Anyone catch the significance in American’s latest announcement last week? I suppose it’s not really “significant” in any way. It’s more of the same old crap. Yup, legacy carrier tries to fight a low cost carrier in a market that they have no business being in.

This time, American is going after Spirit down in South Florida. It’s no secret that Spirit has been growing their presence out of Ft Lauderdale to a bunch of Caribbean and Latin American destinations lately. American, of course, has the huge Latin presence out of Miami, and they’ve apparently decided to try to knock Spirit down a couple notches.

So now, American is starting up Ft Lauderdale to San Jose (Costa Rica), and Santo Domingo. They’ll also beef up the number of seats from the airport to San Juan and Port-au-Prince.

Raise your hand if you think there’s really enough demand for two carriers in the market? Nobody?

It’s just the same tired old story. American probably has planned it this way . . . . Big legacy carrier moves into a market where it really doesn’t need to be. They’ll fight for awhile, potentially get the little guy out, and then they’ll pull all service out. As usual, the consumer is worse off and has to go back to paying really high fares out of Miami with no other options. But hey, American is happy!

The problem is that it doesn’t seem to work that way as well as it used to. Now, American will just waste a lot of money trying to put the little guy out of business, not succeed, quietly pull out of the markets, and go on making different dumb, revenue negative decisions. Glad I’m not a shareholder.

You’ve seen the news. A “small, innocent” baby was forced off a flight for making too much noise. I’ve seen plenty of outrage in most articles and blogs, but I’ve got a different perspective.

This heroic flight attendant saved us from a deadly terrorist attack.

Oh, you think it couldn’t be true? The baby is only 19 months old? Come on. Those are excuses. This baby’s comments give us insight into the mind of a dangerous suicide bomber. What did he say? “Bye bye plane.” That’s right. He was ready to do his duty and destroy the flight for his cause. They may have only had moments left to live.

It’s a good thing this flight attendant caught this clue before the plane departed. I encourage the TSA to start profiling all babies under 2 years old immediately. There are millions of potential terrorists fitting this profile within our borders today. Clearly, the threat level needs to be raised to red and everyone must pay closer attention.

This flight attendant is a hero. Hopefully we can all follow her lead in protecting America from dangerous terrorists. If not, we may have another 9/11 on our hands.

First there was Southwest’s Ding!, then there was Ryanair’s Bing!, now there’s . . . American’s Dang!? Enough with the ridiculous punctuation, please!*!@#)&*%)!!!

Ok, so it’s not actually called Dang!, but according to Sky Talk, some people internally referred to it as just that. It’s actually called DealFinder. So guess what it does? Um, finds deals? Right!

But it’s not really much like Ding! at all. There’s actually more to it than that, and despite it’s slowness on my machine, I still like what they’re doing. Like Ding!, DealFinder sits in your system tray, usually at the bottom right hand corner of your Windows-based computer. You’ll see a little AA logo there. When you click it, you’ll see the application come up on your screen. It looks like this:

The main part of the application is the “saved searches,” which are nothing like Ding! and more like the Orbitz DealDetector. You pick routes that you want to fly and set a maximum price. It will alert you when you get below that level. As you can see, my quick trip to Hawai’i for under $500 isn’t looking likely, but the sub-$500 Christmas run to Indianapolis is available now.

The other, potentially more interesting piece of this application is the RSS reader they’ve built in. If you aren’t sure what RSS is, this quick summary from Wikipedia will help. I know RSS readers are gaining in popularity, but I’d guess that many people who book travel at aa.com don’t use them yet. That’s why this is a good idea.

First, they have feeds from American that offer deals and news from the airline. That can be helpful, of course. But you can also subscribe to your own RSS feeds in here. As you can see, I subscribed to the Cranky Flier (great blog, I hear) and it loaded my most recent posts on the left. Just below the saved searches, you can see a small window that has the text of that post for you to read.

Now, this isn’t a full-featured RSS reader. You can’t see pictures and it truncates long posts, so if you use Google, My Yahoo, or anyone else, this won’t replace it well. But if you don’t have a reader, this could be a good way to get quick news updates, sports scores, anything else you might want to catch at a glance.

This may have nothing to do with American Airlines, but that’s why it’s a good idea. If American can get you checking the application for your news and sports throughout the day, that’s more opportunity for them to get your attention and potentially get you thinking about taking a trip. That’s why I like it, because there are plenty of people who don’t have an RSS reader and might find this to be an interesting way to get started with one.

So the RSS reader is nifty, but what is going to draw people in? Low fares, of course. If my Hawaiian trip still shows the same fares I can find anywhere else, I’m more likely to use Orbitz DealDetector, because at least then I can check other airlines as well. But, if American starts telling you that they’ve found a low fare that you can only get through DealFinder, then it’s going to do very well.

Can the airline do that? I’d think that the GDS contracts might prevent them from posting fares there that they don’t post with the reservations systems, but there could be a loophole. If anyone knows more, please write a comment below.

A Note to Virgin America . . .

Yesterday was a huge day for you guys. You must be ecstatic to have received oral approval from the DOT to begin selling tickets.

So why aren’t you selling tickets RIGHT NOW?!?

All you say in your press release is that you plan “to begin service this August, with specific dates for tickets sales and first flights to be announced in the weeks ahead.”

