This is the last day of voting for the Travvy awards, so please head on over to Upgrade:Travel Better to cast your vote if you haven’t done so already.

Voting ends at 6p Central Standard Time today, February 28. For the time-zonally challenged, let me spell that out for you. You can vote until the following times in the following areas:

Kalaupapa, Molokai - 2p
Prudhoe Bay, Alaska - 3p
Barstow, California - 4p
Paradise Valley, Arizona - 5p
Elk Grove Village, Illinois - 6p
Fishers, Indiana - 7p
Boston, England - midnight
Ljubljana, Slovenia - 1a (March 1)
Lusaka, Zambia - 2a (March 1)
Baghdad, Iraq - 3a (March 1)
Kabul, Afghanistan - 430a (March 1)
Beijing, China - 8a (March 1)
Uluru, Australia - 930a (March 1)
Auckland, New Zealand - 1p (March 1)

Remember, click HERE to vote. This is your last chance . . . .

I know where I’ll be on March 19. Airbus has buckled under the pressure from Qantas and LA World Airports and announced it will bring an A380 to LAX on the same day it brings one to JFK.

The initial announcement said that Airbus would bring the plane to JFK, Dulles, and Chicago/O’Hare on behalf of Lufthansa. Well, Qantas wasn’t too happy about that, and they wanted to see the plane come to their huge LAX operation. Meanwhile, LAX said that Airbus had promised the airport the first visit in the US if they completed the upgrade work necessary to allow the A380 to operate. Well, they did, and now they’re getting their way.

I haven’t seen any details, but with any luck they’ll land on the north runways. I’ll be sitting at In ‘n Out watching if that’s the case.

There are thousands and thousands of videos on the web showing airplanes landing, taking off, going around, etc. Generally, even I don’t find these that interesting to watch, but this one is great. It’s a short, 32 second video of a Concorde descending in a crosswind and then aborting the landing and going around.

There’s something incredible about watching that plane just hang in the air as if being held by a string before you see smoke belching from the engines as the airplane begins to climb again. I miss that plane.

Who wants to guess that last Thursday’s announcement of American’s “New York Initiative” was coincidentally timed shortly after JetBlue’s problems? Me neither. I can’t imagine it was a coincidence.

New York has been a battleground for a long time. Besides JetBlue’s substantial flying, Delta has tried to grow its JFK operation into a major transatlantic gateway, despite the decrepit state of its terminal. Meanwhile, American has continued to grow domestically and in Latin America from both LaGuardia and JFK. Over on the other side of the city, Continental has the built the largest operation of all, making Newark a major domestic and European hub.

So what exactly is American trying to do this time? According to the press release, they will “demonstrate its commitment to New York with additional routes, enhanced offers, and promotions.”

Once you get below all the fluff, what exactly are they going to do? First they talk about all the stuff they have done already. This includes a variety of premium class promotions and the new terminal which is very nice but cost way too much money. They’ve upgraded to the 767-200s that fly to LAX and SFO and they’re installing new business class seats on their long haul widebodies. Ok, so what are they going to do going forward?

Well, much of it is schedule-oriented. They’ll start flying from LaGuardia to Cincinnati and Louisville as well as from JFK to Las Vegas. They’re adding additional flights from LaGuardia to Raleigh/Durham and from JFK to San Francisco, Port-au-Prince, and Caracas. Also, flights to Atlanta will be upgraded from regional jets to mainline jets.

But wait, there’s more.

They’re opening a new lounge at JFK for international First and Business class passengers. And they’re going to spend a bunch of money on advertising.

In other words, they’ve cobbled together a bunch of things they’ve done and now they’re going to put it into an advertising campaign. Sounds like a good plan in light of JetBlue’s troubles. Still, this market is a tough one with all the competition. It will be interesting if they can actually grow their share with these moves.

It’s a rare weekend post for me, but I thought this was worth it.

Remember Adam Air? The Indonesian airline had a 737 go down off the coast of Indonesia in January. Well, now they’ve had another, um, incident. Another 737 came in for a hard landing in Surabaya, and well, Stuff.co.nz has this amazing picture.

That must have been a REALLY hard landing. As you might expect, the Indonesian government is not too thrilled about this. Instead of giving greater scrutiny to Adam Air, they’ve decided to instead require inspections of all 737-300s operating in the country. I’m pretty sure that’s not the problem here.

It’s definitely been a bad couple of weeks for JetBlue. I’m sure everyone is sick of hearing about them by now, but I feel compelled to DEFEND the airline.

This week, Business Week was coincidentally scheduled to release its rank of the top 25 customer service firms. JetBlue was #4. After seeing the problems unfold for the airline over the last week, Business Week decided to drop them from the rankings. But they didn’t just drop them from the rankings, they decided to go for the low blow.

Ouch.

First of all, if an organization is in your top 5 for the full year and they have one bad event, I hardly think they should be removed. Now, it’s true this was a pretty long and painful event, but they are taking a lot of important steps from a customer service perspective. David Neeleman has been out there apologizing on any tv show that will take him. They’ve put apologies in newspapers and in emails to every address in their database. They’ve also rolled out their Customer Bill of Rights which, though widely criticized over their Controllable Irregularity clause (yes, I’ve jumped in as well), is at least doing SOMETHING proactive.

So what was Business Week’s reasoning? How about this quote from an article on the decision:

“What matters most is execution–doing the deep, hard,
organizational work to ensure the crisis never happens again. While JetBlue
recognizes that fact, it still has plenty to prove, especially to those
passengers fuming over their ruined vacation or time forever lost to the inside
of an airplane.”

