For those of you who want Cranky to be a bigger part of your life, you should probably see a shrink. But if that doesn’t work, how about putting Cranky on your chest? Thinking some of the airlines that have received a Cranky Jackass award need more than just a mention in the blog, I went over to Cafe Press and created the t-shirt at left.

Then I started to create more t-shirts, hats, a coffee mug, etc. Eventually, I had a “store” full of gear, and I thought, “hey, somebody may actually want to buy this for some odd reason.” So, I ordered a couple examples to make sure the quality was decent and the images looked good. Sure enough, they do, so now you can head on over and buy Cranky Gear for yourself.

If you’re interested, go to the Cranky Flier Store and you’ll find everything I created over there. If you have ideas of things you’d like to see, let me know and I’ll try to put it together. And if you do buy some gear, take a picture from wherever you are in the world and send it my way.

If you’re traveling through London/Heathrow today, you might want to call your airline and see if things are running on time. They haven’t exactly had the best of luck there these last couple of days.

See, yesterday a British Airways 777 landed on the grass before it got to the concrete, skidded, and ended up stopping right at the threshold to one of Heathrow’s two runways, as you can see below.

Everyone got off ok, and that’s pretty amazing. I spent the day yesterday going back and forth with a bunch of airline dork friends discussing what could have possibly caused this to happen. The weather was good and there weren’t any visibility issues, so that’s unlikely to have been the problem. There were reports that the engines failed, so what would have caused it? Did it run out of fuel? Maybe, though unlikely. It didn’t catch on fire, so that’s always possible.

I know, I should really keep out of this whole speculation game. Remember that potential “undular bore” that the Air Canada plane may have hit? Well, there are now reports that it could have been wake turbulence from a 747 passing in front of it. Not nearly as interesting, but certainly plausible. So, it makes me want to reserve judgment on this accident even though it’s so interesting.

The Daily Mail, however, has no problem speculating that it may have been a bird strike that shut down both engines simultaneously just a minute before landing. They have a bunch of incredible pictures and more details on the site. The odds of that seem so unbelievably small. It made me wonder which was more unlikely: that scenario or Randy Johnson hitting a bird over home plate with his fastball a few years back.

Well, it doesn’t matter. They’ll figure it out soon enough, I’m sure. It’s interesting to note that this is the first major accident I can think of involving a 777. That’s a very long and impressive safety record.

But back to my original point. That plane is still sitting at the threshold to the runway, so it may cause delays. Right now, I believe the runway is open to departing flights. (”And please don’t look to your right, ladies and gentlemen.”) Yesterday, when the runway was closed, most short haul flights were canceled or diverted so that long hauls could run. I imagine that the runway may need to close on and off for investigation and removal, so short haul flights may be affected again.

Alaska, always the gentleman, has decided to roll out the red carpet for Virgin America’s upcoming arrival in Seattle by announcing a bunch of new flights and double bonus miles. Wait, that’s not very welcoming, is it?

Alaska has effectively decided to turn their Seattle - California services into a shuttle-style operation with flights either on the hour or half hour starting April 27. From Seattle to LAX, southbound flights will depart 15 times daily on the hour (up from 12 daily) while northbound flights will depart on the half hour. Flights to San Diego, Orange County, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose will follow the same schedule, but they’ll run every two hours.

If the flight times aren’t good enough, maybe you’ll like the mileage promo. Fly twice from March 15 through May 15 between Seattle and LAX or SFO and you’ll get double miles for every trip on those routes from May 16 through the end of the year.

This seems like a particularly nasty response to Virgin America’s impending entry, wouldn’t you say? I mean, VX will have 3 flights a day to SFO and 4 to LAX when they’re at full strength. These moves make the VX schedule look like nothing, but then again it already looked that way before.

Is the demand really there for this? Maybe. I mean, United has pulled capacity in those markets over the last few years, and Delta is only flying RJs, so there isn’t nearly as many flights as there has been in the past. The shuttle-style service will probably be well-received so this could be ok for them, but I’d be surprised.

How are they adding these flights? Well, they’re canceling the Orange County - Oakland route. That competed with Southwest anyway, so it’s probably a better move to cancel those. Whether this is the best use of those aircraft is questionable.

But let’s be honest, they wouldn’t be doing this without the VX threat. These are two of their biggest markets (if not the top 2), and they are not going to let VX establish even the tiniest of presences without a fight. Which once again makes me wonder why VX would bother with a market like this. It’s not like Alaska is a weakling that people hate. VX is just asking for it.

