It always comes in waves.

Back before 9/11, air traffic had hit record high levels and airports were starting to feel the strain. Stories like the one where Northwest flights sat on the ground in Detroit for hours on end during a major snowstorm caused customer anger to reach new heights.

It got to the point where Congress began debating a customer bill of rights. In the end, the airlines narrowly averted regulation by agreeing to a voluntary customer service commitment called Customers First. The commitments were worded basically the same for every domestic airline because it came from the ATA. Instead of listing them here, I’ll give you links to a handful if you’d like to check them out:

• American
• Continental
• Delta
• Northwest
• US Airways
• United

After 9/11, most people forgot about these commitments. There were fewer flights in the air and a lot fewer passengers which meant less congestion and better on time performance.

As you can see from the DOT traffic info, traffic really started climbing again in 2003 and delays began to mount. There have been periodic reports about how the airlines haven’t really kept their promises, but it took something major to get people really talking about this again.

Thanks to a horribly delayed American flight and a well-timed article by Scott McCartney in the Wall Street Journal, the issue has returned to center stage. This particular flight was diverted to Austin due to thunderstorms and sat on the ground for 8 hours. McCartney’s vivid description certainly fanned the flames. The article begins:

After hours of sitting on the runway, the toilets on the American Airlines
jet were overflowing. There was no water to be found and no food except for a
box of pretzel bags. A pregnant woman sat crying; an unaccompanied teen sobbed.
The captain walked up and down the aisle of the MD-80, trying to calm angry
passengers. At one point, families with children lined up to be bused to the
terminal, but a bus never came.

Now, a movement is underfoot once again to regulate the airlines and their customer service commitments. This latest movement can be found under the banner of Coalition for Airline Passenger’s Bill of Rights. If you’re interested in seeing the details, head on over to their blog and read the bill of rights in the column on the right side.

What do I think about all this? Now, I’m generally not a fan of piecemeal government regulation. When the airlines came out with their Customers First commitment, I thought that would be the end of it. Unfortunately, the airlines didn’t take it seriously and have not lived up to the commitments they made, so it makes it harder to defend them. If the airlines made commitments, there should be some requirement that they actually abide by them.

Some of the new requested commitments should still be left to market forces. If one airline is quicker at responding to customer complaints than another airline, customers will choose that first airline if it’s really important to them. Of course if an airline doesn’t respond to any complaints at all, Dateline will pull out a hidden camera and give them all the bad press they could hope for.

Same thing goes for delay notification. That is one of my pet peeves, and if I knew that one airline was better at keeping customers informed, I would probably shift my business that way.

That being said, there are some basic commitments here that I think should be regulated by the government because they involve health and safety. These include providing for special needs passengers and ensuring access to food, water, restrooms, and medical help during long delays.

In the end, I’m not a fan of the government meddling in bits and pieces unless it involves health and safety. Beyond that, if you’re going to reregulate the industry, do it completely instead of poking your head in wherever it’s politically desirable. If the government really wants to encourage improved customer service, some sort of incentives (ie mail contracts, new route awards, etc) or tax credits (ie tax credit for RFID investments for bag tracking) should be used unless they want to back up and regulate the entire industry all over again.

AirTran has a lot going on these days. First and foremost, they continue to beg and plead Midwest to let them buy the airline. But that doesn’t mean that everything else is standing still. Nay. In fact, they’ve announced some route expansion in the last couple of days. And once again they’re under attack by JetBlue. Never a dull moment for TAFKAV (That would be, The Airline Formerly Known as Valujet.)

So how is that merger attempt going? Not so well. Apparently Wisconsin laws are pretty strict when it comes to hostile takeovers. Since Midwest doesn’t want to marry AirTran, those laws are coming in handy right now. The latest is that Midwest won’t hand over its shareholder list to AirTran and AirTran is suing them under a New York statute requiring they do so. Wisconsin laws, however, may prevent Midwest from having to comply. In short, this merger is going nowhere fast right now. Midwest continues to move forward with its plan to stay independent, and the airline just announced new Seattle flights yesterday.

