AirTran’s long-awaited assault on Milwaukee is now in full force. Just this week, they announced twice daily flights to LAX and Boston as well as once daily flights to Seattle, San Diego, and San Francisco. Lastly, they’ll add a second daily nonstop to Vegas. How nice of them to announce this just as the Northwest/TPG acquisition of Midwest gets approved. These new flights all start in May. For more details, read the press release.

Now the fun begins. After AirTran was spurned by Midwest in favor of a Northwest/TPG combo, everyone was waiting for them to enter the market on their own. They’ve slowly built up service there, but this will be the biggest increase yet.

Will Midwest fight back? Will newfound-uncle Northwest step in to fight for them? Does AirTran have any chance of making this work? I’d say it’s definitely unclear, but you know there’s some response in the making.

What we do know is that this will mean looooow fares for Milwaukee until it all gets sorted out. If you live in Northern Illinois (or Eastern Iowa, as I often like to call my friend’s place in McHenry), you might want to look north for some good deals. Enjoy it while you can.

JetBlue lovers rejoice! In addition to their existing service, you can now fly JetBlue to hundreds of new destinations all across the US. When you get to the airport, it may look like you’re flying Continental on the outside, but it’ll be all JetBlue on the inside. Um, ok not really. What the heck am I talking about?

Continental announced yesterday that they’d begin equipping their domestic fleet with the same live television that JetBlue has. In addition, they’re going to roll out the somewhat-lame-but-still-useful-for-somebody Yahoo/Blackberry Email/IM service that JetBlue is testing on one aircraft right now. Ok, maybe this isn’t JetBlue, but it’s pretty close, and in some ways even better, as you can see below.

You won’t have JetBlue legroom, and you will have to pay $6 to watch TV (free in First Class), but you will get the best onboard product of any network carrier in the US. And yes, Continental will still serve you a meal on the long hauls. Take that, JetBlue.

Of course, this move isn’t squarely aimed at JetBlue, even though they do have a great deal of overlap in the New York area. At least, JetBlue must not think this is a direct shot at them, because they own the company that’s selling the technology to Continental. They must think that Continental is more focused on continuing in their role as the undisputed leader among network carriers in terms of overall experience. Continental usually wins awards for being the best (though we know how much I hate vague awards like that), and this should only help cement their standing.

The details of this are pretty simple. Unlike Delta, which is only outfitting some of each aircraft type with their live television system, Continental will put it on all next generation 737s (-700, -800, -900) and on the 757-300s. Since the 757-200s are now part of the international fleet, they will not have this product and neither will the 777 and 767 aircraft. That’s good, because this only works over land, so it would be a useless box over water. I believe the overwater fleet is getting audio/video on demand at some point.

Besides the Express fleet, the only ones left out are the 737-300s and -500s. To be fair, that’s a pretty big chunk of the fleet. Airfleets.net says that they have 108 that won’t be outfitted with the new system and 170 that will. Of course, the old generation 737s are used primarily on shorter routes while the next generation ones go on the longer runs, so that makes sense. The good news is that you will be able to look at your aircraft type when you book, and barring a substitution, you’ll know if you get it or not. At least, that’ll be the case by next January. Until then, it’ll be luck of the draw as they work to outfit the entire fleet.Actually, you won’t have to worry about it until a year from now when they start installation.

I assume that the email/IM capabilities will be installed at the same time. It’s unfortunate that they haven’t decided to go with a full internet solution, but that’s what happens when you go with LiveTV. At least it’ll be free.

Really, the worst part of this whole announcement is that Continental doesn’t fly to very many places from LA, so we don’t get much of a chance to try them often. This definitely widens Continental’s lead at the top of the standings from a customer point of view. Nice work.

How many of you knew that JetBlue didn’t have a single refundable fare until today? I know, it seems surprising. You’d think that at least their full fares would be refundable, but they weren’t. Now they are.

Today’s announcement shows that JetBlue is trying harder to appeal to business travelers in order to increase revenues. Apparently, they don’t want Southwest to be the only one getting in on this demographic.