If you’ve been reading the blog for awhile, you might have noticed that I’m kind of a weather wonk as well as an airline dork. So I was really interested to see that a recent Air Canada flight that hit turbulence may have encountered an undular bore. What the heck is that?

You may have heard about this flight. An Air Canada A319 was going from Victoria to Toronto when something happened and the plane had to make an emergency landing in Calgary. At least 10 people were injured, but not much other information has been released, except that there was a computer problem.

I read a post in the Turbulence Forecast blog today pointing to an article saying that it could have been a rare atmospheric (aka undular) bore that caused turbulence severe enough that it impacted the computers (or more likely just knocked out the autopilot).

I had visions of a giant tidal wave in the sky crashing down on the plane, but admittedly, I had no idea what an atmospheric bore was at all. Turns out I wasn’t quite right. A little research brought me to this fascinating blog post from ABC 33/40 in Birmingham, Alabama of all places. Now, I’m a huge fan of true weather wonks. I regularly read Tom Skilling’s blog for WGN in Chicago, and I used to really like watching Sean McLaughlin when he worked for channel 12 in Phoenix. After reading this post by Tim Coleman in Alabama, I think I’ve found another weather geek to follow.

Tim explains the undular bore phenomenon very well. Basically, when a warm air mass comes into contact with a cool, stable air mass (or vice versa?), they can create waves in the air similar to what you’d see when you drop a pebble into a body of water, only these waves move at 10 to 50 mph. The tops of those waves will have winds going one way while the bottoms may be going another way. On October 3, 2007, a webcam caught an amazing view of one of these undular bores. Check it out.

Watch the trees at the very beginning. As the waves roll by, the winds quickly shift direction. That’s just cool. But this post makes it sound like this isn’t the rarest event. It actually happens quite often, though you often can’t see it because there are no clouds to show it. That’s a stark contrast to the original article saying it’s an extremely rare event. Maybe it’s only rare at such high altitude. I’m just not sure. Pretty cool stuff though, huh?

I’m just glad I didn’t have fly through it. Then again, it’s nice to know that flying through such violent air only resulted in some minor injuries and the plane landed safely.

I know I didn’t get to it last week, but I couldn’t let Southwest’s massive schedule change go by without at least a passing mention. For those who missed it, Southwest decided to cut 57 flights and add 40 new ones beginning May 10. You math whizzes out there might notice that means they’re ending up with 17 fewer flights. I’d say that might be a good thing since demand has been lightening up.

If there’s one place that’s benefiting here, it’s Denver. The Mile High City will get 18 new flights including 15 to 6 brand new cities. Which cities, you ask? Well, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Raleigh/Durham, San Antonio, San Jose, and St Louis will all get nonstops. As you might have guessed, this is bad news for Frontier. They fly to five of those six cities, and they’re going to be hurting. Here’s a comparison with the number of flights offered on these new routes from Denver:

As you can see, United clearly maintains a large schedule advantage, but Southwest and Frontier are pretty close. This is just on top of the markets Southwest has already launched in the last year or so that sit on top of Frontier. It looks like they’re going for the jugular here. Kind of funny to see an airline that was in the same position 30 years ago turn around and do it to someone else.

Obviously, to fly these new flights, they’ve had to get the planes from somewhere else. They haven’t actually cut a single route, but they’ve cut frequencies in a bunch of markets. Some of these are mostly inconsequential, like Las Vegas to Phoenix going from 18 to 17 flights a day, but some routes are getting cut in half. Orlando to Detroit, for example, goes from 2 flights per day to 1. Some of the cuts are seasonal, so for example, a lot of Florida markets get cut for the summer while the Pacific Northwest gains a couple.

Overall, it seems like a pretty good move on their part. I am curious about the Denver strategy, however. They either must be seeing something they like in the trends over there or they’ve decided that it’s time to go after their prey and hope that things improve if they’re successful.

If you’d like to see all the changes, check out this PDF.

Anyone else having flashbacks to 2000?

Fares are going up, sort of, but not in a healthy way. This time, it’s in the form of massively increased fuel surcharges. United put together a $25 each fuel surcharge for domestic flights, and the usual suspects have matched except for Northwest. They may match today, or it may fall apart, but I don’t like the trend this is setting.

