You would think that with the number of press releases Virgin America has sent out, they’d actually be flying by now. Of course, you’d be wrong.

This airline sounds exactly like what they call “vaporware” in the tech community. Defined by Webopedia, vaporware is “A sarcastic term used to designate software and hardware products that have been announced and advertised but are not yet available.”

Sounds about right, huh?

So, Virgin, er, Vapor America continues to soldier on before they’ve even heard back from the DOT about their objections. What’s the latest?

Yesterday, the airline announced that Sam Skinner, former Chief of Staff under Papa Bush and former DOT secretary, will join the Board of Directors. This seems like an attempt to cull favor in Washington, but I can’t imagine it will. The annoying indignant tone hasn’t gone away, and unless the ownership problem is fixed to the Department’s satisfation, they can add whoever they want to their board and not get anywhere.

Then today they announced their first six cities. They had already announced San Francisco and New York/JFK, but now they’ve added that within the first nine months of flying, they’ll also be in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Washington/Dulles. That’s about what I would have expected, but right now, who cares? They’re trying to get the public excited, but once again, public support isn’t going to change ownership issues.

Head on over to Lufthansa’s website and you’ll find that they’re getting strict with seatbelt use. The blurb from the current info page is as follows:

In the event of unexpected turbulence, injuries are often
the result on board passenger aircraft, whereby this could be prevented in many
cases if passengers kept their seatbelts fastened. For that reason, up to now
Lufthansa has recommended that passengers keep their seatbelts fastened. In the
interest of the safety of its passengers, the airline has now decided to make it
generally compulsory to fasten seatbelts. Passengers will still be allowed to
stand up, for example, to stretch their legs or to visit the toilet, unless
fasten seatbelt signs are switched on. The new regulation also applies to
Lufthansa Regional partners. Incidentally, the aircraft itself is designed to
resist the extra strain resulting from turbulence without any significant
damage.

I’m all for it. If I’m in my seat, I always have my seatbelt fastened. You know those stories about planes hitting severe turbulence and people getting hurt? 99.9% of the time those people didn’t have seatbelts on.

Then again, I suppose you could argue that not requiring seatbelts allows natural selection to run its course . . . .

Allegiant issued their first earnings report since going public today, and there were a couple of interesting tidbits in there worth talking about.

First of all, the amount of ancillary revenue per passenger rose from $13.99 in the fourth quarter of 2005 to $18.84 in the fourth quarter of 2006. What is ancillary revenue? Well it’s all the money they make from sources other than airplane tickets. We’ve talked about this before, but getting every passenger to pay just shy of $20 above and beyond the ticket is pretty impressive. What do they sell to convince each person to shell out the extra dollars?

If you go to their website, you’ll see them hawking hotel rooms pretty aggressively. They get a cut each time you book. Want an assigned seat in advance? You’ll pay for that. Need a soda or a snack? Oh yeah, fork over the cash. How about some Vegas or Florida souvenirs? Or a model of an Allegiant plane? Maybe a pillow and blanket? It’s all for sale.

So remember, if you fly Allegiant, you can expect to pay somewhat more than just the price of the ticket.

The second piece of interesting info is that Allegiant may have chosen their newest focus city. At the end of the year, all their flights were from smaller cities into either Las Vegas, Orlando, or St Petersburg/Tampa. Since the beginning of the year, they’ve quietly launched a twice weekly flight between Bellingham (Washington) and Palm Springs. This flight runs through the peak season and ends in April. Could this be the start of more Palm Springs flights?

As the bids for Alitalia came in yesterday, I must admit I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have. In the middle of the group of private equity investors and a lone airline was buried an individual named Fabio Scaccia.

Fabio is a high school teacher in a suburb of Rome and he makes a mere 1,200 euros a month. Now considering that Alitalia is projecting 4.33 billion euros in revenue for 2006, you’d think that a 1,200 a month salary wouldn’t quite be enough to be able to buy the airline. Then again, they are projecting a horrendous loss of 380 million euros for the year, so they should have to pay this guy to take them over.

