Last time, the suspense was great. Who would win the China flight awards? It had all the drama of a good telenovela. (Um, ok, without the attractive people and infidelity.) This time around, however, it wasn’t nearly as much fun.

The announcements came out yesterday for 2008 and 2009 flights and they were mostly as expected. Let’s look back at my post from July 17 to see how I did with my guesses.

Conventional wisdom says Delta will get this year’s award with Atlanta-Shanghai flights. Next year, United is expected to get San Francisco-Guangzhou while the other spot, which can only be used to second tier airports in China, will likely remain unfilled.

I was right about those. Delta and United both got their flights for next year. My luck wasn’t quite as good on the 2009 awards.

If I had to put money down, I’d say Continental (Newark-Shanghai), United (LAX-Shanghai), and US Airways (Philadelphia-Beijing) pick up three slots for 2009 with Delta (Atlanta-Beijing) and American (Chicago/O’Hare-Beijing) fighting for the last one.

Yes, US Airways and Continental won their flights and so did American. But I missed on United getting LAX-Shanghai. Northwest actually snuck in there and won Detroit – Shanghai instead. Maybe the DOT was being sensitive to the fact that they kept giving United awards while Northwest walked away with nothing. I suppose it was about time they got one.

But they tried for Detroit – Beijing as well and didn’t get that one. You know what happened? A day later, China Southern announced they’d begin Detroit – Beijing flying in 2009 with a 787. Since they’re both SkyTeam members, I imagine this is a good opportunity to feed traffic to each other. I was surprised to see China Southern running out of Beijing though. They’ve generally focused on Guangzhou in the past.

So, now we have just about every airline flying to China that wants to be there, with the exception of MAXjet, who really didn’t have a shot this time around anyway. See, not nearly as much fun.

Enjoy the weekend, that is, unless you’re a Colorado Rockies fan. If you are, I hope you have a miserable one. Yes, I’m a Diamondbacks fan. Who could have guessed at the beginning of the season that this Rockies-Dbacks series would be such a big one.

Interesting things are brewing over at JFK. The FAA appears to finally be interested in taking a more proactive stance at solving delays. (Fingers crossed.) Since the problem is amplified during the summer, they’ve gone ahead and requested summer schedules from the airlines to be delivered by October 11 this year for the airport. Newark is on the list as well. This is a good step, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll take action to fix the problem. They may just watch it happen way in advance. (I hope not.)

We do see airlines starting to come public with their plans for next summer already. Delta came out with an ambitious new schedule that is supposed to reduce flights by 6% during the most congested hours. They’ll do that by shifting flights to other times. For example, flights to the closest parts of Europe, which I take to mean the British Isles, will leave during a later bank of flights after the rush. They’re also going to be flying bigger planes so that they push more passengers through the old crumbling walls of their terminals.

Of course, Delta isn’t actually reducing flights. No. Incredibly, they’re increasing them. I’m thinking they’ll need to start trying the new vertical and roof boarding procedures I’ve shown below.

Believe it or not, they are launching 14 new destinations next summer from JFK. There are only two flights to Europe (Edinburgh and, oddly, Malaga in Spain), but there are two cities in the Middle East (Tel Aviv and Amman) and five in Africa (Dakar in Senegal, Nairobi, Lagos, Cairo, and Cape Town). They’ll also head south to Panama City, Guatemala City, Port of Spain, San Jose (Costa Rica), and Liberia (Costa Rica).

How the heck are they doing this and reducing flights during peak times? Well, I haven’t seen the actual schedules, but these can depart at different times than the afternoon Europe flights. Africa and Middle Eastern flying takes longer, so the flights can leave earlier in the day from JFK. From Atlanta, for example, Delta’s flight to Dakar leaves at 355p, early enough to beat the peak. Still, this may just end up growing the peak hours. Cool destinations for sure, but it’s not what JFK needs right now. It’s also not what Delta’s decrepit JFK terminals need now either. They’re going to be pumping 20% more available seat miles out of that place. Anyone who flew threw there this summer care to comment? It’s going to be ugly.

