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.)