Seriously though, how did this guy get his bid into the process? Well in true Alitalia fashion, the process was a mess. According to this article, Fabio went online and found the address. He put together an expression of interest and sent it off. Even though bidders had to have at least 100 million euros in assets, the Italian government didn’t even bother to check out the bidders. So, Fabio’s name joined the ranks of the big boys.

The funny thing is that he has a plan that would probably work better than what current management is doing. He says he’s happy with his salary and he’d be willing to work for the same amount running Alitalia. That alone would save the company more than 2.6 million euros per year considering the current CEO’s outrageous 225,000 euro salary PER MONTH.

Then Fabio would “concentrate on maintenance, invest in new aircraft and centre all the activities around a single hub in Rome (instead of having a second hub in Milan).” Hey, gotta give the guy credit for trying. He seems to have a better plan than anyone currently running the show, though I’m guessing the other 10 potential investors might be able to do a better job.

And now for a brief lesson on aircraft engines.

This is what a GE CF34-3B1 engine on a Mesa Airlines CRJ in America West Express colors is supposed to look like.

Now, here’s a picture of that same type of engine after a flight from Denver to Phoenix last Thursday.

Now, only the most detail-oriented people will be able to spot the difference. Can you see it? Yup, that’s right, the engine on the bottom is SHREDDED! Not freaky enough? How about this side view:

According to Flightglobal.com, this apparently happened on a Mesa Airlines flight operating as US Airways Express last Thursday. The flight left Denver and about 50 miles out had a, um, minor problem when it “shed a fan blade and the forward cowling from its left engine.”

The flight turned around and landed without any problems, but this picture is fairly disturbing. This is the first problem of its kind for this type of engine, so it will be interesting to see what they uncover.

Looks like a sweet ride, huh?

To your left is what the first 737-700ER will look like in the colors of ANA. They’re going to start flying it on March 25 from Nagoya to Guangzhou (China).

What’s so unique about it? Well on a plane that Southwest fills with 137 seats, they will have only 48. There will 24 business class seats and 24 economy class seats. Even the economy seats will be good though with more than 6″ more legroom than normal (38″).

And while we’re on the subject, let’s talk about the 737-700ER a little more. This plane is going to be a rockstar. According to Boeing it will fly up to 5,510 nm. As you can see on the map below from the beloved Great Circle Mapper, that gets you really far.

This map shows the range from LAX. You could fly to London, Tokyo, or Sao Paulo without problem. Of course, this means you’d have to buy all the auxiliary fuel tanks so it’ll cost a little more, but that kind of range could open up new thin routes that aren’t currently flown today.

LAX to Madrid, anyone?

Today was the deadline for showing interest in buying a share of my favorite whipping boy Alitalia from the Italian government. We had heard a lot of people object in the past to the onerous terms - no layoffs or real route restructuring - but there was still interest from a surprising 11 buyers.

So, Jim, let’s meet our suitors on this week’s edition of . . .

Most of our suitors are private equity firms. Notably, we see Texas Pacific Group in there. These guys have done wonders in the past of investing in airlines, bringing in stellar management to fix them up, and then getting out of there with some good money. Every company has a price that makes sense for these guys, so if they can get the price low enough, it will be worthwhile for them. The question is, how low will they have to go?

Other than private equity companies, there’s one lone airline bidder. Air One, Italy’s second largest airline, would like to get in there and take over. I would be surprised if Italy let this happen simply because it might actually make sense. Both Lufthansa and Air France/KLM, both thought to potentially have had interest, said they weren’t going to jump in.

The next step is for Italy to go through and determine which bids should be allowed to move on to the next round. This will of course be determined after the swimsuit and formalwear competitions.

Looks like the BA flight attendants have called off their strike after coming to agreement with management. This means there will be fewer disruptions this week, but there are still some problems.