So let’s say I’m a business traveler. I live in Long Beach and I now have an urgent meeting in New York that requires I fly out tomorrow morning and return Thursday night. I go to JetBlue.com and I’m instantly annoyed that you have to choose if you want to see refundable fares or just the lowest fare. I wish they could show me both, but I’ll just do two queries to see the difference.

The lowest available fare is $717.50. The refundable fare is $1,117.50. Since this is a last minute trip and I know it’s going to happen, I’m probably not going to bother buying the refundable fare. But what if I think I’m going to have to take the same exact trip two weeks later but I’m not sure?

The lowest available fare is $397.50. The refundable fare is $1,117.50. Considering the change fee is $50 ($40 if you book online) plus the difference in fare, I’m probably still going to go with the non-refundable one assuming I’ll be able to use the credit in the future.

In other words, these top fares probably have limited appeal to most people, but that’s not to say they’re a bad idea. JetBlue might as well offer a refundable fare for those people who really like the flexibility and find that it’s worth it even at high prices. It can’t hurt revenue - it can only help.

If these end up becoming popular, JetBlue is going to need to be careful. Remember, they don’t overbook right now. Refundable fares tend to breed higher no-show rates (since there’s no penalty), so there will be pressure to starting overbooking.

But, I think it’s unlikely that we’ll see that happen, especially since these shouldn’t be huge sellers. It’s just another option for the business traveler that JetBlue can and should be offering, especially since they can make more money with it.

It was a short 22 years ago today that the space shuttle Challenger exploded during its ascent, and the word “o-ring” entered our everyday vocabulary. As we all know, all seven astronauts died. Here is a shot of the bird during happier days.

I was in third grade at the time, and I remember being outside during recess when my friend came running out with the news. None of us believed him. Our logic said that if we could always hear the shuttle when it landed (at least, we could hear the sonic booms), then we certainly would have heard the shuttle explode. I suppose we forgot that it launched in Florida and NOT California.

When we returned to the classroom, our teacher sat us all down and explained what had happened, or at least what she knew. Then we watched it on television. Many of us were Young Astronauts, and we were all devastated. There are only a handful of national tragedies that make such an impression that you remember them clearly for as long as you live. This was the first to impact me in that way.

So, let’s all remember the crew of STS-51L. Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judith Resnik all lost their lives on January 28, 1986.

Poor ExpressJet. They’ve been trying to make their “branded operations” work, but they seem to be running out of time. As the months pass and they continue to lose money on it, shareholders will become more restless. The latest? Hayman Capital Master Fund.

Hayman owns just over 6% of the airline and they aren’t happy with the branded flying. They sent a letter to ExpressJet Chairman and CEO Jim Ream saying that they want the branded flying to immediately stop and they want an expanded, more stable relationship to be established with Continental. They also want the airline to look at potential buyers. Well, this is just some of the fun you get when you’re a public company. There’s not nearly as much tolerance for new ventures that don’t pay out quickly, and that’s too bad.

Why do I say it’s too bad? It looks like there might be some hope for this service in some areas. Just recently, the October T100 government data was released and that’s the first month ExpressJet was forced to release its information for their branded flying routes. You may remember they were fighting this for awhile, but they’ve apparently officially lost the fight, because we can now take a peak.

What we’ll take a look at here is seat factor, or the percentage of seats that were filled with people on each route during the month. For all branded flying, they had a dismal 59.0% seat factor for October. This is very close to the 59.1% load factor they publicly announced back in November, so we’re on the right track.

So what do we see? Of the 58 markets I found, 10 of them had a seat factor of better than 70%. The bad news is that 11 markets were at less than 50%. In other words, some of these appear to be working while others aren’t. I say “appear” to be working, because we don’t know whether all those people on those flights were paying enough money to make it profitable or not, but we do know that people are at least interested in flying those routes.

I can see why ExpressJet didn’t want to release these traffic numbers. I mean, it’s pretty easy to see which markets are worth considering for other airlines and which ones aren’t. The only thing is that most other airlines won’t be interested in flying in these markets. Southwest is the only one I could see really coming in to any of these, and with 737s that’s going to be a hard sell.

That’s why I think that ExpressJet could do very well if only they were Southwest Express. The connection to a large airline’s frequent flier program and access to passenger feed from a broader route network would be exactly what they’d need. Just look at the routes that are working here and you can see them fitting into the Southwest network quite nicely.