Ok, so even though I may not agree with it, I can understand the argument about why they should be quietly removed from the list. But why on earth would you decide to leave the cover the way it is and just cross out JetBlue entirely?! Yes, I know the answer - it’s all about selling magazines - but it’s still really harsh and completely unnecessary.

Apparently the people taking Business Week’s poll would agree. The poll asks “JetBlue’s recent operational fiasco led BusinessWeek to cut the company from our first ranking of Customer Service Champs. Would you have kept JetBlue on the list?”

Of the 820 votes cast so far, more than 80% (including my own) said yes, they would have kept JetBlue on the list. You can cast your own vote here.

For now, the only good news is for employees of the carmaker Lincoln. They must be excited because JetBlue’s dismissal allowed them to slip in at #25.

If you’re flying US Airways the first weekend of March, you’ll want to read this.

I’ve received confirmation from their PR team that Saturday, March 3 will be the big day where they standardize the combined airline on a single reservations system. This is an important step for the airline, but it could cause some short term hiccups.

Right now, the old America West is running on SHARES while the old US Airways is running on SABRE. On Saturday, old US Airways will migrate over to SHARES so that the entire airline will be running on the same system.

The switchover will happen overnight, because that’s when the fewest flights will be affected. To do something this massive, it requires an outage for probably a couple hours. That means that people leaving the Hawaiian Islands on redeyes will have to be checked in manually. Get there early if you’re on one of those flights. I imagine flights from Europe may be affected as well. Oh, and if you’re an insomniac and like to make reservations in the middle of the night, you’re going to be out of luck that day.

Hopefully by the time everyone wakes up on March 4, it will all be functioning perfectly. I REALLY hope that’s the case, because I have a flight on the airline that afternoon. Now, they’re confident that it’s going to go smoothly, but as with any major tech project, there can always be snags. I’m definitely keeping my fingers crossed.

Beyond the actual migration, the benefits are great. Currently when you go to an airport, there are separate lines for old America West and old US Airways flights. That’s a systems issue. Now with the combined systems, they’ll be able to merge those lines. All reservations and gate agents will be trained on the same system, so now anyone can help with any problems regardless of whether it’s on old America West or old US Airways. Oh, and the website should work better and offer more functionality for old US Airways flights now. I’m sure there are plenty more benefits that will become readily apparent once the change is made.

So, have patience if you’re flying this weekend and remember it’s not the airline employees’ faults if their systems aren’t working right. By the way, March 3 really is National Anthem Day. The US adopted the Star-Spangled Banner as the national anthem on March 3, 1931.

UPDATE Feb 23 10:00AM - It figures that I received more information just after writing this post. I now know that the systems will be down early morning March 4 from 2a to 4a Eastern Time. There will be 33 flights that need to operate during that time including some Vegas redeyes, so get there early if you’re going to be traveling on those flights. Check in from home to get your boarding pass ready to go. And if you’re flight leaves after 11p Pacific, try to get there before that cutoff so you can check bags and be at the gate before the systems go down.

It may not be cool to everyone (despite my title), but a handful of new long haul routes have been introduced lately, and I think it’s worth a post. Here they are in no particular order (ok, it’s actually the order the stories were opened in my browser’s tabs).

• This morning, Delta announced they’ll be starting nonstop flights from Atlanta to Lagos (Nigeria) on December 3 with 767-300 aircraft. I’m not so sure this one will actually fly though. Continental announced plans to fly there previously (lots of oil out there), but a fight between the US, British, and Nigerian governments (don’t ask) didn’t allow Continental to start. Will this be different?
• On Feb 20, Air France said they’d begin flying daily between Paris/de Gaulle and Seattle from June 11 on A330-200 aircraft. This one starts to make sense as the airline strengthens its SkyTeam alliance ties. Northwest has a strong presence in Seattle (partner KLM already flies nonstop to Amsterdam), and an additional frequent flier agreement with Alaska Airlines should help as well.
• Air China launched what I consider to be a very odd route - Beijing to Sao Paulo twice a week with a stop in Madrid on 767s. I have no doubt there’s a great deal of traffic between Sao Paulo and China, but why Madrid? Air China has the right to sell tickets between Madrid and Sao Paulo, so maybe they thought they could fill up their plane that way. You will find them consistently less expensive than Iberia, which also flies the route nonstop.
• Air New Zealand said this morning they’ll fly three 777s a week between Auckland and Vancouver. This will only operate during the southern summer - November 2 through March 28. They’ve said they want to start a new city each year, and this is an interesting one. I imagine if it does well they’ll extend it year round.

If you’ve flown on an Airbus narrowbody (A318/A319/A320/A321) or an A330, you’ve definitely heard the sound that makes you think something is horribly wrong, especially if you’re sitting near the wing. As you wait to take off, you look out the window expecting to see this:

But don’t worry, it’s not actually a ninja repeatedly kicking a seal in the head, nor is it a dog that got loose in the belly of the plane . . . it’s just the Power Transfer Unit (PTU).

First, here’s a little background. These aircraft each have two separate hydraulic systems. Those hydraulic systems power some pretty important things, like flight controls. Each of those systems is powered by an engine-driven pump. One is on the left side while the other is on the right.

When both pumps are working, there’s no need for the PTU, but when only one pump is working, the PTU enables a single pump to also power the hydraulics on the opposite side. It’s most common to hear this while taxiing, because you’ll often taxi with one engine to save fuel. When both engines are running, all sounds normal.

So next time you hear the noise, just remember it’s nothing bad. Now you can reassure your fellow passengers that all is well. (Cue “The More You Know” music.)

For more info, read this article.