No, it’s not the increase in fares that bothers me, but rather the piecemeal way in which it’s happening. All I know is that with fuel prices where they are, fares need to go up. They can do it with a fuel surcharge even though that seems like a waste of time. Why not just increase fares? Maybe there is a hidden reason that I don’t know. Are fuel surcharges commissionable? Anyway, that’s not the point.

As with most fare increases, this happens on higher structure fares. Take LAX to Chicago on United, for example. Right now there are sale fares out there for as low as $224 roundtrip. The surcharge doesn’t apply to these fares. In fact, the fuel surcharge doesn’t apply until you reach the “UA” fare for a whopping $437 each way. You think there are a lot of leisure travelers buying that fare? Nope.

So, it’s like we saw in 2000 right before the bubble burst, fares at the upper end of the spectrum kept going up while leisure fares stayed where they were. When the economy started going downhill, business travel started to drop off or at the least became much more cost conscious. That meant fewer seats were filled and less revenue was coming in the door. To compensate, the airlines had to fall back on the leisure fares, and those were still too low. Since the number of passengers dropped off, fares dropped so that people would buy more tickets. And that’s how the airlines started bleeding money last time.

People may say that we don’t need less capacity since planes are full, but it’s higher business fares that are propping that up right now. Planes may be full, but airlines will be losing money when they have to rely on leisure fares that they have been unable to increase. That doesn’t work.

I’ve finally done it. I’ve done my first ever podcast. Thanks are certainly due for Addison Schonland for convincing me to actually do it. I spoke with him yesterday about my Essential Air Service post earlier this week, and we talked a little more about the program.

If you have 13:29 to spare, click here and have a listen. As you might be able to tell, I was a little nervous in the beginning. It’s not so easy when you can’t double check everything before posting. But I think I came through ok.

If you’re interested in seeing other places I’ve been quoted outside of the blog, I’ve put up a link called Cranky in the News in the upper right side of the page. I’ll keep that updated as often as someone is crazy enough to quote me.

Thank you to everyone who headed over to Performancing to vote for me. I have now officially been crowned The Best Travel Blog of 2007*!

Why the asterisk, you ask?

Well, the editors over there decided that reader votes aren’t enough. They thought they’d come up with their own winners from the list as well. So I won the reader vote, but the editors voted for Gridskipper. I didn’t even take their runner-up spot - Gadling took that honor.

But hey, who cares what editors think anyway? You guys, my readers, voted for me, and that’s all I care about. Hopefully I can keep writing things that interest you. The good news is that in case I’m unable to fulfill my duties during the upcoming year, it’s very comforting to know that Travel Rants came in second, and they could easily have won this one.

Thanks again for your vote.

If you’ve ever questioned why better visibility around the airport is so important, take a look at this video depicting a near-disaster in Providence last year. (Thanks to Vanity Fair Musings via Don Brown at Get the Flick.

If that doesn’t make you crap your pants, I’m not sure what will. There are just so many problems here that could have been avoided with ground-based radar. It’s a foggy night in Providence so you can’t see much outside. The United pilots get lost on landing and incorrectly state their location as being near inactive runway 25R instead of active runway 25L. That’s bad enough to cause problems. Meanwhile, the controller really blows it. Despite the aircraft saying they were near Taxiway Kilo and hearing a plane fly right overhead, the controller doesn’t pick up that they must be nowhere near runway 23R and on 23L instead.

The hero here? Obviously the US Airways pilots. Had they departed as directed by the controller, they very well could have taken the top off that United aircraft . . . or worse. Fortunately they had the good sense to wait the whole thing out until everyone knew where everyone else was. Wow.

Coming from the capital of runway incursions here in LA, I certainly hope we can get some funding together for better coverage of what’s happening on the ground.

There had been rumblings about this for quite some time. Would British Airways make any moves designed to fight the all-business class airlines that have popped up over the last few years? Would they try to take advantage of open skies and fly between the US and Continental Europe?

The answer to both is now officially, “yes.”

Yesterday British Airways announced they were so enthusiastic about the open skies agreement that they were launching a new airline called . . . Open Skies. (Try not to groan too much.)

The idea is definitely an interesting one. Let’s start with the basics. The airline will be BA’s first attempt at using narrowbodies across the Atlantic. They will start with one 757 and expand to six over the next couple years. These planes will be configured in a three cabin configuration, similar to their 767s, with Business, Premium Economy, and Economy. They expect to start flying in June between either Paris or Brussels and New York/JFK or Newark, all subject to government approval, of course.