BA says that if people changed their flights due to the strike, they can call back and have the original flights reinstated if they’d like. That being said, there are a couple caveats. Since this is so last minute, the airline says it won’t be able to offer full catering on all flights from Heathrow on Tuesday and Wednesday. If you are on a flight without full catering, they’ll give you a voucher in the airport to redeem for food.

There’s also no guarantee that every flight will be able to operate. Instead of giving the actual flights that will operate, they’ve annoyingly requested that everyone use the flight info link on their website on the day of the flight to see if it will operate. Lame.

You probably haven’t heard of ExpressJet, but you likely know Continental Express. For the longest time, ExpressJet was the sole operator of flights for Continental Express. Now the airline has been spun off into its own company, and it’s trying to branch out into new areas. Besides corporate jets, they’re also looking to start their own independent regional airline.

Now don’t start getting bad flashbacks of Independence Air’s miserable failure. No, this airline isn’t trying to be a low fare carrier. They’re trying to connect the dots between cities that don’t have service yet but could use it. They’ll use 44 of their regional jets in this new airline, and the details will be announced on February 1. What we do know from their 4th quarter earnings release is that there will be service to “24 cities in the West, Midwest, and Southeast United States.” There will be XM radio in every seat and complimentary snacks with meals on longer flights.

I’m not sure how many routes there are that need direct flights but don’t already have it, but I look forward to seeing the announcement on Feb 1. Thanks to an eagle-eyed reader’s email, we can get a sneak peak today.

If you head on over to the airline’s job website (click Job Opportunites from ExpressJet.com), you can see the 156 current positions they’re hiring for. In that list there are quite a few “General Managers” posted. While some of the cities are places that ExpressJet flies as Continental Express already, the rest are not.

Put two and two together and we may have a list of the new cities to which they’ll fly. The following are the 19 general manager positions they have open (the ones with stars are not currently served as Continental Express). They said there will be a total of 24 cities in the network, so there must be at least 5 that already have personnel. By the way, these all fit quite nicely into the plan for West, Midwest, and Southeast service.

West

• Albuquerque
• Bakersfield
• Boise*
• Colorado Springs
• El Paso
• Fresno*
• Monterey*
• Sacramento*
• San Diego*
• Spokane*
• Tucson

Midwest

• Austin
• Kansas City
• Oklahoma City
• San Antonio
• Tulsa

Southeast

• Jacksonville
• New Orleans
• Raleigh/Durham

Now there are some interesting possible routes here that don’t currently have service. How about New Orleans - San Diego? Or maybe Austin - Sacramento?

It will be interesting to see how this works out for them. I’m looking forward to seeing the remaining cities next week.

I haven’t really talked about the impending strike over at British Airways because I was hoping it would be averted. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

The strike will be by the TGWU union which repesents about 14,000 of BA’s flight attendants. What are they fighting over? Well, I like this commentary’s take on the situation. Though it appears to be over the matter of sick days and the elimination of one purser position on every 747 flight, it’s actually a much bigger fight over the future of the airline.

What does this mean for you? Well, if you’re traveling to the UK next week, watch out. It’s going to be an ugly one. BA announced that it’s pre-canceling flights, but you can check here for the most up to date info:

• Tuesday, Jan 30 - No flights will operate from Heathrow to the US/Canada and from Gatwick to Tampa, Bermuda, and Barbados. All flights to London will operate as scheduled from the US/Canada. No short haul European/UK flights will operate from Heathrow or Gatwick.
• Wednesday, Jan 31 - All flights between the US/Canada and London are canceled. No short haul European/UK flights will operate from Heathrow or Gatwick
• Thursday, Feb 1 - Most flights from the US/Canada to Heathrow and from Tampa, Bermuda, and Barbados to Gatwick are canceled but all flights from Heathrow will operate.
• Friday, Feb 2- Most flights will operate as normal with the possibility for a couple cancellations

The good news? It’s only a two day strike. The bad news? They’re planning more on Feb 5, 6, 7 and Feb 12, 13, 14.