Boston and Washington’s National airports will remain in place. The Boston-New York route will be switching over to the Embrear E190 aircraft, as will Boston-Philadelphia service.
These cuts are huge. Just a few weeks ago there were discussions going on about how well US Air seems to have weathered the storm and how they might turn the corner back to profit. Apparently that simply isn’t in the cards and these drastic cuts are necessary. It does explain a bit why CEO Doug Parker looked so glum during the press conference yesterday announcing Continental Airlines joining Star Alliance. This sort of thing would weigh on my mind, too.
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Posted by Seth on November 16, 2008 under TSA |
I’m off on another, albeit much more reasonable, trip this weekend just for the miles, heading out to Sacramento for about an hour tonight and turning around to head straight back home. This trip will be enough to qualify me for elite status for next year, so that’s nice, but it doesn’t really have the same excitement as last week’s 72 hour, 9,600 mile ordeal, so not much useful in writing about on that front. But there were some interesting happenings on the ground through the week that I thought I’d mention here.
First, on the refreshment front, announcements from Delta and US Air. Delta has decided to eliminate ginger ale, tomato juice and apple juice from their in flight beverage offerings. Apparently there are cost savings to be had in making such a change, though they must be on the logistics side of things as odds are they will be stocking just as many cans of soda on flights going forward so the total weight is the same. Perhaps this is a move to consolidate all beverages to being supplied by Coca Cola (Seagram’s Ginger Ale is a Pepsi product) but I really have no idea. US Air, continuing their efforts to charge for just about everything they can, has decided that bottled water in their lounges will now cost money as well. There is still free water available, so it isn’t completely the end of the world, but it is an interesting move nonetheless.
Next up, some bad news out of Washington, DC. Passengers yet again find themselves getting screwed by the federal government thanks to an impressive lobbying effort by the airline industry. There was some movement towards defining a set of standards under which passengers would receive benefits due to flight delays and other irregularities in their trips. This effort was stymied by a most ridiculous problem – the inability of those negotiating to agree on what a “long” delay meant. I certainly have my ideas on what the threshold could be set at but that’s not actually the point of such a rule. Pick a number. Any number. And give the passengers SOMETHING. Go back later and adjust the number if necessary. And in case anyone is curious what my number would be, I’d take the massive dataset that the Bureau of Transportation Statistics has, find the average performance of all domestic flights over the past 12 months and then got out 1, 2 and 3 standard deviations on the delayed end of things to set the thresholds for levels of accommodation. At least I’d start there and see what the numbers were. It can’t be too much worse a plan than what anyone else has, and that’s about all I remember how to calculate from a stats class 12 years ago.
Some good news for passengers, too, with the announcement that US-bound passengers will now clear all immigration and customs checks in either Dublin or Shannon prior to departing for the USA. Such pre-clearance is already the norm for many airports in Canada as well as the Bahamas and Aruba. For at least the past 8 years passengers traveling from Ireland the the USA were able to clear immigration in Ireland but still had to pass through Customs inspection in the USA. For the vast majority of passengers this consists of walking past the Customs officials and saying hi, resulting in the passengers being left outside the terminal at their arrival airport. For passengers connecting onwards this meant re-checking any bags that were checked and, more annoyingly, re-clearing security with the TSA. Now passengers will arrive into a gate just like any other flight and if they are connecting onward to another flight they’ll be able to just head to the next gate. Actually, the pre-clearance was incredibly helpful in the case of a lost passport as it allowed us to get past the airline agents and know before setting out on a flight back to New York if we’d both actually be admitted upon arrival (and we were).
Finally, it is really, really cold in seat 14F on Continental’s 737-300. Sure, I’ve got virtually unlimited legroom thanks to no seat in front of me, but my toes are going numb thanks to the cold of the window exit plug I’m sitting next to. I’m putting on extra socks in hopes of warming them up. And this is the first flight in a long time that I haven’t been annoyed by the heat that my laptop gives off.
So there you have it….some odds and ends, some good and some bad.
