. . . not Cranky. If you went to check the Weblog Award site after the voting ended on Tuesday, you likely saw that my blog ended the race in second, down 29 votes to a small Swiss blog called MyKugelhopf. But they didn’t officially release the winners until today, so I figured I’d wait just in case they decided that, oh, 30 of MyKugelhopf’s votes didn’t count.

That wasn’t the case. So, thank you to everyone for who voted for me over the last week, and congrats to the Kug (not to be confused with John “no longer the Coug” Mellencamp). It’s a very food-focused site, so foodies may want to head over and check it out.

Now back to writing about today’s US Airways accident. I’ll be back in the morning.

I know it’s just one route, but Southwest’s decision to enter the San Francisco – Orange County route with five flights a day on May 9 is a very telling move with a lot of implications.

First of all, this marks the last route flown by United mainline aircraft within California that Southwest wasn’t flying. Years ago, United was the king of California, but that status has been in decline for a long time. In fact, once we get rid of all the little prop flying within California, there are only five regional jet routes that United flies and Southwest doesn’t:

• Burbank – San Francisco
• Los Angeles – Fresno
• Los Angeles – San Diego (one regional jet flight a day, the rest are props)
• Ontario – San Francisco
• Palm Springs – San Francisco

We’ll probably never see Southwest in the LA – San Diego market since that short route is almost solely for connections beyond LA, and I doubt we’ll see Southwest in Palm Springs or Fresno anytime soon. But those Burbank and Ontario routes to San Francisco will probably happen one of these days. It’s just a matter of further connecting the dots as United continues to retrench. Burbank-San Francisco, for example, had mainline United flying until recently when it became all United Express.

The other implication is for Virgin America. Southwest is clearly making it quite clear to everyone that it considers California its turf and it isn’t going to mess around. It showed it to Virgin America when it came back to San Francisco and when it started LA to San Francisco flights. (The image at left was originally from my post on the LA-SF flights.)

Lately, one of the routes on Virgin America’s list was San Francisco – Orange County, when it could get the slots. At least, that’s the story that came out in December. There are slot restrictions at Orange County, but Southwest has either found more or reshuffled its existing flights. It wouldn’t surprise me if they got more, because with Aloha’s demise and other flight cutbacks, there were slots to be had.

My guess is that Virgin America will still try to enter the market, because they want to serve all the big destinations from San Francisco, but it’s going to be a lot harder to make money on the route with Southwest plying the skies as well as United and American.

I’ll leave you with one incredible stat from the Southwest press release . . . they currently have 362 flights per day within California. Wow.

Let’s say you’re running Air Asia, the premier low-cost carrier in Southeast Asia, and you’ve got a problem. You want to keep growing, but that airport at your primary hub in Kuala Lumpur can’t keep up. What do you do? Apparently, you build your own airport.

Air Asia says that it has already outgrown the low cost carrier terminal that was built at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) in 2006, and it needs more room. KLIA has plans to make more room there, but Air Asia says that costs are too high there and it wouldn’t happen fast enough anyway. Instead, they’re going to build “KLIA East” which will be, uh, east of the existing KLIA in Labu which is apparently where there’s an enormous development project underway called Negeri Sembilan Vision City. Take a look at it on the map and you’ll see that for customers in Kuala Lumpur, it’s not much different than going to KLIA except that unlike the existing KLIA, it will be on a train line. Oh, and operating costs are expected to be 30% less.

I see something like that and I have to wonder if an airline in the US could do this. Technically? Maybe. Practically? No chance in hell. If a US airline wanted to take a stab at it, it would have to be completely privately funded with no federal money being used for operations. A US airline would also have to find a place where there’s a big population base and land is affordable. Bzzt. Try again. Even then I’m not sure if this would be allowed under anti-trust rules.

Back in the day, Boeing, United Air Lines, and Burbank Airport were all part of the same company. The government broke that one up, but I’m not sure whether that would still happen today. Anyone know the rules on this? Could an airline actually build their own airport in the US is they so choose?

Just remember, today is your last chance to vote in the 2008 Weblog Awards. You can vote once per day, so even if you’ve voted before, head on back and do it one more time. Voting ends at:

9a in Sydney (Jan 14)
7a in Tokyo (Jan 14)
10p in London
5p in New York
2p in Los Angeles
12n in Honolulu

My guess is that it’ll be a close race all the way to the end, so make sure you head over and vote for the blog you like best.

http://2008.weblogawards.org/polls/best-travel-blog/

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

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Hallelujah! It’s official. Alitalia is born again. Praise Silvio! Last night, the last “old” Alitalia flight landed and the airline completely shut down for a few hours in order to get some sort of certification change. This morning, Alitalia woke up merged with Air One under the “new” Alitalia name. That means we need a new “worst airline ever.” Yes, that honor will now be bestowed upon . . . the “new” Alitalia. I’m operating under the premise that they are guilty until proven innocent.