And what about AirTran’s new flights? Well, first of all they’re going to begin summer seasonal daily flights between Atlanta and San Diego on May 24. Not quite sure why that’s seasonal. You’d think San Diego would be big enough for year round service, but maybe they need those planes elsewhere during the winter.

Meanwhile, in their ongoing quest to find another minihub, they’ve decided to push in St Louis. Now there’s an airport with a lot of room. Ever since American gobbled up TWA, there has been plenty of open terminal space. AirTran moves in on May 8 with four daily flights to Atlanta. Beginning June 7, they’ll have a daily nonstop to Orlando as well. I imagine that if these flights do well, there will be a lot more coming. Then again, AirTran has a habit of starting and stopping flights at the drop of a hat, so this could go the other way as well.

And lastly, in yet another example of when copying is not considered to be the sincerest form of flattery, JetBlue announced they’ll start flying from White Plains (New York) on March 28. What does this have to do with AirTran? Well once again, JetBlue has entered markets right after AirTran starts them. These guys can’t get a break.

JetBlue will have two daily flights to Orlando, one to Ft Lauderdale, and one to West Palm Beach. Not surprisingly, AirTran has an identical schedule in those markets though the flights are at different times. JetBlue is making a habit of this, and I’m sure AirTran is not happy.

Just another week in the life of AirTran.

Spirit is definitely a unique kind of airline. Just a few years ago, they were a small airline flying ratty old MD80s out of their Detroit hub as well as sending cold weather travelers down south to warm up. Here is their route map from January 19, 2001.

It’s not much to talk about. They had pressure from Northwest in Detroit and ultra-competitive routes like Chicago – Los Angeles were certainly not helping the bottom line. Now 6 years later, it’s a very different airline. Here is the current route map.

As you can see, Detroit it still there, but the focus has moved south to the Caribbean. The airline has taken their all-new Airbus fleet (the MD80s have been thankfully retired) and based most of their operations in Ft Lauderdale these days. The seem to be happy with this strategy because they continue to expand at a rapid pace.

On Jan 16, the airline announced flights to Aguadilla (Puerto Rico) beginning in April. January 18 brought an announcement of flights to Port-au-Prince (Haiti) at the end of March. Just yesterday, Spirit said they’ll start flying to St Maarten (Netherlands Antilles) in April. They have enough planes to fly these routes now, but they clearly want to continue this aggressive expansion in the long run. That’s why today they decided to add 30 new Airbus A319s beginning in 2009.

This may all sound great, but that’s a lot of seats that need to be filled. How are they going to be able to pull it off? Well they’ve definitely gone for the lowest common denominator. The airline has decided to be an extremely low cost and low fare carrier.

At the beginning of the year, Spirit announced they were down to a 5 cent cost per available seat mile excluding fuel. That compares quite favorably with most airlines, so they do have an edge on that side of the equation. Of course, that means they can charge less and theoretically be able to profit at fare levels where other airlines can’t. That has been the strategy as of late.

The airline has had plenty of offers promoting low fares including one that Business 2.0 ranked the eighth dumbest moment in business in 2006. The airline launched a campaign to help find Jimmy Hoffa by digging for his remains online. The reward involved fares from $39. While it is clearly tasteless, it got the job done for the airline by generating a ton of press.

More recently, $39 would be considered an expensive sale fare. For awhile, they were stuck on the $8 fare sale, but this year has brought the 5 cent fare sale. Now they’re starting to sound like Ryanair and other European airlines that charge very little to get on board but then nickel-and-dime you for everything else you might want above the basic transportation. It’s a model that has worked very well in Europe but has never really taken hold here in the US. Along with Allegiant and the soon-to-be launched SkyBus, Spirit will try to see if the model can work over here.

So far, some of the indicators are pointing in the right direction from a customer interest standpoint. Check out this chart from Alexa comparing the traffic rank of the Spirit website to both Northwest and AirTran.

As you can see, Spirit has really skyrocketed since the beginning of the year. They’re basically neck-and-neck with the much larger AirTran now in terms of traffic. That means they’re doing a good job of directing bookings to their lowest cost channel – their own website.

But the news is definitely not all good. Even though the airline isn’t public, they do have to release financial information to the government. The most recent release was for the 3rd quarter of 2006 and it doesn’t paint the prettiest picture.

