- Continental has now joined American and United by offering double EQMs.
- Even better, apparently flights booked before the promotion was announced will still count, according to View from the Wing.
- Virgin America has made some changes to its fee structure.
- The pilot union at American has censured its president and vice-president. Interesting.
- The DOT has given preliminary approval to Continental and US Airways to fly to Rio de Janeiro.
- There have been some interesting developments over at Eclipse.
- Republic, who previously loaned $8 million to Mokulele, has now taken a 50% stake in the company.
Monthly Archive for March, 2009Page 3 of 5
Last year we saw Midwest’s mainline fleet decline in terms of size by a great deal. Midwest had 25 717s, and then got rid of 16 of them and had them replaced by E170s flown by Republic.
Recently, Boeing announced it would be leasing 25 717s to ClickMexicana (to replace the Fokker 100s I believe), and the first sixteen of those will be the ex-Midwest birds. Apparently, Boeing can make Midwest give back the other nine aircraft. In this news report, Boeing didn’t say either way what was going to happen.
Regardless, this again just shows how much Midwest has declined in recent months. Midwest should have just accepted AirTran’s takeover bid, but apparently “saving the cookie” by cutting a large amount of capactiy was more important.
Boston passengers on transcons have gotten pretty lucky lately ever since Virgin America started service. American has a triple mile offer going on, and today JetBlue decided to do its own promotion. Travelers who buy two roundtrips to DEN, LAS, LGB, OAK, SAN, SFO, or SEA will receive a certificate good for a roundtrip anywhere in JetBlue’s network. Travel has to be booked and completed by May 31. Click here for all the details.
In other miles and points news, One Mile at a Time reports that United has matched American’s double EQM promotion.
Branson Airport in Missouri is very interesting to watch, as it is the first privately-funded airport here in the United States. For some background, take a look at this post from Brett Snyder.
Sun Country recently announced that it will begin nonstop service to Branson from Dallas (DFW) and Minneapolis on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays, starting in May (the airport has yet to open). (For some reason, two press releases were needed.)
I’m guessing here, but by looking at the schedule in the press releases it seems that one aircraft will fly MSP-BKG-DFW-BKG-MSP, and during the Saturday summer flights one plane will do the DFW one and another will do the MSP route.
It’s kind of hard for me to analyze the routes, as, well, Branson is a new airport. But I was able to find DOT Data for the second quarter of 2008 for the closest airport, Springfield-Branson (SGF). Here are the top ten markets (ranked by average daily passengers) for that market (after I combined the passenger count for Orlando and Sanford):
So, Dallas an Minneapolis are in the top ten. There might not be enough for a daily 737-800 from Sun Country, but I think three flights a week could work. I wonder if Sun Country is hoping to get some MSP-DFW traffic on the route to fill some seats, as their website will allow you to book that trip with a quick stop in Branson.
As for AirTran, Atlanta is one of the largest markets, and Milwaukee is near the bottom of the list with only 12 average passengers a day. But this data is just for O&D (origin and destination) traffic, and AirTran’s ATL and MKE flights allow for connections to a good number of markets.
Another thing worthy of note is that the top three markets (Vegas, Sanford, and Tampa) have Allegiant as their largest carrier. If Branson can convince Allegiant to move over from Springfield, that could give the airport a nice boost.
Overall, though, it seems that Branson is off to a good start. Yes, it only has two carriers, but based on this rendering from the airport website, it doesn’t look like the airport is expecting a great deal of traffic with only four parking spots in front of the terminal.
It’ll be interesting to see how AirTran and Sun Country do in this new market. If they’re successful, I wouldn’t be surprised if some legacies decided to send a few RJs to Branson as well.
It was reported that due to weak demand, Emirates is dropping its A380 service to JFK and replacing the aircraft with 777s. The A380s will instead be flying to Bangkok and Toronto (of course the official press release neglects to mention dropping the A380 on the New York route). Flightblogger has the disappointing details:
One industry expert with direct knowledge of Emirates’ JFK operations tells FlightBlogger that January and February load factors took a significant hit with several A380 flights operating with less than 100 passengers on board.