Now, let’s dig in. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make the breakfast in New York announcing the launch. Fortunately, I was able to speak with John Lampl, spokesperson for BA, and he was able to fill me in with some details that weren’t in the release.

First of all, it’s fairly strange for an airline to announce its grand entrance without actually knowing the routes. But apparently that’s all dependent upon slot acquisition. As we all know, JFK is a tough place to fly and BA will now have to hope they can get a hold of some slots for this service. If not, they’ll end up at Newark, where they’re confident they’ll be able to fly without a problem. Once they know the times they’re allowed to fly in the US, then they’ll choose whether they can start with Paris or Brussels. Once both those cities are up and running, they’ll look at Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Madrid, and Milan. According to John, they aren’t currently looking at any other cities in the US.

Another thing you’ll notice is that they are calling the cabins Business (instead of Club World), Premium Economy (instead of World Traveller Plus), and Economy (instead of World Traveller). That means, as you might expect, that it’s going to be a different product than on BA mainline. The odd thing here is that the product is definitely worse than mainline in Business, about the same in Economy, and far superior in Premium Economy.

There will be 24 Business class seats (at left) which basically will be the same as the last version of Club World before the recent upgrades. John said it will be improved, however, with “new colors, materials, cushions and some added bits.” Economy will have 30 new seats, but they will have a knee-crunching 31″ pitch, just like in BA’s World Traveller class. Ouch. At least it’s a small cabin of only 5 rows.

The big improvement here is in Premium Economy, and this is what appears to be competing with the all-business airlines like L’Avion, which flies between Paris and New York. Anyway, there will be 28 seats with a very solid 52″ pitch. John first said it would be like a domestic US First Class seat, but he quickly corrected himself and said that it would be better, especially with 52″ pitch. As you can see at right, it is much better than a normal domestic First Class seat. It also looks to be very competitive with L’Avion’s seat.

The oddest thing at first glance is that this is a completely different airline from BA. The above description might sound pretty similar to United’s p.s. service, and like p.s., this airline might deserve to be a different brand. But it’s going to be a completely separate airline with its own operating certificate. The airline will codeshare with BA. Passengers will be able to earn miles in BA’s frequent flier program, and they’ll have access to BA lounges. So why are they creating a completely separate airline?

There’s only one answer that makes sense, and that’s labor costs. With a new airline, they have to be betting that they can get cabin crew and flight crew to work for less. That may even be the only way this venture makes sense from a financial perspective, but I can’t imagine the current employees will welcome this with open arms. John says they’re currently in discussions with the employees.

I have to say, I think it’s a really interesting idea. If United were on top of things, they probably should have sent p.s. over the Pond by now, but they have other issues to worry about. This is a chance for BA to take advantage of open skies and start connecting the US with Europe with a relatively low capacity airplane that makes success an easier target. It also shows the great benefit of Open Skies. Healthy competition is good when it’s rational.

Personally, I’m a little concerned about the first 4 to 6 months when they will only have one airplane operating six days a week. (I’m assuming Saturday will be the day the plane rests, but I don’t know.) I asked what they’d do if that plane goes down for unexpected maintenance, and unfortunately I was told that they don’t know yet. According to John, “the objective will be to get the passengers to the destination as fast as possible.” That could mean putting people on another carrier or getting another plane from BA (potentially), but they just don’t know yet.

The next step will be to see how this gets priced. I would fully expect to see Premium Economy priced in the sweet spot to compete with airlines like L’Avion and Silverjet. It also wouldn’t surprise me to see Business priced competitively with someone like Eos. Air France clearly won’t be happy if the first route is to Paris, but they’ve already announced London to LAX, so they can’t really be surprised.

Let’s forget about the product for a moment here. I’m most impressed with BA’s PR push here. Of course they’ve gone out of their way to reach out to journalists and analysts, but they’ve also done a great job of reaching out to bloggers like me. I was surprised to even get an invitation to the breakfast, let alone an offer to speak with the new head of the airline, Dale Moss. (He ended up running late so I didn’t get the chance to speak with him.) The airline has even started a blog of its own on the website. They say they’ll only be updating it about once a week, and the setup can use some help, but it’s a start. It’s different from what I’d usually expect to see from BA, and that’s good.

I’m interested to see how this works for the airline. It could be a smart move. Even if it doesn’t work, it’s nice to see some creativity.