Yes, it’s true. A reader alerted me to the fact that, as the website says, “MAX is back.” Don’t get too excited though. The airline is coming back as a charter carrier focused on NCAA sports travel, so you probably won’t have much of an opportunity to fly them.

Weird, huh? Apparently, the airline has been bought by NCA Sports Group, a company which wants to provide bus and air transportation for college sports. On their website, they say that they will be starting University Airlines with A320s and CRJ-700s. Well, now they own a fleet of fancy 767-200s with all business class, so their plans have apparently changed.

So, if you see a MAXjet plane at your local airport, you’re not going crazy. There’s probably just some college team in town on a very nice charter aircraft.

It’s on like Donkey Kong. Yesterday, Northwest and Delta finally announced that they would merge. This of course follows speculation that began back in 1932 when C.E. Woolman and Lewis Brittin first discussed such a possibility. Now, before I go any further, let me just say once that this all completely depends upon receiving antitrust approval from the government. I’d argue that this administration is likely to be friendly to such a merger, but it’s still far from guaranteed. Enough of the disclaimers; let’s get it on.

You can read the bible-length press release issued by both airlines if you’d like to get all the details. If that’s not enough, you can go to the new Delta website found at the ridiculous url of newglobalairline.com. I’ll just focus on what this means to you, the customer. But first, a brief rundown of the deal.

Let’s make no mistake about it; Delta is the lead dog here. The name of the combined airline will remain Delta and it will continue to be headquartered in Atlanta, though oddly there will be “executive offices” in Minneapolis as well. Delta CEO Richard Anderson will be in charge, and his second lieutenant Ed Bastian will continue as President and CFO. So what does Northwest get? Well, the shareholders get 1.25 shares of Delta stock for each share of Northwest stock, and everyone else gets . . . um, screwed.

Routes
On paper, this airline looks mighty sexy. You’ve got Delta’s strengths in the South, Northeast, Europe and in the West to a limited extent. Combine that with Northwest’s domination in the Upper Midwest and Asia and you’ve got very little overlap at all. Now, about the hubs. Delta says it “will maintain all hubs at Atlanta, Cincinnati, Detroit, Memphis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, New York-JFK, Salt Lake City, Amsterdam and Tokyo-Narita — each of which will benefit from improved global connectivity.”

The guys who wrote that release were very careful to say that no hubs will be eliminated but notice that they don’t say the same about flights. In fact, they do say in the release, “The transaction is expected to generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue and cost synergies from more effective aircraft utilization, a more comprehensive and diversified route system and cost synergies from reduced overhead and improved operational efficiency.”

Wow, that’s a lot of bullcrap, isn’t it? Anytime I see “synergies” mentioned, I throw up a little. But what this says to me is that they’ve got $1b worth of ideas on how to make this airline more efficient. And that has to involve cutting capacity out of the system. Where are the most likely candidates? I’m looking at you, Memphis and Cincinnati.

Yes, they should keep all their “hubs” if they use that term loosely. By the time they’re done with Memphis and Cincinnati, they might look more like Indianapolis. See, all those small Upper Midwest cities that Delta serves from Cincinnati can now very adequately be served from Detroit and Minneapolis. And all those southern cities that Northwest serves from Memphis can be served from Atlanta. Heck, those two cities themselves are only 400 miles apart. So, I would completely expect to see those hubs shrunk down. Whatever cities they can serve due to strong local demand, they will. But many of those other cities can be better served elsewhere. And Northwest has plenty of old DC-9s that they can just send to the boneyard to easily reduce capacity. And don’t forget, Delta just kicked Mesa’s 50 seaters off the property, so they now won’t need to replace that capacity either.

Internationally, this will probably only result in growth. There aren’t any real overlap issues here. With the recently approved antitrust immunity approval from the US government, they won’t even have to wait until the merger is done to start coordinating with Air France/KLM on routes and fares over the Atlantic. In the Pacific, Delta has just about no presence at all, so this will only create more opportunities.

Onboard Product
Great, so there will be a bunch of flights, but what will it be like onboard? We get one clue from the press release. “The combination will accelerate the upgrading of existing international aircraft with lie-flat seats and personal on-demand entertainment.” Now I’m not sure if they consider Northwest’s angled lie-flat seats to be “lie-flat” but I’d bet those seats will be hanging around for awhile since they’re pretty new. As the Northwest-ordered 787s get delivered, however, I’d expect a true lie-flat product more along the lines of Delta’s new seats.

It will be interesting to see what else Delta plans to do here. It’s probably a safe bet that the current Delta onboard product will become the standard. Northwest currently has no inflight entertainment on their domestic fleet and Delta has been installing personal televisions on a pretty good chunk of their fleet. Will this change their installation plans at all? We’re getting way into the weeds here. This will all come out in time.

