Pop quiz: Where is the one place in the continental United States where you’ll never be asked to walk through a metal detector before boarding a commercial aircraft? The answer is . . . Tulsa. Yes, the people of Tulsa can now rejoice; there’s finally something interesting going on there. The TSA is testing Millimeter Wave technology, and that means no more metal detectors (unless you want one).

The Millimeter Wave is a controversial device, though I’m all for it. It’s actually a better security device than a metal detector because it catches more than just metal. When you walk into a Milimeter Wave machine, it scans you and shows the outlines of foreign objects to the screeners. In one example, a passenger had left a credit card in her back pocket and the machine picked it up. This means that it can pick up non-metallic explosives as well. It’s also excellent news for people with metal screws or other non-native parts in the body, since those can be detected without the dreaded pat down.

You won’t be surprised to know that there are those who hate this idea. Some say that it’s too revealing and it’s an invasion of privacy because you see an outline of the person’s body parts, but I think it looks sufficiently vague to me. Here’s a sample view courtesy of Travelin’ Librarian via Flickr:

But for those Tulsa fliers who remain offended by this device, you can opt for a metal detector and pat down instead. Others are worried about the amount of time it takes – certainly longer than a metal detector. That’s a very valid complaint, and it means the TSA is going to need to adjust the number of machines it uses. I suppose that’s why they’re doing this test.

If anyone flies through Tulsa, let me know how it goes. In the next few weeks, this will also be coming to San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, Albuquerque, and Salt Lake City so more people will have the chance to try it out. I welcome this with open arms. What about you?

Delta Starts Consolidating Regional Carriers
Delta is taking pieces of Compass, Comair, and Mesaba and mashing them together. Seems like a good idea to me.

Why is Hawaiian Installing In-Seat Video?
Hawaiian is putting in seat video on its long haul fleet, but the case for installation is different in this market than in others.

Billions of Stimulus Funds Will Go to Transportation
The stimulus is now law, and the government is starting to dole out the funds quickly. How will the world of transportation benefit?

Mesa Makes Progress in Hawai’i with Mokulele on the Brink
Big changes could be in store for Hawai’i as a couple of airlines show very mixed results.

December Premium Air Traffic Down More Than 13 Percent
It’s time for the December premium traffic update, and guess what? It’s not pretty. Traffic continues to drop, but which area is getting hit hardest?

LAX Modernization is On the Wrong Track
LAX continues to push how proud it is that they’ve designed an architecturally-significant building for the airport expansion. It’s just sad to see how wrong that strategy is.

Frontier Has a Good December
I’m a little late with this, but I wanted to talk about Frontier’s good December. While the results are good, they’re not as good as you may think.

Despite all the skepticism around my initial post, Allegiant did, in fact, announce this week that it’s coming to LAX and not any of the other surrounding airports. Glad to see that my source is as reliable as I thought. It’s definitely some new territory for the airline, and I imagine that they’ll do very well here, or shall I say they’ll do very well bringing people here. Let’s get the details out here for all those frozen Midwesterners who want a little sun and sand (today’s weather: 71 and partly cloudy).

Allegiant is a very simple operation. They will be basing two aircraft here at LAX and those planes will usually each do a morning roundtrip to some far flung destination followed by a second roundtrip in the afternoon every day of the week. That’s right. They’ll serve twelve destinations from LAX with only two airplanes, but that’s normal for these guys.

Allegiant doesn’t try for business traffic. They just want to bring leisure travelers to a destination, and in this case that destination is Southern California. It’s cheap (some flights for as low as $39 each way), but you have to fly on their terms. Make sure you pay attention to all the extra fees – almost nobody escapes without paying more – but it’s still a really good deal overall. Each destination will be served only two or three times per week. Here’s the rollout schedule:

Starting:
May 1 – Grand Junction (Colorado) on Monday/Friday
May 1 – Medford (Oregon) on Monday/Friday
May 2 – Bellingham (Washington – near the Canadian border) on Monday/Wednesday/Saturday
May 2 – Missoula (Montana) on Wednesday/Saturday
May 3 – Monterey (California) on Tuesday/Thursday/Sunday
May 3 – Springfield/Branson (Missouri) on Thursday/Sunday
May 22 – Billings (Montana) on Tuesday/Friday
May 23 – Fargo (North Dakota) on Tuesday/Saturday
May 23 – Sioux Falls (South Dakota) on Wednesday/Saturday
May 23 – Wichita (Kansas) on Wednesday/Saturday
May 24 – Des Moines (Iowa) on Thursday/Sunday
May 24 – McAllen (Texas) on Thursday/Sunday

