Apr3rd
ATA Shuts Down Immediately
The rumors started swirling yesterday, and it was confirmed overnight. ATA is shutting down effective this morning. They lost their military contract, and so they’re done. I’ll have more on this tomorrow (my regular post here today will be up soon). If you were booked on them, try to get a refund from your credit card or see if any other airline will accommodate you. If you booked them via a Southwest codeshare, Southwest will take care of you.
Sad day for the industry.
Ouch, two this week. Plus the DL/Mesa spat.
That’s too bad, I’ll miss their Belgium cookies
Ok, Aloha and ATA in the same week. Frankly, Aloha was typically on the higher side of prices to the islands but ATA was always the cheapest - and direct from easy-access OAK.
Who is going to fill the void? Low pricing wise that is. UAL direct from SFO-OGG is always expensive and I’m afraid it will get worse (thou they do have the latest flight available allowing you to get in a nearly full day of work before heading to the beach…).
And who got the Military contract instead of ATA? BAA? AF? Luthansa? maybe China Southern?…why not, we’re giving our Air Force re-fueling tanker contract to Airbus so why not put our troop transportation in the care of Europe too…but I digress…
Damn, I used to fly them all the time out of PHX to Hawaii, always great service from the crew that worked out of PHX.
This is a real drag.
I hope US can grab the 6 757 ETOPS planes, they are good, new planes and can be used immediately for some lift.
Jeff - Good question about filling the void. I’ll talk about that a little more in my post tomorrow. As for the military contract. It sounds like it was FedEx’s contract that they divided up, and they took it away from ATA. I don’t know why, but they did.
Low blow on the Air Force contract. Northrop Grumman was also on that deal, and the tankers will be built in the US. There’s no reason to not buy those planes just because one of the partners isn’t American. It will still create plenty of jobs here.
Hmm, the question is does SWA get into the ETOPS to Hawaii market? And if they do that does it make sense to have a small inter-island service?
But yeah I am rooting for US to get the ATA 757s.
I’m envisioning (the highly unlikely scenario of) 757 ETOPS service on US between LA/San Fran and Tokyo (via HNL).
There are already too many carriers doing LAX-HNL, (CO, NW, DL, HA, AA. I don’t think a 757 ETOPS can do HNL-NRT, that is a long flight for twin engine 18 minute ETOPS, and Midway Island isn’t open for emergency landings any more.
18 minute ETOPS? Yes, planes aren’t allowed outside of Seattle, DFW, DC, NYC, and other metro areas with two airports. :-p
Perhaps 180 minute ETOPS is what you intended…
Ahh, the joy of typos.. (No hard feelings Yo, I just couldn’t resist…)
Actually, HNL-NRT is shorter than the 757 flights to Europe that Continental operates from CLE.
The current CEO of ATA’s parent co., Global Aero Logistics, is John Denison. He’s an ex-CFO & ex-EVP at Southwest Airlines and ex-CEO of ATA. His former positions @ Southwest should mean he works well with current Southwest CEO Gary Kelly. (Kelly was Southwest CFO under John Denison during Denison’s tenure as SW Exec VP.) I would look for Southwest to benefit from ATA’s demise.
Hmm, a better question is how many of ATA’s fleet will make it into Global Aero Logistics’s other airlines… Some of the DC-10s apparently are already operated by World Airways..
At least there won’t be anymore confusion between ATA and Air Tran Airways.
I meant 180 ETOPS. LOL!
And I left out UA as a LAX-HNL carrier (duh!)
What about the winds aloft between HNL and NRT? I thought those were really nasty, would that affect the flight?
Next one: Alitalia :-)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/04/04/cnitaly104.xml
[…] writing an obituary back then, and really, I was. Combine that with my brief heads up yesterday on ATA’s bankruptcy filing and the excellent comments that followed, and there’s not really much left to say, but of […]
Hmm…not sure about the winds aloft between HNL-NRT. Very well could be the case that they might prevent regular 757 service, although I can’t imagine them being worse than the North Atlantic.