Customer Service
Oh no, this isn’t going to be good. If you thought Doug Parker over at US Airways had a tough job integrating labor groups, that’s now going to look like a walk in the park. Originally, Delta and Northwest said that they wouldn’t merge unless they could get the pilots to agree to an integration plan before the deal happened. Um, yeah, that didn’t work out so well and the deal fell apart a couple months ago because of it. Why are they so focused on the pilots? That is the only large employee group at Delta that’s unionized. Ah, now it becomes clear.

So what do they do? Delta goes to its pilots and gets an agreement with them that will go “through the end of 2012. The agreement, which is subject to pilot ratification, facilitates the realization of the revenue synergies of the combined companies once the transaction is completed. It also provides the Delta pilots a 3.5 percent equity stake in the new company and other enhancements to their current contract.”

Again, what the hell does that mean? It “facilitates the realization of the revenue synergies of the combined companies”? Please shut up. No, just stop talking. I can’t take it. What this actually means is that the pilots get good raises every year until the contract is done and they walk away with a stake in the new company. But what about those Northwest pilots? How about . . . nada. In fact, they’ve already said that they’re against this merger.

On the brighter side, “The company also expects no involuntary furloughs of frontline employees as a result of this transaction and the existing pension plans for both companies’ employees will be protected.” Well that’s good, but that’s also dependent upon them getting enough voluntary furloughs to make up for the job cuts they’ll need to make this work. I’d guess that they’ll be successful on that front. Northwest employees will probably run away in droves.

So, you can expect all kinds of customer service hiccups as this thing goes through. Just hold on tight and try not to cry too much.

Summary
Let’s see, what else can I say? This has been a long time coming. Is it as necessary as everyone claims it is? I wouldn’t say that, but I’m not going to say it’s bad either. It all depends upon how well they execute. If the combined airlines can trim Cincinnati and Memphis at the very least, the industry will be better off. Will fares go up? They should. There, I’ve said it. Hate me if you like.

The airline industry has been an unstable roller coaster ride for 30 years. If this allows airlines to better match capacity to a level where they can actually fly profitably, then it’s a good thing. Though low fares are always nice for the customer, it’s better to have a stable airline industry that can actually survive the ups and downs.

Oh, one more thing before I go. A lot of you have written me over the last few months asking why I hadn’t said a word about the rumored merger. The reason? I’ve seen way too many rumors and barely anything actually come to fruition. So, I won’t speculate on the rumored Continental-United merger. For those who don’t know, Northwest holds a “golden share” in Continental. That means they have the ability to block Continental from merging with anyone. This stems from a deal they made years ago, but when Northwest enters a merger agreement, Continental can buy that back for a hundred measly dollars. We know Continental and United have been talking. If it turns into something more, then I’ll be back with another post.

Until then, I’m going to continue to digest this avalanche of info, and I’ll update you when I find something interesting.

Raise your hand if you wish you could read more of what I have to say.

For the two of you who actually raised your hand, you might need to seek some professional help. If not, you’ll be happy to know that in addition to Cranky, I’m now going to be writing for BNET as well. What is BNET? Well, take CNET and change the first letter. Still not working for you? BNET is “the go-to place for management,” or at least that’s what the tagline says. It really is trying to be a resource for managers, and for some strange reason the people over there have asked me to help make that happen.

I am now officially the travel blogger for BNET. Basically, you know that as Cranky I try to keep more focused on customer facing issues. Well, now over at BNET I’m going to talk more about topics for either managers in the airline industry or those who think it’s so screwed up that they could learn how NOT to do things. I’ll be posting over there every day Monday through Friday, just as I do here.

So, please come and check it out. You can sign up for RSS and email alerts if you’d like. But please keep coming back to Cranky as well. Nothing will change over here at all. You’ll still get the same frequency, same quality, and same terrible graphics that you know and love.

It’s been a heck of a week. Nice of Frontier to cap it off with a Chapter 11 filing last night, huh? I’m a little nervous about this one. They say they filed because the credit card processor increased the holdback significantly. It’s no surprise. With all these other airlines going under, the credit card guys are getting nervous that they’ll be left holding the bag again, so they want more of a cushion. Meanwhile, that means Frontier had to throw together a bankruptcy filing and now hope they can find Debtor-in-Possession (DIP). If they can, then they’ll reorganize. If they can’t, well, they’ll join the rest of the guys in the graveyard. For now, nothing changes while they sort things out. We’ll see what happens.

So I say let’s forget this crap for now. I’m ending the week on a lighter note. I’m very sad to report that the Playmobil Security Checkpoint is no longer available on Amazon. This is a bummer, because it provided some pretty impressive inspiration for the 47 customer reviews. These are definitely worth a read.

