Frontier really is putting a lot of effort into Denver these days. Its new startup regional airline Lynx came out with its next eight cities, and every one will be served from Denver. Not surprising, of course. These new routes are interesting ones, and they’re a departure from the airline’s traditional path made possible by the introduction of the 70 seat Q400 turboprop. I’d say we can divide these routes into two parts, the Rockies and the Heartland.

In the Rockies, you’ll see flights from Denver to Colorado Springs, Aspen, Durango, and Grand Junction. My guess is that you won’t see too many local passengers on these flights. No, these are designed for people who want to connect in Denver to get some skiing done. Actually, they start in the summer, so skiing will have to wait.

The other ones are Fargo, Bozeman, Missoula, and Jackson Hole. These will probably have some more local traffic, but they’ll take strong connecting traffic as well. These are all part of the Heartland that Northwest has ruled over for so many years. Though to be fair, this is probably going to take more away from United and Delta which fly to these cities from Denver and Salt Lake, respectively.

In addition to the Lynx flying, the airline is beefing up the number of mainline flights to several destinations. Yup, keep strengthening that Denver hub . . . . It looks like these new flights will come at the expense of flights to West Palm Beach and Baton Rouge as well as Fort Myers and Jacksonville during the summer months.

Overall, I think these are pretty good moves. The airline is trying to hide from Southwest, and this will help. Until Southwest picks up some smaller aircraft, you won’t see them going to these cities. So for now, Frontier can bring down “really high” fares in most of these cities more toward the “marginally high” fare levels that will still make them money. If there are enough passengers to go around, this will probably work out well for them.

A nice side benefit of attending JetBlue’s press conference yesterday was that I had the opportunity to meet Ian Gregor, Communications Manager for the FAA’s Western-Pacific Region. We started talking shop, and soon enough I realized that there was something worth writing about here.

LAX has recently started using Continuous Descent Approaches (CDA) for some flights arriving from the East. What, that’s not exciting to you?

Ok, let me explain exactly what that means. Better yet, let’s go with an image here.

Just about everyone is used to the stepped approach that has been the standard for some time (and I’ll guess nobody has experienced the drunken pilot approach). You know the feeling. The pilot reduces thrust, you start to descend, then he increases it and you start to flatten out. This goes on for quite some time until you end up on the ground. It’s like going down stairs, whereas the CDA is like going down a ramp. When the aircraft gets ready to descend, the pilot cuts power and the plane maintains a constant rate of descent all the way until touchdown.

That means no more powering up along the way and no more ear-busting changes in pitch of the aircraft. As you can imagine, that helps reduce noise (since the engines don’t spool up) and it helps reduce fuel usage. Good news for everyone, right? Why wouldn’t they have done this before?

Well, it’s not like there’s unlimited room to pull something like this off. You need to make sure that during your continuous descent, you don’t happen to get in the way of, oh, say, airplanes coming from Ontario or one of the other many airports in Southern California.

That’s why this can only be implemented for landings from the East. If you come from the North and West, you usually have to make that turn around downtown LA to come in. There just isn’t enough room to make this work out there. The good news, however, is that half of the arrivals at the airport come from the East. Although only half of those are using CDA right now, the other half will be soon enough.

This procedure was first tested in Louisville, and there was a “34 percent reduction in nitrogen oxide emissions below 3,000 feet, and a 30 percent reduction in aircraft noise within 15 miles of the airport. UPS aircraft flying this approach also save between 250 and 465 pounds of fuel per flight.” Sounds good to me. Maybe this will get some of those testy airport neighbors to stop whining so much.

They’re also rolling this out in other airports, so next time you come in for landing, see if you notice any difference.

As I briefly mentioned in yesterday’s post, JetBlue has decided to expand their presence in Southern California mostly starting May 21. This is welcome considering that after the initial burst of service at Long Beach and a minor move at Burbank, there really hasn’t been much action from them out this way.

Apparently JetBlue thinks this is a huge deal, because they had a lot of pomp and circumstance around the announcement. Their CEO flew in along with an army of crewmembers from Long Beach for the announcement. And LA Mayor Villaraigosa along with Councilman Bill Rosendahl (LAX falls in his district), literally rolled out the red carpet for them, as you can see at left. Fortunately, I had the chance to attend the press conference at LAX, but no, I didn’t get to hitch a ride on the flight from Long Beach.

On the surface, this looks like a big expansion, but what most media outlets aren’t reporting is that much of it is really just a reallocation of resources. Take a look at this table that summarizes the changes. The numbers are the changes in frequency. Anything in italics is a new route.

Table Edited 2/13 @ 105p to reflect changes confirmed by JetBlue PR that conflict with information received at the press conference. There will now be only one Dulles flight cut from Long Beach. Instead of cutting the second one, they will cut one of the two O’Hare flights instead. The remaining flight will become a smaller Embraer 190. It is undecided what they will do with the now-unused O’Hare slot.

Table Reverted 2/13 @ 309p because it was apparently correct in the first place. O’Hare will not be changing. Hopefully the PR story won’t change again, but watch this space.

So, you see LAX gets flights to JFK and Boston, but those are taken away from other airports. That’s probably important at JFK where there isn’t much room to expand these days, but it’s most important at Long Beach. Remember, the airport is maxed out and JetBlue can’t start any new flights unless they get rid of some other ones. Before we get into that, let’s talk about LAX.

Like I said, the airport will get flights to JFK and Boston. They can’t have many more than that, because they only have one gate in terminal 6. That’s gate 69, to be precise. Hmm, they should try a Southwest-style “love” message with that gate number.

