Last week I wrote about SAS’ two accidents involving landing gear problems on the Q400. This story keeps getting stranger.

On Thursday, Horizon Air announced that they had completed inspections of all their Q400s and everything would be back to normal Tuesday, Sep 24. They took ads out in local papers reassuring customers that inspections were completed, but they made no mention of finding anything wrong.

Meanwhile, a report came out this morning saying that SAS found corrosion of the landing gear on 25 of the 27 planes inspected. They were fixing the gear and then they would put everything back into service.

As if that wasn’t enough, there was yet another incident this weekend. Augsburg Airways, which flies regional flights for Lufthansa, had a Q400 land with its nosegear up at Munich over the weekend. The SAS incidents both involved the main gear, but this still has to have many people thinking about the connection, not to mention how this relates to the ANA nosegear problems from March.

I wish I had more answers than questions at this point, but I don’t. What the heck is going on here? Why is it that Horizon would seemingly find no problems (unless they just aren’t telling us) yet SAS would find some on almost every plane? It’s not like they operate in very different climates. I’d argue that the environment is about the same for both operators. Anyone else have any theories?

Over the last couple years, Midwest has been quietly changing its model to the point where they’re becoming just like every other airline. Sadly, I’d say the transformation is now almost complete.

Back in the day, Midwest was head and shoulders above the rest. While most airlines served meals in coach, Midwest served things like lobster on china. As airlines began to pack more seats on planes, Midwest stayed strong with wider, more comfortable seats throughout. Service was excellent and yes, it was finished off with a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie. Today, the cookie and the good service are about all that’s left.

Meals are now buy-on-board and the china is long gone. Even the seats, the biggest differentiator have started to disappear. A couple years ago, Midwest decided to have two levels of service. Their 717s would continue to have “Signature” service with the nice wide and cushy seats. But on longer routes to leisure destinations, they started flying MD80s in “Saver” service, configured just like every other airline with a bit more legroom.

Earlier this year, they decided to standardize the fleets to have a little bit of both onboard. Yeah, that made me think that Saver = Coach and Signature = First Class, but that’s not exactly the case. Yesterday, they put out a press release trumpeting that their MD80s now all have Signature seating on board. Somehow I doubt we’ll see the same release when they put a bunch of Saver seats on the 717s by the middle of next year.

If you’re on an MD80, you’ll have the option of paying $60 extra per segment just to sit in the nice seats. Keep in mind, all you get to do is sit in those seats. Like Spirit, there is no difference in service when you’re up there. It’s just a bigger seat. And though I haven’t seen it confirmed in print, it appears that the seats will also have the same seat pitch as the ones in back as well. Right now, the MD80s in all-Saver configuration have either 143 or 147 seats an 33 inch pitch. The new configuration will see 12 in Signature and either 127 or 131 in Saver. Each of the three rows in Signature will have 4 seats instead of five, so I understand losing 3 seats here, but I’m not sure where the fourth has gone. Either way, seat pitch shouldn’t change.

Oh, and if you want to sit in those seats, you can only buy them at the time of check-in or at the gate itself. You can’t do it in advance. So, if you really want those seats, check-in early or you might be stuck in the back.

With Northwest taking a 47% stake in the airline recently, we should be happy the product hasn’t started to get even worse than this.

Southwest has spent the last year trying to decide whether to keep open seating (take any seat when you board) or switch to assigned seating (seat number given to you in advance) like every other airline. Today, they made their decision. What is it?

Bingo seating

Ok, so nobody is calling it Bingo seating yet, but I’m hoping the name catches on. They’ve tried a million different ways to explain how it works, but I think the most effective is their Boarding School site. (That’s also where I took the picture from at left.) Let me try to give a brief summary.

Instead of checking in and getting an A, B, or C pass, you’ll actually get a letter and number combo. If you’re the first person to check in, you’ll get A1 (mmm, steak sauce). If you’re the 20th, you’ll get A20. The A group goes all the way up to 60, so if you’re the 61st person to check in, you get B61 (Bingo!). B goes up to 120, so then if you’re a real slacker, you’ll get C121 all the way on up. Almost all of Southwest’s planes seat 137 so the worst you can get is C137. There are 25 planes that have only 122 seats, so there will end up being only 2 lonely people in the C group on those.

