The airplane tray table . . . so small, so uneven, so . . . so upright and locked before landing. Why do they have to mess with a good thing?

First it was advertising on the tray table. I wasn’t a big fan of the half-naked dude advertising clothes at Dillard’s, but the Verizon ad wasn’t too horribly offensive. Now they’ve moved one step further and started selling space to Business Week. US Airways will be happily displaying the content soon.

So what is this content exactly? Well, it will be “written by some of BusinessWeek’s most popular columnists, including former GE CEO Jack Welch and his wife Suzy; the world’s most renowned wine critic, Robert M. Parker; and CNBC’s Closing Bell anchor Maria Bartiromo.”

Why do you do this to me?

I have a problem . . . if something in my line of sight can be read, I’ll read it. And since aisle, middle, and window seats will have different columns, I’ll read those too. And then, when I’m trying to relax, I’ll end up reading them again. I just can’t stop reading if something is in front of me, and that’s going to be really annoying. If I really wanted to read Business Week, I’d get a copy myself.

I understand the appeal to the advertisers. It’s a captive audience that now won’t even have to open a magazine to see the content. That’s a strong selling point, but not for the guy stuck on the plane. Think they’ll include some advertorials on there as well?

And what’s next? Digital media that keeps changing every few minutes? Maybe my tray table will start talking to me? Hmm, I’ll have to remember to keep my knives off the table . . . who knows what it’ll be capable of soon.

Speaking of Eero Saarinen-designed terminals . . . let’s check in on Washington/Dulles. When was I speaking about Sarrinen terminals, you ask? Well, both JFK’s terminal 5 (from yesterday’s post) and the main terminal at Dulles were designed by Saarinen. Unfortunately, he died in 1961, a year before both structures opened to passengers.

Had Saarinen been around long enough to actually try flying out of Dulles, he would probably have quickly learned what a painful place it can be. Why is it so painful?

The mobile lounge.

Back in the day, the idea was an interesting one. You would check in for your flight and then wait to have a mobile lounge take you directly to your plane. Unfortunately, it’s not as idyllic as it sounds. The mobile lounges create a lot of ground traffic, and if there was one lounge per plane, it would be like rush hour gridlock on the beltway. So, back in the mid-1980’s, they built the first of the “temporary” midfield concourses. More than 20 years later, that temporary building is still there.

Now, you hop on a mobile lounge and wait for what seems like an eternity (but is probably only 2 minutes). Finally, they drive you over to the midfield concourse and then you hop off to find your gate, which could be quite a ways away. Fortunately, the death of the mobile lounge is coming in 2009 with the opening of the AeroTrain.

They’ve been working on a big Dulles enhancement program in recent years, and it’s a welcome undertaking. If you’d like to read about everything they’re doing/have done, click here.

The most important enhancements that have yet to be finished are:

• A new runway to increase capacity
• A new, permanent midfield Concourse C/D
• The AeroTrain

The train will take you from the main terminal to three location at first: Concourse A, Concourse B, and the future home of Concourse C. If this doesn’t make sense, check out this map.

You can see that it’s all set up nicely, except for Concourse C/D. That temporary concourse really is going to go away (though I can’t find a projected date), and when it does the AeroTrain will stop right underneath the nice new concourse. Until that time, there will still be a walk from the stop. As if C/D could get any worse.

Either way, it’s better than the mobile lounge. No more waiting for traffic to cross, no strange detours around obstacles. Just an easy train that goes back and forth with ease.

So, let’s begin the 2 year countdown until the death of the mobile lounge . . . a great idea that in practice was absolutely terrible.

JFK, originally uploaded by maxpower33.

I spend so much of my airport posts focused on LAX that I thought it would be nice to check in on the east coast and see what’s new. In this post, I’ll check in on the new JetBlue terminal at JFK.

Anyone who has flown JetBlue into New York/JFK knows that it’s not easy. Sure the terminal has wi-fi and good food, but it is just about maxed out with flights and travelers.

JetBlue anticipated this long ago and they’ve had a new terminal in the works. It’s quite convenient that right next door to their terminal 6 is the long vacant terminal 5. You’ve seen pictures of terminal 5. It’s an architectural icon, the former home of TWA at JFK. Well, JetBlue has bulldozed everything behind the main structure and built their own terminal., as you can see above.

The terminal structure appears to be mostly complete, well in advance of it’s scheduled opening next year. It will give the airline some much-needed space to stretch out and most importantly it will make life easier for travelers.

Ah, Memorial Day. The start of summer and the start of airline delay season. Is there anything worse than getting stuck in a thunderstorm in Chicago and not being able to do anything except sit on terminal hold and hope for some agent in India to pick up the phone before you get to the front of the airport line? Fortunately, the mobile phone is the next frontier when it comes to travel, and there are some pretty helpful applications out there right now that can help you out this summer.

Find On Time Status

This is probably the most useful thing you can find on your phone. If you need to pick someone up or you just want to know their flight status, your only option used to be to call the airline if you weren’t near a computer. Now there are plenty of places you can go using your cell phone.