Yikes.
The Emirates A380. (Source: Emirates)
But this brings me to a bigger point about Emirates. According to this Airbus spreadsheet, Emirates has 4 A380s in service with 54 more to come. Meanwhile it has 70 A350s coming, and I believe the airline has some more 777s coming as well.
Am I the only one that finds these order numbers a bit unrealistic? I realize the A350s are still a few years away, but does Emirates really expect such strong demand? I’m not an expert on the airline by any means, and I’m wondering what others think. Leave your thoughts in the comments. 
A few people let me know that the poll wasn’t working. Apparently, having the poll twice on the homepage (in the post and on the sidebar) causes some issues. It was very weird for me as the poll worked in IE7 but did not in Firefox.
Anyway, feel free to vote away in the sidebar!
I figured it would be a good time for a new poll, considering the old one (Southwest’s next city) is out of date now that Boston has been announced.
The Bombardier CSeries got a boost last week when Lufthansa ordered 30 aircraft (plus 30 options) for its Swiss subsidiary. In terms of seats, the two CSeries variants fit snugly between the larger E-Jets and the smaller members of the 737 and A320 families. I was wondering if the aircraft will have any success here in the States.
I think one important aspect is who will fly it. Is it a regional or mainline aircraft? Having it as a regional aircraft would bring down labor costs, but it seems unlikely that many unions would change their scope clauses to accommodate it. US Airways operated the E190 as mainline, and aircraft only seats 99.
The CSeries C100 and C300 (image from Bombardier)
Personally, I see the CSeries being a good bargaining chip for some airlines. Threatening to order a large number of CSeries aircraft could motivate Boeing and Airbus to get going on replacements for the 737 and A320. At the same time, I do think some airlines would like to use the CSeries to replace the older 737s and A320s, as the CSeries will be available earlier.
So, what do you think?
Southwest has finally crawled into the 21st century and is now allowing customers to e-mail customer service. There’s now just a simple webform like every other airline. The page promises a response within five business days, though SWABrian mentioned on FlyerTalk that “this is definitely a case of us trying to underpromise and overdeliver….Our goal is to respond much much quicker.” I think this is the same reason there’s no formal announcement about the change, as Southwest probably wants to work out any bugs that arise over the next few weeks.
The next feature added is the Travel Guide for Southwest cities. Users can contribute restaurant reviews and activity suggestions, etc. It seems like a good idea, but I wonder how many people will actually use the service because the Travel Guide isn’t much different than any other travel review site. I’ll be sticking with TripAdvisor, just because there’s so much more information there already. It just seems that it would be more efficient to just partner with a current website.
My other pet peeve with the Travel Guide is what appears to be a complete lack of integration with Rapid Rewards. To give an example, one can automicatlly import trips into Air France’s Bluenity into his or her Flying Blue account. It would be nice if the Southwest site would have automatically picked up my upcoming Philadelphia and Fort Lauderdale trips from my Rapid Rewards number, but alas I must enter all the inormation manually.
It’s been awhile since we’ve last visited our good friend the oil price graph, so let’s look from when oil hit a low in December:
The price really hasn’t done a whole lot, as the red trendline shows only a very slow increase.
But I still think we will see a rise in the price of oil, though perhaps it might come later as the economy is still weak. It is very important, however, to follow oil and the entire commodities, because I think I general rise in commodity prices will be one of the first indicators of an improving economy.
In my opinion, any airline expecting very low fuel prices for the long-term is deluding itself. Will oil hit $140 soon? Probbably not, but prices in the $80 range in the next 12-24 months aren’t out of the question. While using alternative fuels in all flying is still many years off, the industry has made good progress when it comes to dealing with high oil prices, whether it be investments like adding winglets or deciding to taxi with one engine.
This is great – a rapping flight attendant! Good way to make people pay attention.
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