Greetings, again, from San Diego. It’s about 4 AM here and I’ll be heading to the airport shortly. There was a bunch of cool stuff at NBTA, and I’ll have plenty of things to talk about.
But, today, I have yet some more annoying reporting that I heard behind me in the press room yesterday, where someone was interviewing a representative of Virgin Atlantic. The interviewer inquired about future growth, and the representative mentioned that Virgin has both A330s and 787s on order, which will enable them to expand.
Where does this one get annoying?
Next, the interviewer asked, “You have orders for the Dreamliner too, right?”
Ugh. 
Yeah, sorry for having two of these in row. I probably will have another for tomorrow, too! This story, which I found on FlyerTalk, comes from Caribbean Business. The article reports that Southwest is mulling the possibility of serving San Juan, Puerto Rico. To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if that came up in the coming years, but we’ll have to see.
But this story becomes annoying with the last paragraph:
The landing of Southwest Airlines could mark an important market entry for the regional airline into the Caribbean and could be a potential competitor for American Airline’s regional carrier American Eagle.
First, Southwest isn’t a regional carrier. But second, let’s think about the second part of the sentence. There’s a pretty extensive American Eagle operation based out of San Juan with ATR service from Executive Airlines (which is part of the AMR Corp. family). To compete with that, Southwest would have to launch a hub and fly to a bunch of Caribbean islands.
Southwest has made some big steps this year, like deciding to serve LaGuardia, but I think inter-island service is out of the question for the time being.
This one comes from a top ten list of ShermansTravel’s favorite budget carriers. Eight of these were foreign carriers that I don’t know a whole lot about, but JetBlue and Virgin America also made the list. The piece first mentions JetBlue:
What’s more, JetBlue was the first U.S. airline (back in December of ’07) to offer free in-flight e-mail and messaging for WiFi-enabled laptops and BlackBerrys – a perk cherished (at long last) by both business and leisure travelers.
This is true. JetBlue only has one aicraft, BetaBlue (N651JB) with the service, and it only has limited capabilities compared to the Wi-Fi service other carriers have been rolling out. The carrier will, however, will be expanding its offerings toward the end of the year.
So where does this one get annoying? Because Wi-Fi wasn’t mentioned when the author got to Virgin America. Sure, Virgin wasn’t the first to the game, but all of its planes are equipped with Aircell’s gogo service. Someone who follows this article’s advice would have to hope that he or she is on the only JetBlue A320 (of more than 100) that has these capabilities (until JetBlue rolls out more service).
As I wrote when I started this cheesy post series, I don’t want to make it sound like I’m an expert on everything, but occasionally I see something that comes up that a beat reporter covering the airlines should know. Today’s feature comes from Reuters:
Frontier, founded in 1994, competes with Southwest Airlines Co (LUV.N) and JetBlue Airways Corp (JBLU.O).
OK, the Southwest part I can dig. But JetBlue? The two carriers compete on one route – Denver to New York. That’s it. Why not say Frontier competes with Southwest and United, since the latter is the other major carrier at that airport?
Yes, another cheesy post series. You’re welcome.
When I read stories about airlines from the mainstream media, there are sometimes some obvious errors. I’m not expecting every reporter to be a total expert on the industry, and nor am I trying to say that I’m perfect. But, there are some things that are just plain wrong, and even annoying to read.
For example, we have this article from CNBC:
Low-cost carrier Ryanair this week revealed plans to scrap luggage check-in desks, saying passengers will have to take their own bags through security, departure lounges and across the runway to their plane, according to various media reports.
Across the runway?
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