If you think about it when you’re at home, you can go to some airlines’ websites and sign up for flight alerts. American is one that does that. But this doesn’t work for all airlines. You can sign up for alerts for all airlines from FlightAware in advance, but that also requires forethought.

Another option is to use one of several SMS services. Send a text message with the airline and flight number and you’ll get an instant text message back with flight information. You can text Google at, um, Google (466453) (at left) or you can text 4INFO at, um, 4INFO (44636). Both are free, but I like 4INFO because it’s more flexible. For example, with 4INFO you can send a message that says “UA LAX ORD” and it will give you a full list of the flights operating that day. With Google, you need to know the flight number.

One quick note. Only the airline notification systems show gate to gate times. The rest of these will tell you when the plane leaves the departure runway and lands on the arrival one. So you’ll need to build in some extra padding if you’re picking someone up. Also, this information is only available for travel in the US, so international times aren’t very reliable, if they’re available at all.


Security Wait Times

It’s probably not well known that you can get projected security wait times on the TSA website. Now you can also get it on your cell phone. Text 4INFO with “wait” and the airport code and you’ll get the most recent estimated wait time for each terminal using history from the last month (at right). If your flight is at 7p, don’t send a text message at noon. You’ll get wait times for noon, and that won’t help.

FAA Airport Delays

I’m starting to sound like a commercial for 4INFO here, but I promise this is the last one. On the FAA website, you can search for delays by airport. This is especially helpful when the weather is bad or if you’re flying to O’Hare. Either way, there will be a lot of delays and you can get a heads up. You can also get this info by sending a text message to 4INFO saying “delay” and then the airport code (at right).

Book a Flight

Booking a flight is about as advanced as you can get using a cell phone, and for that reason it isn’t very popular in the US yet. I believe US Airways is the first US-based airline to announce it will offer mobile booking in the near future. You can go to usairways.com sometime soon and book yourself a trip. This is probably most helpful when you miss your connecting flight or the flight you’re on is canceled. You can just whip out your phone and beat everyone else to those few empty seats on the next flight. I’m guessing you’ll have to have a stored profile including a credit card on the site so that you can book quick and easily.

That brings me to the next cool thing - TripSync. This service lets you book travel in a variety of different ways including through your Microsoft Office calendar. It’s primarily for business travelers, but I signed up on my own so it seems anyone can use it. They’ve just introduced a mobile application so once you’re account is all set up, you can book while you’re on the road. Best of all, there is no fee, unlike most online travel agents.

As you can see at left, the interface looks pretty good on a PDA-sized screen. But when I tried to pull it up on my basic phone, it was definitely not so pretty. Still, it can get the job done and that’s what is most important.

So, happy summer travel season to everyone. I’ll be back on Tuesday after the long weekend.

Update 5/25 @ 1130a: Looks like Northwest actually now has mobile booking as well, beating US Airways to the punch.

In case you were wondering, no, I am not above using a Supertramp song title in my subject line to lure readers. (Would that really lure anyone?) Anyway . . .

The FAA came out with a groundbreaking program yesterday that will help speed up summer travel. In a nutshell, when there’s bad weather around, those flights that won’t be going through the bad weather won’t be delayed. Um, did I say groundbreaking? I may have to take that one back. How was this NOT happening before?!

Here’s a little more detail. Let’s say you’re in Chicago and a line of storms stands between you and your destination in Las Vegas. In the past, you would have had a ground delay program and you would have been stuck until cleared. Now, they’re saying that if you’re willing to load up on fuel, you can fly around the storms and then you won’t have a delay. Again, common sense, right?

Last year they did this for 7 northeast airports, but this year they’ll expand to 18 total airports including some in the Midwest. So is this one of the first flights to take advantage of the new policy? Thanks to FlightAware, you can see it went way south to get around the weather. (This shot shows the weather after it had moved further east.)

I don’t know. It seems like I’ve done this many times in the past. What is so different here?

The rollout of the first 787 is only 46 days away, and I can’t wait. Really, what I’m excited about is flying on one, but the rollout obviously has to come first. As we get closer to seeing the plane for the first time, I keep learning more about why this plane is so cool.

That latest? The vertical gust suppression system.

Oh yeah, it sounds fancy. Actually, it IS fancy. It’s a system that actually reduces the turbulence you’ll feel while in flight. James Wallace over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had the opportunity to ride in a simulator once with and once without the system activated. You can find his report online here. Here’s a brief snippet to pique your interest.

Mike Sinnett, chief project engineer for 787 systems, said Boeing can’t reveal all the details about how the vertical gust suppression system works. It involves the plane’s entire “air data package,” he said. That includes sensors embedded in the composite skin of the Dreamliner that will detect tiny changes in pressure caused by wind gusts. The jet’s flight-control system automatically will make adjustments to smooth out the ride before the plane gets bounced around.

Boeing’s 777 has a gust-suppression system that reduces side-to-side motion, but it does not dampen the up-and-down motion of the plane during turbulence. The 787 system will dampen these motions by as much as 60 percent to 70 percent.

So cool.