And why would I automatically pass it on to the new Alitalia? Well not much is changing yet. Yes, we have a new, smaller Alitalia that now owns Air One as well. The combined airlines will continue to operate separately for now, but they’re beginning to merge pieces together. But most importantly, we still have those oh-so-stubborn unions which are still rattling their sabres, hoping for a miracle to save all their jobs. There’s probably only room for one miracle here, and that’s the fact that Alitalia still exists. Instead, we’ll see protests all day long and maybe even a strike or two considering how things work over there.

Oh, and there is one other big piece of news. Alitalia has now officially chosen Air France as the winner of the ownership lottery. For a mere 323 million euros, Air France gets 25 percent of the airline. Looks like the French have succeeded in stopping the German march southward, sort of. Lufthansa will still start up its Italia subsidiary to fly out of Milan, and they own Air Dolomiti as well so there will be strong competition.

But Air France now gets three out of nineteen (19?!) board seats and Alitalia will remain in Skyteam. Alitalia frequent fliers probably won’t see a big change on that front at all. So now we have a private Alitalia that’s a little smaller, but those are really the only changes so far. Can it really find its way out of last place in the race for worst airline ever? Time will tell, but of course, I highly doubt it.

Let’s say you’re John McCain. You’ve finally had a couple months to relax after a very long and taxing presidential campaign. Now it’s time to head back to the Senate and use your influence to really help the country, right? Uh, well, sort of. McCain is back, but he’s not pushing out bills on the most pressing issues of the day. Instead, one of his first acts back on the Hill was to introduce the Abolishing Aviation Barriers Act to eliminate the perimeter rules at Washington/National and New York/LaGuardia airports.

While the perimeter rules may not be the highest on the list of national priorities, I am fully behind this legislation. I wrote a full post on the perimeter rules awhile ago, and you can read that for a full refresher. But in short, there is an imaginary circle drawn around National and LaGuardia, and airlines can’t fly nonstop beyond those points. Here’s a map to help the visual folks here.

Airlines can’t fly nonstop from LaGuardia to anywhere west of the red line or from National to anywhere west of the blue line. It’s not on the map, but Denver got itself an exemption for LaGuardia flights awhile back, and there were a few exemptions that McCain pushed through for National flights beyond the perimeter as well. The National exemptions of course greatly benefited his constituent carrier, America West, which walked away with half the exemptions to fly back to Phoenix and Vegas. America West is now US Airways, and they have a bunch of slots at National and LaGuardia that they’d love to use to fly beyond the perimeter. McCain is clearly trying to treat his home airline well here.

Let’s be honest. These rules are dumb. They were initially instituted back in the day when newer, further airports were being built at JFK and Dulles and they wanted to phase out the use of National and LaGuardia. Instead of shutting them down (Congress couldn’t let go of an airport that’s so close for their own purposes), they slapped these rules on. The rules have changed over the years, but looking at it now, it just seems silly. I mean, there is absolutely no reason for these rules to exist anymore. If it’s a safety issue, then close down the airport. If not, let airlines fly where demand takes them. Everyone will be better off. It’s not like it would increase the amount of traffic. Airlines would simply turn in their flights to Akron and fly to LA instead. Seems smart to me.

The bill is a very simple one. So simple that I’ll just past it here. It’s Senate bill 36.

A BILL

To repeal the perimeter rule for Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the `Abolishing Aviation Barriers Act of 2009′.

SEC. 2. RONALD REAGAN WASHINGTON NATIONAL AIRPORT.

(a) In General- Chapter 449 of title 49, United States Code, is amended by striking section 49109.

(b) Clerical Amendment- The chapter analysis for chapter 449 of title 49, United States Code, is amended by striking the item relating to section 49109 and inserting the following:

`44901. Repealed.’.

SEC. 3. TERMINATION OF FEDERAL SUPPORT FOR PERIMETER RULE AT NEW YORK LAGUARDIA AIRPORT.

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no Federal funds may be obligated or expended after the date of enactment of this Act to enforce the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey rule banning flights beyond 1,500 miles (or any other flight distance related restriction), from arrival or departure at New York LaGuardia Airport.

So it wouldn’t really end the rule in New York, but it would no longer allow federal funds to dictate where airplanes fly from the airport. And I have to think that the Port Authority would like these longer haul flights since they’ll probably replace prop planes which serve fewer passengers.

Oh, and Section 44901? It states:

An air carrier may not operate an aircraft nonstop in air transportation between Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and another airport that is more than 1,250 statute miles away from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

Despite the fact that this is of very little to no national importance, I hope we see it pass.