August is NOT very far away. You’ve had years to plan this thing and now you get approval but you aren’t ready yet?!? What’s holding you up? Let’s get this show on the road.

When are you starting? What route are you flying next after JFK-SFO? The more time you have in advance of the launch next month to sell tickets, the better chance you’ll have of making money on those flights. I really don’t need to tell you this, do I? So, what’s the hold up?

Back to the story. Now, where were we again? Ah yes, Denver airport. Sitting and waiting and sitting and waiting. And yes, I was still hungover.

THE UGLY
July 8, 2007
Frontier #413 Lv Denver (DEN) 405p Arr Los Angeles (LAX) 525p
DEN: Gate A51, Runway 17L, Dept 21m Late
LAX: Gate 38, Runway 24R, Arr 48m Late
Aircraft: N808FR, Airbus A318, Fawn tail, 100% full
Flight Time: 2h9m

The flight before ours was at the gate about 30 minutes past departure time, so when it finally pulled out, our flight was able to pull in. This plane was the short and stubby looking A318. Maybe the low number of seats confused people into thinking they were on a private plane and there was no reason to hurry, but every passenger acted as if they were taking a Sunday stroll through the jet bridge. It took forever to get them off the plane. It was another 15 minutes after that before the plane was clean, by which time the scheduled departure time was rapidly approaching.

This is really the only complaint I have about Frontier. There was no urgency to board at all. They leisurely called rows up, the flight attendants didn’t help with bags, etc. You’d think they’d take a little more interest in pushing on time.

So, now past departure time, we got into the jet bridge and of course were backed up due to some passenger who probably couldn’t figure out why their 10 foot by 10 foot bag wouldn’t fit into the overhead bin. While I sat in there sweating, I kept hearing this voice repeating the same thing over and over again but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Sure enough, it was a girl equivalent of Rain Man. Seriously, she must have been autistic. I shrugged it off and just kept trudging toward the plane.

At this point, I thought it was going to be smooth sailing. I got to my seat and broke out the free tv card we were given on the flight out, ready to just sit there and enjoy some mindless entertainment on the way home. Bzzt. Wrong. Not gonna happen.

My tv decided it would be better to assume the identity of a black box instead of actually showing me anything. Great. So after activating my girlfriend’s tv, the flight attendant apologized and gave both cards back to me. A nice gesture, sure, but it wasn’t going to help at all.

At this point, my girlfriend blissfully fell into an HGTV-induced happiness, and I begrudgingly picked up a magazine and started reading. That’s when the Denver Babies Choir decided it would be a good time to practice their screaming sessions. And this was no small choir. We’re talking a lot of babies. This was not good.

As if that weren’t enough, remember the girl with autism? Yeah, she was only a couple rows behind. She kept yelling gibberish over and over but sometimes I could actually make out what she was saying. I heard her same something about “lots of bubbles” 20 times in a row and then something about “Christmas pequins” (piquants? penguins? what is it?!?!) later on.

At one point, after saying “Mrs. Robbins” for the 150th time in a row, I kid you not that a woman in between us actually yelled “broken record,” as if the girl was doing it on purpose. I really thought a fight was going to break out, and I didn’t relish the thought of being delayed once again just so the police could come arrest her. So when we pushed back, I considered it a small victory.

As we taxied, I could see the remains of a thunderstorm over the south and west parts of the airport. Fortunately, it was nothing but blue skies to the west, so it wouldn’t affect us. Oh wait, yes it did. They stopped all departures for some reason even though arrivals were proceeding as normal. After a 20 minute wait, we were off into the choppy Rocky Mountain air. I passed the time watching the cloud formations, reading a magazine and trying to ignore the noises penetrating the cabin which were mercifully muted by the roar of the engine.

Again, service was good and the flight passed relatively quickly . . . until we started descending. One of the members of the Denver Babies Choir must have had a stuffed up ear, because as soon as we started descending, he started screaming. And this was no normal baby scream. This was a piercing, painful cry of suffering so loud and awful that the idea of ripping my ears off my head somehow sounded pleasant.

Thirty minutes straight of screaming babies led to a nice, soft landing at LAX. Since we were in the exit row, I pondered the idea of pulling it right there and jumping out of the plane, but I changed my mind at the last minute. That was probably a good idea since I’m pretty sure jail is not a good place for me.

I figured a two minute taxi and we’d be back at the gate, but of course, I was wrong. We had to wait for what seemed like hours (probably 5 minutes) before they cleared us to cross the departure runway, and then we lumbered into the gate about 12 hours after we had first left Vail that morning. That couldn’t be the end of it, could it? Of course not.

It took them awhile to get the door open, so we just sat. The pilots decided to start shutting down, but they failed to turn off the power transfer unit. Airbus fliers know where this is going. As if the screaming babies, Christmas pequins, and blank tv screen weren’t enough, now we had the delightful sound of the PTU, something I liken to a ninja repeatedly kicking a seal in the head.

I can’t express in words how happy I was to get off that plane. The funny thing is that as miserable as the flight was, it wasn’t really Frontier’s fault (except for the tv technician, I suppose). I actually really enjoyed all my dealings with their people and wouldn’t hesitate to fly them again . . . as long as the Denver Babies Choir isn’t onboard.