For Latin flying, the airline had an operating loss of $3.3 m for the quarter. That’s worse than the $705,000 loss from Q2 and the $1.6 m loss from Q1. They’re losing even more on their domestic operation. Net loss for the entire airline for Q3 was almost $16 m. Clearly, that’s why they’re moving toward the Caribbean quickly. They at least lose less money there than they do in the US. That sort of strategy still doesn’t work. You’ll run out of money at some point.

Hopefully the airline has plans for turning this situation around, but it’s not going to be easy. Look for more Caribbean flying and cheap sale fares to lure people in to the website, but those fares will be very limited. They need to start charging more here soon or the money may run out.

I’ve had friends come back from vacations with harrowing stories about turbulence so bad they thought the wings were going to fall off. Of course, it didn’t happen, and it’s extremely unlikely that it could happen.

I came across this video this morning which is a 3:35 piece of the PBS series “21st Century Jet” about the 777 showing what kind of testing they did on the 777 wing.

As you can see, they bent that wing up more than 24 feet from level and only then did it break, at more than 150% of the strongest force that could expected in flight.

And this isn’t the only wing testing they do. They also flex the wings up and down for long periods of time to simulate sustained periods of turbulence.

Why is this the NFL playoffs edition? Well, because I want to watch the games this afternoon and I have a lot to talk about, so I’ll keep it short and sweet. (Go Bears and Colts)

• United Joins US Airways in Mileage Cutoff – Following US Airways’ lead, United has reduced its mileage expiration date from 3 years to 18 months. In other words, if there is no activity in your account over 18 months, your miles are gone. Remember, even buying flowers counts as activity, so you don’t need to fly.
• Delta Kicks Off Jockeying for 2008 China Routes – The ink is barely dry on the award to United for 2007′s China routes but the competition for 2008 is now underway. Though 2007 was only for airlines already flying to China, 2008 is for anyone. That’s why it’s no surprise that Delta kicked off the competition with a bid for its first China service – Atlanta to Shanghai. Though it’s too early to handicap this race, I’d say Delta has a decent shot here. if they handle it right.
• Continental Heads to Athens – Ramping up for the summer season, Continental announced daily flights between Newark and Athens starting June 7. This is going to be an interesting year in Athens as US Airways also announced Philly – Athens service. I’ll be surprised if all these flights do well.
• Frontier Announces First Embraer Flights – You may remember that Frontier announced they’d be contracting with a regional airline to fly the new comfortable Embraer 170 jets to smaller cities from Denver. Well, soon after announcing Republic had won the bid, Frontier announced that the first flights will be from Denver to Louisville twice daily beginning April 1. This is all part of Frontier’s strategy to find places where they can avoid Southwest. Though Southwest does fly to Louisville, I’d be surprised to see a nonstop flight between the two cities.
• United Beefs Up Denver As Well – Just 30 minutes after Frontier’s release, United came out with their own Denver expansion. Flights to Dayton on United Express begin April 24, flights to Raleigh/Durham also begin that day, and Express flights to Kalispell (Montana) begin June 7.
• A New Way from the West Coast to Germany – Germany’s LTU will begin scheduled flights between both Los Angeles and Las Vegas and Dusseldorf in Germany. Flights begin May 3 and operate 5 times a week to LAX and twice a week to Las Vegas.
• Merger Mania Begins – People have been talking about industry consolidation for a long time, but it now looks like it’s actually happening. Well, sort of. Caribbean Star and LIAT are well on their way to merging in the Caribbean. All flights will be sold under the LIAT code. All the other action involves Northwest. The airline has agreed to buy Mesaba, one of its regional airlines which has been knocking on death’s door. Also, Pinnacle, a Northwest regional, will buy Colgan Air, a small turboprop operator, for $20 million.
• Odd PR Firm of the Year Award – I’m guessing most people don’t see China Southern’s press releases, but they really are a sight to be seen. The headline on the latest release is “BOFFO! BOFFO! BOFFO! China Southern Airlines Close to 50 Mill PAX Mark in ’06.” I’m not sure what kind of press the three “Boffo” mentions are going to get them, but it certainly got them a place in this