Well, it took them 15 days, but I finally received the following email from Delta yesterday:

Hi Brett,

We think the idea you sent us was excellent. In fact, it’s being featured along with other member ideas at delta.com/change this week. Be sure to check it out, and thanks for sharing.

We’re really looking forward to your participation in our new online community forum launching mid-summer of this year.

Cheers,

Rick
delta.com/change

Yes, I got a response from Delta about the suggestion I submitted to their new change site. See my previous post for some background. Fifteen days is hardly a respectable turnaround time, but I guess it’s better than nothing.

I’m not sure if this means that they’re actually planning on rotating comments in and out each week, but at least for now, my name is up in lights. I’d post a link, but that’s not possible with their current setup, so instead I’ll leave you with this screen shot.

American announced yesterday that they’ll being offering a hybrid price/schedule search on the website that looks quite similar to what we’ve already seen at Southwest, Air Canada, Alaska, and Hawaiian. Though it’s not live yet (and there is no announced date), they’ve put up a demo on the website that shows what it will look like.

This is the first true legacy carrier in the US to start displaying fares in categories. Southwest has done this for as long as I can remember, but they’ve never differentiated the actual product received by people who buy in different categories.

Air Canada was really the first to begin “productizing” their fares. In other words, you receive a different onboard product, different number of miles, and different levels of fees, etc. depending upon what type of fare you buy. American hasn’t announced they’ll be moving to this type of model, but I have to think that it’s likely the main driver for an enhancement like this.

That’s a good thing for everyone involved, and it’s why I’ve given them a gold star for the effort. It’s sort of a gold star-in-waiting so we can see what they actually do with this technology, but I have high hopes.

Why is this a good thing? As airline continue to feel downward pricing pressure (look at how much a flight cost 20 years ago, you’ll be surprised how much it was), they’ve had to adapt to charging for every little additional thing. Most people don’t like this, but then again, most people aren’t willing to pay more in their base fare either.

The problem is that the airlines don’t have the ability to really upsell you, so even if you would pay more, you aren’t given the option. For example, let’s say American’s lowest fare class has no frequent flier miles, no meal, and a $100 change fee. The next fare class up may cost $50 more but it includes miles, a meal, and a $50 change fee. Is it worth it? To some, it might be. In the current set up, there’s no way for American to try to push that option to the customer. This new functionality allows them to do that.

This gives the airline an opportunity to earn more money at the time of sale instead of nickel-and-diming throughout the travel experience, and it gives the customer more options when they’re purchasing flights. Again, this hasn’t actually happened for American yet, but the new booking interface is the first and most crucial step in making it a reality.

Southwest just decided to start participating in the Galileo Global Distribution System (GDS), and the media is running around like it’s the biggest news in the history of mankind.

• Travel Weekly (subscription only) says it’s “a sea-change for Southwest”
• The Star-Telegram says that this move, along with a couple others, marks a “retooling” for the airline.
• Ebert and Roeper gave the move “Two thumbs up,” or not . . .

The problem is that this isn’t as big of a deal as people are making it out to be.

Right now, if you, Joe Customer, want to book a flight on Southwest, you have to go directly to Southwest or you can go to a travel agent. This will not be changing. If you go to a travel agent, they either have to make the booking directly with Southwest or they can use the Sabre GDS, which they’ve participated in for many years.

Now, travel agents that use the Galileo GDS will also be able to book with Southwest without having to go direct, but they’ll have to pay for the privilege. This agreement is a bit more robust than Sabre’s in that it will eventually have real-time availability and fares, but that does absolutely nothing for you as a passenger.

You still can’t book on any website other than Southwest’s. Even if Galileo powers an online travel agent (eg Orbitz, Expedia, etc.), Southwest won’t let the agent sell their fares online. So the only people who have access to this will be travel agents and corporate travel managers.

And that’s exactly why Southwest is doing this. They’re trying to be more friendly to the corporate market by letting them search fares and availability and book directly in their own system, even if they will be charging them extra to do so. It’s one of many efforts they’re making to be more business-friendly, including a far more exciting development that they hope to have onboard wi-fi by early next year (happy, happy, joy, joy).

So unless you’re a corporate travel manager or a travel agent, there’s nothing to get excited about here.  Even if you’re a corporate travel manager, it may still be worth it to book directly with Southwest to avoid the additional cost of booking through Galileo.

After an epic battle, Virgin America (IATA code: VX, seriously) has finally received approval from the DOT to start flying.

They jumped through a million hoops, and now they’ve finally finished this part of the process. If you’d like to read the 12 page ruling, go here (PDF).

In the end, CEO Fred Reid was forced to leave, but he’s received a stay of execution. He can stay up to 6 months after launch. According to a friend who flew through SFO last week, the AirTrain at the airport says that Virgin America starts service on August 3. They haven’t said anything about it yet, but that sounds plausible.

I wish I could say that the hardest part is over for these guys, but really it’s just beginning. They’re not exactly starting on less traveled routes (SFO to JFK), and the competition is going to be fierce. I do wish them luck, and hopefully I’ll get to try them out sometime once they start flying to LAX.