Anyway, this is nothing but bad news for Virgin America since they’re targeting the same travelers and offering similar amenities. Virgin America may have one more flight per day, but JetBlue has better times, most significantly on the westbound. Virgin has no flight leaving JFK between 930a and 510p. JetBlue has a midday trip at 11a.

Down in Long Beach, most of the changes they’re making appear to be so they can introduce the smaller Embraer 190 into the market. Austin starts (the only one to begin May 1) probably because it’s the best way to get the plane from the east coast to the west coast, but San Jose and Seattle are interesting moves. Seattle is in direct competition with Alaska. They must think there’s enough room for two players in this market, because they’re going to be at a frequency and loyalty disadvantage. The odds aren’t stacked against them nearly as much as they are for Virgin America going against Alaska at LAX, however. They’re also doing Seattle to San Diego. Meanwhile, Burbank gets a couple Dulles flights, which is a nice addition.

I thought it was funny that at the press conference, the theme was all about the regionalization of airports in LAX, but that’s far from the case here. Sure, they added a couple flights at Burbank, but the restrictions on flying at Long Beach means they didn’t add anything, they just moved the flights around. It’s kind of hard to regionalize when the desirable regional airports don’t have any room.

Really, the big announcement is that they added LAX flying which goes against LA’s effort to move away from LAX. I thought it was pretty funny to see JetBlue CEO Dave Barger pressured to start more Ontario and even Palmdale flying. He laughed uncomfortably, but until Ontario lowers its fees, I can’t imagine they’re going to see much more traffic. And Palmdale? That’s way too far out there today.

So, good news for LA travelers in that you can now fly JetBlue out of LAX. It’s nice for LGB travelers to have more destinations, even if it is at the expense of some east coast flights. There are still plenty of options in those markets. I’m just happy to see JetBlue finally taking their eyes away from Northeast to Florida flying and giving us some love out here on the West Coast.

Click to see all my photos from JetBlue’s press conference.

I’m heading out to LAX today to see the press conference from a “Major National Low-Cost Airline” expanding service in the LA area, so I’ll have more on that tomorrow. (Hint: It’s JetBlue) But today, I’d like to extend a hearty welcome to a couple of newbies in the blogosphere, BoardingArea and the TSA.

Wait . . . the TSA? Yes, really. They’ve started a blog called the Evolution of Security with the Fox-Newsy tagline of “Terrorists Evolve. Threats Evolve. Security Must Stay Ahead. You Play A Part.” This is a unique blog in that it’s set up to focus on the comments section and basically be a feedback mechanism. They’re soliciting feedback from everyone and anyone, and clearly they’ve seen a response. This post on inconsistencies between airports has received over 350 comments so far. Let’s just hope they haven’t censored too many of them, though I think it’s safe to say they have that as least some have been censored. In fact, they say “In the spirit of transparency, we plan to note how many comments we’ve rejected and tell you why. Mostly the rejected comments include profane language, political rants or abusive posts that we just can’t print, and some are completely off topic. Other than these, every post will go up as written and we will continue to operate this way.”

It may not be the most informative blog around, but clearly, good things can come out of this. In fact, they already have. Apparently, some “local TSA offices” had decided to start requiring all electronics to be removed from carry-ons against TSA rules. Well, people commented on the blog, Washington found out, and now it’s been fixed. Huzzah!

Ok, half-huzzah. I mean, how is it that they need a blog to figure out the major problems that are happening at some of their outstations? It’s a little concerning that they don’t have better oversight to ensure the regulations are being implemented correctly.

Maybe this won’t be too bad after all. I mean, they had the good sense to include my blog in their very short blogroll. I’m in some pretty lofty company there. Actually, I’m downright giddy to be listed right below security deity Bruce Schneier’s blog. Makes me look much cooler than I am.

Enough about the TSA. Let’s also welcome BoardingArea, the latest creation of FlyerTalk founder Randy Petersen. Head on over there to find “voices of the business traveler.” Randy has decided to aggregate blogs that appeal business travelers from around the web. I’m very happy to say that I’ve been included in that group. No need to read my content over there since it’s the same stuff I post here, but you should definitely head over there to discover some other excellent blogs, some of which are brand new and most of which can only be found at BoardingArea.com.

Edited 2/13 @ 131p to change wording on comment censoring (shown in italics)

It’s been a month and a half since we last checked in on Alitalia, and I feel bad. I try not to neglect my favorite airline to hate, but it looks like that’s been the case. So what’s new? Nothing.

Ok, so a lot is new, but the theme is the same. The situation gets worse and worse every day and there’s no end in site. But let’s get caught up on the details.

The Italian government did finally decide to pick the Air France/KLM deal as their favorite, so the two airlines entered into talks. Then, the Italian government collapsed. Oh boy. There’s lots of speculation that the collapse of the government means that this deal is in trouble, but we really don’t know. The players all deny that this will hurt anything.

So how bad are things for the airline? Really bad.

It looks like they need 750 million euros by the middle of the year just to survive on their own, or at least that’s what they say. They continue to lose over 1 million euros per day, but at least they’re making some real changes this summer.

The word is out that they’ll reduce flights to Milan from about 660 per day (that sounds high, but it’s what the article says) to only 75. This is part of their recovery plan, and it’s consistent with what Air France/KLM would do – focus on the Rome hub.

How are they rewarded? The operator of Milan airport is suing them for 1.25 billion euros in damages for pulling out of the airport. Are you freakin’ kidding me?!? Sadly, no. They say they made a bunch of investments in the infrastructure of the airport for Alitalia, and now Alitalia owes them if they pull out.

If I’m running Alitalia at this point, I’m just planning on grabbing some grappa and drinking myself silly until I forget about how absolutely absurd this is. Even if they do something right, they get hit with backlash. Someone please shut this airline down.