I think images really can help you understand how things work when you get to the gate. Take a look at that drawing up top as well as the photo at right that was taken at San Antonio. See, they’ve been testing the idea there and my friend, Towers and Tarmacs blogger Benet Wilson, took this shot when she flew threw.

First, people with disabilities and unaccompanied minors board. While this happens, they call the A group (all 60 of them) to hop up and stand by the sign that has their number. As you can see, it’s divided into groups of 5 people, so you don’t need to get in line until they call you. When everyone in the A group is standing, they open the doors and everyone walks straight down the jet bridge on to the plane, free to take any seat they’d like, as long as they give it back after the flight.

Then, while the B group is getting their act together, families with small children get to board. Yup, that’s right. All those families that jump to the front of the line pretending they need extra time when they really have a 12 year old son who is faster than they are . . . don’t get on first anymore. Oh, you can always just check in early to get on early, but if you don’t and you’re a family, you’ll hop on after #60. Unless there are a lot of through passengers sitting on the plane from a previous flight, there will still be plenty of open rows for families to sit together at that point. Not sure how they’ll handle it if there are a lot of people onboard already. That might get ugly.

Once B gets on, the C stragglers get up and grab the remaining middle seats next to the two large people in the last row. Sucks to be them, but if you get a C boarding pass, you just don’t care enough anyway.

If this explanation didn’t work for you, try this link or the Southwest blog post, both of which give you other ways to understand what they’re doing.

So what do I think? I like it a lot.

The biggest issue with Southwest right now isn’t open seating. It’s the cattle car mentality of standing in line for an hour before your flight. I mean, remember when you could only check in at the gate? People would line up well over an hour before the flight to get their plastic boarding card. Then they’d go wait in line for another hour at the gate. Not worth it. This system basically takes the lines out of the equation because there are only 4 other people in your individual group. You don’t gain anything by standing there.

Now I’m not sure how they can enforce this – it’s just going to be the honor system I suppose. But peer pressure will probably play a part as well. Not even back cutsies for your friends will happen here. The angry mob behind won’t allow it. And according to Southwest’s tests in San Antonio, they say this actually saves them a minute or two over the current system. Fantastic.

The test that happened in San Antonio is now permanent. You’ll never see the old boarding method there again. But the rest of the system won’t see it happen until early November. I assume that’s how long it’ll take to get all those line placeholders constructed . . . and the bingo cards.

Southwest did leave the door open for further enhancements down the road. Lots of speculation is out there about what that means. It could be a “pay for A” type of model where a small fee gets you to the front of the line. But one thing is clear – there won’t be any assigned seating for a long time.

Lots of big news this week. At 9a PT today, Southwest will announce what changes (if any) they’ll be making to their boarding process. I’ll write about that tomorrow. But for today, let’s focus on the 787, and the new claims that it is going to be unsafe.

Last night, Dan Rather had a special report on the safety of the 787. (Believe it or not, he’s still on TV. You just have to try hard to find him on HDNet.) The focus? A former Boeing employee is claiming that the composite materials being used on the plane aren’t as safe as the metal used on other planes. You can read a good summary of the interview in this Seattle Post-Intelligencer article. This is one that will inevitably get blown up to increase the scare factor, so let’s start with the facts here.

As I mentioned, all of the allegations come from the fact that the airplane is made from composites instead of metal. This is the first time the fuselage of an aircraft has been made from composites, but parts as large as the tail have been made of composites before. And the military has planes made from composites as well. Still, we don’t know nearly as much about composites as we do about metals, so there are questions to be answered. According to the former employee making these claims, here are the potential issues:

• In an accident, the composite fuselage will shatter into a bunch of tiny pieces instead of staying together like metal. This will prevent people from being protected from fire for a few minutes as they are with metals, and it may mean they can’t get out in time to survive.
• In an accident, the composites will create toxic fumes when they burn so people will die before they can escape to find fresh air.
• The mesh used to conduct away lightning is “too light and vulnerable to hail damage,” so strikes could bring down the plane.
• Lastly, there was just an overarching concern about composites being damaged in general. You can’t always detect composite damage with the naked eye so other tools need to be used, like ultrasound, to detect problems and those machines may not be readily available.