Unfortunately, I’m guessing we won’t see this happen, though it would be nice. For now, I’m just hoping that ExpressJet can find a way to tweak their network quickly enough that they won’t have to give in to shareholder demands to disband the network. Then again, flying 50 seat jets in the era of $90 fuel makes that an incredibly difficult task even with high levels of demand.

If you’d like to see the full spreadsheet with seat factor by market, click here. (I learned from my last post that you guys like the raw data.)

The Gimli Glider, one of the greatest “feel good” stories in aviation history, was retired by Air Canada yesterday. The plane flew from Montreal to Tucson before heading to Mojave where it will probably meet its fate as a bunch of Molson cans. Actually, there is hope that someone will rescue it, but the future is up in the air right now.

For those who don’t know, you’ll be surprised to hear the the Gimli Glider was not some newfangled type of aircraft. It was just a 767-200. Actually, it was this ship:

What you’ll be amazed to know is that back in 1983, it ran out of fuel at cruising altitude due to an error converting between metric and imperial measurements. The skilled crew was able to glide the airplane down for over 100 miles, line up with an old abandoned military runway that was being used for go-kart races at that instant, and successfully bring the plane back to Earth without killing a single person. Sure the nose gear collapsed, but the plane was to be repaired and fly for 25 more years.

Where is Gimli, you ask? It’s about 55 miles north of Winnipeg. Where is Winnipeg? Find the border between North Dakota and Minnesota and head north.

If you’d like some more reading on this topic, there’s a good article on the retirement here. You can also buy a book and a movie that were made on the subject.

I’ve just survived what may possibly have been the first tornado warning I’ve ever endured living in LA. And yes, I grew up here. I’m not quite sure why they’d bother doing that because none of us have any clue what we’re supposed to do if there’s a tornado nearby. It’s not like we have basements here.

I swear I’m not just hear to tell you about the weather. I’m actually trying to figure something out, so hopefully someone can enlighten me.

The airports here have been operating in reverse configurations all day today (eg landing over the ocean and taking off over land at LAX). Here at home on the west side of Long Beach, that means we can see landings heading to runway 12 instead of the usual departures from runway 30. You know what? This isn’t going to make sense to 99% of you. Let me throw down a map here. We live west of the airport.

Anyway, I was out walking the dog a little after 530p when I saw an Airborne Express 767 fly overhead lined up for runway 7L. He throttled up and ended up going around before landing on 12. This seemed really odd to me, because I’ve never seen a large jet operate on those smaller runways. I’ve only seen them on 12/30. So, I went back and listened to the tower archives on liveatc.net to see what was going on.

Here’s the conversation that occurred:

ABX1753: Tower, Abex1753 Heavy, we’re trying to get on runway 12 here
LGB Tower: Abex1753, Long Beach Tower, runway 12 cleared to land
ABX1753: Cleared to land runway 12, Abex1753

Then a couple minutes later . . .

ABX1753: Are we cleared to land runway 12?
LGB Tower: Abex1753 Heavy, you’re lined up for runway 7L right now
ABX1753: Ok, we’d like to go around for 1753

Needless to say, the tower cleared him to execute a missed approach, and that’s what I saw. Now I’ll get to the point . . . how the heck does that happen?!? Shouldn’t an aircraft know with which runway it’s lined up? I mean, even a simple compass could tell you that you’re lined up at heading 070. Can someone explain this?

It’s earning season, and most airlines are doing their best to mask their weak fourth quarters. It’s hilarious to see the headlines talking about what a great year it was. Then they bury their fourth quarter loss down below.

Just today, we saw US Airways and Alaska talking about how fuel prices are choking them. US Airways said, “Our fourth quarter results were materially impacted by increases in fuel prices. Had our fuel price per gallon simply remained at last year’s fourth quarter levels, our 2007 fourth quarter fuel expense would have been approximately $230 million lower.” And Alaska? “The loss was driven primarily by skyrocketing fuel costs combined with fares that have not kept pace.”

Just in case you’re a visual person, let’s take a look at some graphs showing what’s happened to fuel. Once again, I turn to government data for the answers. This time, it’s Schedule P-12A. Oh man, just the name makes me think it’s going to be interesting . . . riiiiiight.

