When Delta announced new nonstop flights between New York/JFK and US Airways’ hometown of Phoenix the day after US Airways announced its takeover intentions, it seemed like a coincidence to me. After today’s events though, I’m starting to get suspicious.

This evening, shortly after the US Airways team made their formal presentation to Delta management, Delta turned around and said “I don’t wanna talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!” Translation for the non-Monty Python fans out there . . . “You might be able to take us over, but we can make vain, money-losing, and futile attempts to tell you that we don’t like you.”

I think futile really is the right word here, but hopefully I’m wrong. The airline announced new nonstop service from its hub in Salt Lake City to the major US Airways hub of Charlotte. A single daily flight starts on March 1.

Can the timing of these announcements really be coincidental? At this point, I doubt it. Delta employees are really not happy that US Airways is trying to take over their airline, and apparently the best they can do is start filing schedules (SSIM files) for flights to US Airways hubs.

I do hope this is just a coincidence for Delta’s sake, and that they really have determined that this is the best use of that aircraft time. If it’s not, then US Airways has an even stronger case supporting its ability to create additional value in a takeover. An airline has a responsibility to make the best business decisions possible at all times. There is no room for someone at Delta to be making a statement by placing an airplane somewhere when it could be making more money elsewhere. I really hope that’s not what’s happening here.

Today was the big day for US Airways. Delta let them come on in and make their presentation in front of management and creditors. So how did it go?

Well, according to the US Airways press release, CEO Doug Parker said, “We were pleased to have made a presentation to both Delta and its creditors about what we believe are the compelling and unique benefits of our plan. . . . ” blah blah blah. Well what do you expect him to say?

And how about the response from Delta?

Well the PR from that camp was hardly as gracious.

Consistent with our obligation to review US Airways’ unsolicited proposal,
today we, along with representatives of our Creditors’ Committee, met to listen
to US Airways’ presentation concerning US Airways’ proposal to merge with
Delta.

While we will fulfill this obligation, we will, as we have stated,
continue to progress toward filing our stand-alone plan by the end of the
year, which would have us emerge from bankruptcy as a highly competitive,
independent and financially sound airline by mid-2007. Our plan is working and
we have tremendous, hard-won confidence in it.’

In other words . . . you suck, go away.

They have to say they’re reviewing the proposal or there would be plenty of shareholder lawsuits saying that they aren’t exploring all possible options. But this is pretty clear that they don’t care how good the offer is, they still think they have a better plan.

Personally, I’m not so sure about that. Let’s see how the creditors feel.

I’ve actually been meaning to write about this for awhile, but for some reason it kept getting pushed into the corner and I’m just dusting it off now.

After a short period of beta testing, United has now integrated the new version of its booking engine onto its site. This has been a long time in the making, and it’s really way overdue. If you’ve heard frequent users talk about United’s website in the past, you’ve probably heard it called United.bomb. Of course, you can scan FlyerTalk today and hear all the complaints about the new site as well, but in reality it’s a nice improvement.

The first thing you’ll notice on the home page is that it’s no longer just search by price and schedule. You can now also search by flex dates but only for roundtrip itineraries. One way and multi-city don’t have that functionality.

If you do a search by price, it still just lists possible itineraries from lowest to highest price, but now there’s a grid at the top that looks like this:

So now you can see nonstop vs. one stop as well as different fares for different classes of service. Really, it’s a good improvement over the lack of info before, but it’s not really anything revolutionary. Unfortunately, the results below the grid still only show the lowest fare, so there is no way to see how much different classes cost on a specific itinerary unless you keep clicking between all the links and then searching for the itinerary you want.

The best news here is that you can now click to see the seat map right from the results instead of having to pretend like you’re making a reservation for a couple screens. Nice work there.

Another nice feature is you can now click over to see the search by schedule or flex dates from this page fairly quickly. The schedule search is the same as it was when it was introduced over a year ago, but this is still by far my favorite way to search for United flights. If gives you a choice of outbound and return flights side by side. As you change which flights are highlighted, it dynamically updates the price for you on the right. The interface is slightly improved, but other than that, no changes (not that they were needed).

Then there’s the flex dates option which is pretty basic. The results still show just as they do in the search by price option, but now the grid is changed to show you multiple date options as follows:

As you can see, it shows you the lowest available fare two days before and after the dates you’ve chosen. I suppose that is helpful to know if you can be flexible in your timing, but it would be nice if you could break it down further by time of day.

Overall, it’s a good improvement for United, and I’m glad to see they’ve finally upgraded the booking engine. They are definitely due for a full site overhaul though, so hopefully that’s coming soon as well.

It probably won’t come as a shock to anyone that people have grown wider in the last 50 years. Now there’s research to prove it, but is it really that big of a deal for the airline industry?

I don’t know if you’ve been following the Russian spy saga that has been unfolding in the UK, but it has been fascinating. Now there’s an aviation angle that makes this even more James Bond-like.

The backstory here is that Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian KGB agent, was poisoned with the radioactive substance polonium-210 in London during the last couple weeks. He died last week but not before blaming the Russian government for his murder in relation to some investigations he had been conducting.

Now, it turns out that British Airways has identified 3 767 aircraft that might have been involved. They have found that 2 of the 767s have very low level traces of a radioactive substance onboard while the third is currently in Moscow and had yet to be tested. Those three aircraft have obviously been removed from service.

The airline stresses that the public health risk is extremely low, but they are contacting passengers who flew on those aircraft in the last few weeks. According to their statement, the planes have flown between London and Barcelona, Dusseldorf, Athens, Larnaca, Stockholm, Vienna, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Madrid, and . . . Moscow over the last month. Click on this link to see a full list of flights operated.

This is truly an incredible development. How did the radioactive substance get on all three of these aircraft? It seems highly likely that transit of the substance between Moscow and London occurred but how would it have spread beyond one aircraft? Were multiple people involved? Who was on the manifest of all those flights? I’m sure Scotland Yard is busily sifting through all this information.