This employee was apparently “fired last year under disputed circumstances.” You can read the details in the article, but could it mean he’s just a disgruntled employee? Sure it could, but I don’t think that matters. It’s still a good special, (except for the reappearance of the perennially-wrongMary Schiavo. Ugh.) because this sort of questioning can only help in the long run.

The FAA is going to require that this plane meet the same standards of survivability that metal aircraft face, so we might as well get all of these issues out in the open before something bad happens. If this is a disgruntled employee and they aren’t really issues, that’s great. Tests will show that his concerns are unfounded and we can move on. If not, well, then Boeing is going to have to come up with some solutions here.

The thing I worry about most is that damage occurs to composites that can’t be seen with the naked eye. A lot of training and expensive equipment will be required for people to be able to identify that damage, and we must be really vigilant until we know more about how composites behave over long periods of time. Whenever you do something new like this, there’s always a learning curve, and we need to do whatever we can to make sure that learning curve doesn’t kill people.

I can’t help but think back to the introduction of the Comet, the first production jet aircraft, more than 50 years ago. That plane suffered multiple catastrophic failures in flight due to what was eventually determined to be metal fatigue. At the time, people just didn’t know the effect of pressurization on metal as well as they do now. The design of the windows left weak spots in the corners that ended up buckling in flight. They figured it out, but a lot of lives were lost.

I’m not suggesting that we’re going to see the same thing with the 787. I think it just underscores the idea that extreme testing that doesn’t end with the entry into service must be mandatory for an aircraft made differently than in the past. That’s why Boeing’s decision to have a truncated testing schedule in order to deliver the 787 on time seems highly suspicious to me. In a way, I really hope we have delays so that there is no rush get the airplane out there. Let’s make sure it’s safe.

If you’d like to watch the Dan Rather special, tune in to HDNet (if you can find it) over the next few days. It’s showing on “Dan Rather Reports.” For times, click here.

I know, I know. I promised a review of Virgin America’s website over a month ago, and I’m just now getting around to it. Sorry about that. But, better late than never . . . .

What do I think? Overall, the site is pretty good, but of course it’s not perfect. Today I’m focusing on the booking process. Let’s look at the home page first.

Just like Southwest originally did on their redesign, Virgin America does not make the reservation search accessible without clicking to open the window. Southwest ended up caving and defaulting to showing the search box, so I wonder if Virgin America will come to the same conclusion. The fewer clicks it takes to sell a ticket, the better.

After playing around for just a few seconds, it’s obvious that this site is Flash and Javascript-heavy, and that makes me nervous. Usually that means that someone thought it needed to be pretty without seriously considering functionality. In this case, the functionality is there, but there are some quirks.

The basic search is just as it should be . . . basic. I was a little annoyed to see that multi-city was limited to two segments (not very helpful). Everything else looks like any other search box except that they don’t give you a choice of class of service. That’s a good move. You can see why when you search for flights.

They don’t let you pick your class of service because they display both First and Coach prices on the next page. Airlines always complain that air travel is a commodity and all people buy on is price and schedule. I’m convinced that a lot of that is because that’s exactly how the airlines sell their product (except for an increasing number of exceptions that have followed Air Canada’s lead). Virgin America is at least making a small attempt at upselling.

Strangely, the First class upgrade is their only real attempt at merchandising on the website. They do really like that one though, because if you choose coach, they try to upsell you again on the seat map. And when you get to the seat map, please make sure you choose your seats yourself. When I tried to let them choose my seats for me, it kept kicking me back to the home page where I had to start over. Grrrrr.

So, overall, the site is good. I’m surprised you can’t buy a meal beforehand or pay for excess baggage fees, but I’m sure they’ll add it over time. In the end, they give you a lot of information on the flight results page, and that’s the key to helping customers make the right decision.