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.

Update 2/13/09: It appears that the video has been pulled down from YouTube. Watch the undular bore in action at NASA.

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.