Anyway, I isolated 16 of the airlines and graphed them below. Unfortunately, government data only goes up through September 2007 so far, but you get the point.

As you can see, they all follow the same trend . . . up, up, up. I know some of the colors are light, but with the exception of some early spikes by Hawaiian and a couple other airlines I’ll talk about in a second, they all moved together. Prices hovered below $1 a gallon until early 2004 at which point they took off like an empty 757 in a headwind. (Maybe I should stay away from the analogies.) Prices passed $2 toward the end of 2005 and except for a couple of dips back, they’ve stayed there. Ouch.

Let’s focus in on some of the exceptions. I’ve taken the 16 lines and put them into an average. Then I’ve highlighted Southwest, Allegiant, and Skybus.

As you can see, we’re looking at these airline for different reasons. Starting in 2004 when fuel prices took off, Southwest kept them low. How? They bought a bunch of fuel hedges keeping their future cost of fuel less than they’d have paid normally. Though the prices have continued to climb, they have continued to keep their prices lower than average, and that is pretty much why they’ve continued to be profitable. With average fuel costs, I believe Southwest would have been break-even at best last quarter.

In case you’re wondering, they’ve continued to hedge fuel. It looks brilliant when prices keep rising, but when (if) they fall, Southwest will be stuck paying more than others. Personally, I think that’s fine. It’s worth having some certainty in your fuel costs even if you end up paying a little more.

The other two airlines, on the other hand, are highlighted for paying way above the average. Allegiant seems to be paying through the nose for fuel. Considering that they operate fuel thirsty MD80s, this is really costing them dearly. The fact that they remain profitable is even more impressive with that knowledge.

Then we have Skybus. They seem to be paying the most of all. They like to call themselves an ultra-low cost carrier, but, um, this clearly shows otherwise. I’m not sure why they’re paying so much. It can’t be because they’re new - Virgin America is new and they fall into the pack. Maybe it’s all these small airports they fly where nobody else goes. Come to think of it, they share that characteristic with Allegiant. Hmmm.

Well at least the trends look good, right? Of course not. You see the average fuel cost in that graph was maybe around $2.10 or so. Well just to give you some numbers . . . Alaska paid $2.48 in the fourth quarter. US Airways paid $2.56. And it doesn’t look better elsewhere.

So just remember, if you’re complaining about your ticket price being too expensive . . . pipe down. It should probably cost you even more than that.

Chances are that you’ve never heard of Arctic Circle Air. That’s not much of a surprise. See, these guys do the tough flying up in Alaska with a fleet of props. They do a lot of cargo work, but they also fly passengers around. After seeing that shot of one of their planes at left, um, how is it that I can call them the most comfortable airline?

Well, people are always complaining about how cramped and annoying it is to be on full flights. You won’t have this problem with these guys. In October, the latest month that government data is available, their 1,254 flights carried a whopping 285 passengers. Since they flew 5,482 seats, that means they only filled 5% of them. Just think of all the room you’ll have to stretch out. Actually, that’s probably not true. They’re probably full of cargo, maybe a moose, but that doesn’t count. Feel free to book your next flight here.

I’ve actually been playing around with the government data a lot lately, so you can expect more posts on it in the next couple days. Not sure what government data I’m talking about? Don’t worry, I’m putting a post together on that as well.

We all know that crowded airports create plenty of nightmares for fliers here in the US, especially during the busy summer. A couple weeks ago, the FAA came out with its latest proposal to fix this by allowing for congestion pricing. There has been a lot of talk about this in the blogosphere, and some people are in favor of this plan. I am not one of those people. (If you’d like to read the the opinion of someone who thinks it is good, try here.

Before I get into my thoughts, let’s outline the plan itself. If you’d like to read along, you can see the entire 25 page docket in this PDF file. There are three basic parts to the plan.