Some of the highlights . . .

“I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger’s shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger’s scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up.”

“I especially appreciated the enclosed signed photo of Michael Chertoff and his letter explaining how necessary it is to start educating today’s youth early with toys like these, especially as their elders just don’t seem to be taking the whole thing seriously”

“I applaud Playmobile for attempting to provide us with the tools we need to teach our children to unquestioningly obey the commands of the State Security Apparatus, but unfortunately, this product falls short of doing that. There’s no brown figure for little Josh to profile, taser, and detain? Where are all the frightened plastic Heartlanders pointing at the brown figure as they whisper “terrorist?” Where are the hippy couple figures being denied boarding passes? And shouldn’t someone be forcing a mother figure to drink her own breast milk?”

“Unfortunately, this toy comes short in a few areas:
1) It does not show that if you’re rich, you don’t have to wait in line for hours. If you can travel first class, you get your own fast-track screening. Too bad the terr’ists have plenty of Saudi and Pakistani cash and can easily travel first class should they want to. They should have included another screening set in the box.
2) It does not come with the 300 tired-looking playmobils you would need to show the passengers waiting in line behind the screening area. “

“I wish this toy had been around when I was a child so that we might have learned important life lessons rather than the fluffy sugar-coated false utopia of Rainbow Bright and Friends.”

Come to think of it, this may not really be much of a lighter note after all. Ugh. I’m taking the weekend off this week. See you back here on Monday.

There’s no question that American has done an absolutely terrible job of managing the latest round of MD-80 maintenance issues from a PR perspective. It’s been so bad, that I’ve seen articles start to question the MD-80 as an airplane, even though there’s no reason for them to do so. The MD-80 is a safe plane, and it’s unfortunate that American has let this thing get away from them. So, as Milli Vanilli might say . . . blame it on AA, yeah, yeah. (No? Too ridiculous?)

It all comes back to American’s unwillingness to push out a full explanation of what was happening. Finally, yesterday, they did, though curiously it came from their EVP of Marketing and not from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. Airline Biz blog has the info here.

Basically, a couple years ago, there were concerns that wiring could arc and start fires or cause a variety of other problems. The FAA put out an Airworthiness Directive (AD) and made the airlines comply within 18 months. Now, they clearly didn’t think this was a problem of imminent doom, or they wouldn’t have allowed the airlines to make the fixes over 18 months.

By now, the fixes had been finished, but not 100% to spec. Now the FAA, fresh off being burned by the Southwest fiasco, is getting anal. They’re enforcing every little detail, so when they found that the spacing between ties holding the wire bundles together weren’t exactly one inch apart, they called foul.

So, the airlines flying the MD-80 are making these tiny changes to meet the requirements, even if it isn’t really a safety issue. How American wasn’t able to fix this last week when the planes were first grounded, I’ll never know. But it’s probably the FAA’s attempt to show the public that they’re doing something that’s making all this happen. It could have happened to any aircraft, but this is like the one kid in class who gets pulled to the front of the room so the teacher can make an example out of him.

Since it took American awhile to finally discuss the full details, it gave the media plenty of time to cook up stupid, stupid stories. The worst piece of irresponsible journalism comes from the AP. They put out a story entitled “Plane type Under Review Has Had Mishaps.” Uh oh. This awful piece of work goes on to link completely unrelated incidents, most of which were not even due to problems with the aircraft. And now CNN is jumping into the ring by talking about some landing gear problems that American MD-80s have had on extremely rare occasions over the last few months. The scaremongers are revving up. Let’s put a stop to that.

The MD-80 is a safe plane. Douglas built planes like tanks, and they tend to last forever. It’s no surprise that Northwest continues to operate 40 year old DC-9s. They may not be fuel efficient compared to newer planes, but they’re definitely solid aircraft.

I mean, take a look at this plane. Does it look unsafe?

Ok, so maybe it looks like a giant flying wiener, but it’s not unsafe. I know a lot of Americans living out here on the West Coast often associate the MD-80 with the Alaska Airlines crash off the coast of Southern California. It’s not often that we see accidents of that magnitude in our own backyard, so it tends to leave a mark. But once again, that wasn’t the fault of the plane. That was improper maintenance by Alaska Airlines.

If you’d like to review all the previous accidents the MD-80 has had, the Aviation Safety Network can help. You’ll see that most if not all the accidents in there were not due to problems specific to the MD-80.

Don’t believe me that the plane is safe? I actually booked a flight on one yesterday. My fiancee and I will be flying on a Midwest MD-80 in August, and I didn’t think twice about it from a safety standpoint. American, Delta, Allegiant, Midwest, and Alaska all still fly the MD-80 in the US thousands of times per day without incident. There’s no reason you should avoid them.