Don’t think Delta is the only offender here. How about this article talking about BA’s plans. EU-US open skies has apparently encouraged them to start flying from the US to points in Europe beyond the UK. Next summer they’ll start at JFK, of course, with 2 to 3 new cities using 757s. If it works, they’ll only grow from there.

If the FAA doesn’t step in, I’d avoid New York next summer.

Spirit announced its new livery today, and I’ve got some early pics for you to see. I was definitely not a fan of the old livery (it looked better before they went from the purple to black). This one is better suited for the “ultra” low cost leisure carrier that they are, I’d say, but that is still a dizzying array of colors to take in. Thoughts?

In a time when parts of our air traffic control system can shut down for two hours without backup, you know it’s tempting for Congress to get involved, especially with the upcoming FAA reauthorization. Wait, the FAA reauthorization is still spinning in circles? So what could they be working on?

It’s been awhile since I’ve whipped out the Cranky Jackass, but Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) and Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.) have certainly earned it this week. While there are plenty of major problems facing the US Congress right now, these two have opted to launch a bid to pass the Family Friendly Flights Act.

This ridiculous piece of legislation is designed to force airlines that don’t make all programming family friendly (what does that mean, exactly?) to create sections on every airplane that would not have viewable movie screens. Why? To protect children from seeing images that are too graphic. Why the heck is Congress involved with this? Don’t you have better things to do?

You know what ends up happening here? A bunch of passengers suffer without inflight entertainment just because a couple of parents can’t prevent their kid from watching the movie. Give ‘em a blindfold or some baby Ambien (or something else that doesn’t exist just in fantasy land). Or better yet, just don’t fly on planes with overhead screens. This doesn’t impact flights with personal screens because you can turn those off yourself, so there are plenty of options for parents who really care about this.

On overseas flights, make sure you fly someone that has personal screens. For domestic flights? Fly Southwest – you won’t see a screen on any airplane. Or fly American’s MD80s – not a screen to be found. There are million different options if you really want to “protect” your children. But don’t rely on the government to step in and do something that will anger more people than it will help.

And as for you, Congressmen . . . get back to doing some real work, please. This is a waste of everyone’s time. Let’s hope this goes nowhere, kind of like most of Shuler’s passes in the NFL.

In another, “Why is the US so far behind?” moment, Air Canada announced last week that you can now go straight to the gate without a paper boarding pass. Just check in on your mobile phone and show the barcode on the screen to the gate agent for boarding. How cool.

The way it works is pretty simple. You go to the Air Canada mobile site on your phone and check in for your flight just like you would online. They then send you two SMS messages – one with your flight info and another with a link to your boarding pass. Click the link and it will open the image of a barcode in your mobile browser. You can use that to get through security. Then the gate agent will scan it and you can board the plane without a single piece of paper.

Of course, there are restrictions on where you can use this. You may not be surprised to find out that you can’t use this on US flights. Nope. Only flights within Canada or flights departing from Canada and going to any other country as long as it isn’t the US. I’m sure there’s some silly TSA restriction preventing this from happening, and that’s unfortunate. I can’t see why this is any different than a regular boarding pass except that this version saves trees.

Now, Air Canada isn’t the first to do this, but I believe they’re doing it best right now. A company called Mobiqa (image at left) has something similar that will be used by Nok Air of Thailand and Spanair of Spain. The way Mobiqa works is a bit different. A big negative is that you have to check in online. You can’t use your phone. But once you’re checked in, they send you an MMS message with the boarding pass. That’s easier than having to click on a link, but not being able to check in using the phone is a big downfall. This is also the way WestJet does it. (Updated 9/25 @ 1019a)

The good news for me is that I’m flying Air Canada in a couple weeks from Canada to Europe, so I am hoping I’ll be able to try this out. I’ll report back and let you know how it goes.