1. Landing fees determined by both departure and weight instead of being solely by weight
2. Allowing airport construction costs to be included in landing fees before completion of project
3. Allowing airports to charge landing fees for secondary airports to the primary congested airports instead

It might (definitely) not be clear why this would reduce congestion, so I’ll talk about each one as I explain why they won’t actually solve the problem. It’s important to know before we get started that airports are required to charge “reasonable fees [that] must be based on the capital and operating costs of the facilities for which the fees are assessed.” (from the PDF)

Proposal #1 - Right now, landing fees for aircraft are almost always determined by weight of the aircraft, but airports are allowed to charge on a mix of per departure and by weight. This proposal actually just clarifies and I guess encourages airports to start charging landing fees based on a mix of weight and a per departure basis.

The idea here is that small jets are problems because they don’t carry a lot of people, but they contribute just as much to airport congestion as a 747. So, if you charge on a per departure basis, it will effectively push smaller jets out because they can’t spread the cost of landing over nearly as many passengers. Will that stop regional jets from flying to an airport? Some of them, sure. Higher landing fees will make for unprofitable flights.

The end result, however, may be a less congested airport, but it’s also going to mean less access to the hub from smaller communities. If flights are marginally profitable to a small city now, this plan could end up making it largely unprofitable and the service will cease. We shouldn’t be discouraging flights to smaller cities just because they don’t have as much demand.

Proposal #2 - This is really the heart of the congestion pricing proposal. Since airports can’t charge above and beyond their cost of operation, the FAA had to get creative here. Currently, airports cannot charge for construction projects in their landing fees until that project is finished. There has to be a tangible and current passenger benefit for inclusion of the cost in landing fees to be permitted. This rule would change that to allow for projects under construction to be included when construction begins.

I don’t really have a problem with this proposal in its basic form. It will encourage airports to start construction projects because they can pay down their debt faster. It’s definitely an incentive that would help get things rolling, but how does this encourage congestion relief?

Well there are two proposals here. One of them would let them only charge for construction projects during congestion periods. That way, they could charge more when the airport is congested and less the rest of the day. The other would allow these costs to be charged at any time. So why would you only charge this during congestion periods? I guess because it’s the only way they can figure out how to charge more during busy times without breaking the rule about having reasonable fees.

As a congestion-relief tool, this proposal is garbage unless you’re willing to accept large fare increases. A small increase in landing fees during peak periods will not get any airline to shift their flight times to a non-crowded time. A large increase for a more massive construction project may get some flights out of there, but the remaining flights would have to raise fares a lot to remain profitable. So you either don’t relieve congestion or you end up with extremely high pricing during peak periods just to cover costs.

Really, this would be a temporary measure anyway. As they say: “Any costs recovered for principal and interest during the construction period would have to be deducted from the amount later capitalized and amortized for recovery in the rate-base after the facility is put into use.” So, once construction is done, the fees would then be spread across all departures as they are now.

Proposal #3 - This one would allow primary, congested airports to begin charging landing fees for secondary airport operations. Put it this way. If LAX is a primary airport and it’s congested, it would be able to incorporate landing fees for Ontario into its landing fee package. Meanwhile, Ontario would be able to lower its fees so that costs would be lower over there. This can only work if the two airports are owned by the same operator.

I still don’t see how this would relieve the larger airport. Lower fees would probably encourage more flights at the secondary airport, but people still want to fly out of the larger airport. As long as that’s the case, the flights won’t disappear just because the costs go up. Instead, the fares will go up and the customers will have to pay.

Can you see a common theme here? These proposals aren’t really going to fix the problems. Now, if you could start jacking up fees to the point where airlines would stop flying routes, then you’d be able to reduce congestion. But at that point, you’d also see a steep fare increase, and that shouldn’t be the goal here.

There’s even more ridiculousness, like the fact that Pittsburgh, St Louis, Tucson, Long Beach, and others are all defined as “congested” by this proposal. Um, those are not congested airports, but I won’t get into that right now.

The primary goal should be to create more capacity by building more runways and terminals. In the mean time, we need to get better at increasing the number of flights that can be handled at the airport. I know that at JFK, for example, there are ways to get more flights in an out by reconfiguring runways. That’s not an easy task, but it’s a good medium term fix until the long term airport projects are completed. And in the short term? Airport caps. You’re going to get to the same place with caps as you are with congestion pricing. The only difference is that with caps, fares will stay the same whereas with congestion pricing, fares are bound to increase.