It will be very interesting to see how United/American/Alaska react to direct competition on routes they fly nonstop. Scratch that – there really isn’t much competition here, but will it be perceived that way? Those United and American flights from Monterey to LAX are there mostly to feed other flights and not for local traffic. This thrice weekly flight on Allegiant really won’t take much traffic from the existing airlines but rather stimulate new traffic. It’s a little different in Medford where Horizon gets local traffic, but it still won’t be much competition with only two flights a week. Of course, Alaska (Horizon’s parent) has shown that it is all for strong reactions when threatened lately (right, Virgin America?), so there’s no guarantee they will ignore this either.

Another interesting thing is what you find when you pick through the schedules to look for holes. When a plane goes to Monterey on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, it looked like it was sitting on the ground for more than four hours. A little more digging shows that Allegiant is squeezing in a roundtrip down to San Diego from Monterey before it comes back to LAX again. Same thing goes for flights to Grand Junction, but from there the plane is just going back to Vegas, probably so they can swap aircraft through the system.

Also, one of the airplanes has a gaping hole on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons. The plane arrives back at LAX at 140p on Monday, 235p on Tuesday, 355p on Wednesday, and 135p on Friday and does nothing else for the rest of the day. Something tells me they could launch another route or two in the not-too-distant future. There’s no reason for that plane to sit idle.

One more thing. If you’re trying to put the schedules together yourselves, you may have a little trouble until you realize that the Wednesday and Saturday flights to Bellingham are actually flown by an airplane based in Bellingham and not one of the LAX planes. That’s how they can squeeze out an extra morning flight on those days.

Allegiant will use Terminal 6 at LAX, and they won’t need a ton of space. In fact, the flights are scattered so that this entire thing can be operated from only one gate. So, welcome to LAX, Allegiant. We look forward to seeing you bring many pasty white Midwesterners here to spend money and help us out of our budget hole.

In case it wasn’t clear, the days of Southwest heading to secondary airports are over. Next stop? Boston. Flights begin, well, we don’t really know that. The airline has once again announced a new city/partnership without releasing any details (LaGuardia? WestJet? Anyone?). But, whenever it happens, it’ll be a small, two gate operation to start.

I’m a little surprised by the choice. While Islip is in no way a decent substitute for a New York City airport, Providence in the south and Manchester in the north have done a fair job over the years of pulling traffic from Boston. They stand to be the biggest losers in this announcement, and I have to think that they will end up losing flights, even if the Boston operation remains small.

Boston is the newest destination from Virgin America (though unless we see some highly unlikely transcons, they aren’t trying to compete with them), it’s one of JetBlue’s biggest locations, and AirTran has a strong presence, especially on routes that Southwest is most likely to enter (twice daily to Midway and seven times daily to Baltimore). So there’s plenty of low fare competition on many routes, but clearly that’s not stopping Southwest.

If they really are hell bent on serving every big city, as it seems, I’m surprised that Atlanta wasn’t next on the list. It’s THE southern city and it has nothing from Southwest closer than Birmingham, 150+ miles away from town. That city seemingly would bring more benefit to the Southwest system. I’d say maybe AirTran was driving them away, but they’re likely to be dropping right on top of AirTran with this Boston announcement as well.

Either way, I’m done guessing Cincinnati, Memphis and the usual suspects for new Southwest flying from now on. I think we’ll see them at Washington/National, Atlanta, and Miami if they keep this up. I just hope one of these days we start to get some details on their announcements.

[Original image from Eric F Savage via Flickr]

It appears that more cuts are coming at the US Airways (formerly America West) Las Vegas hublet. Over the next few months, we’ll see flights to Calgary, Edmonton, Baltimore, and Portland disappear. But the one that really gets me is the end of Vegas to New York/JFK. To me, this officially marks the end of one of the most fun hub operations around, so please excuse me while I get a little nostalgic.

Why is the end of the JFK route so monumental? For years, that was THE route out of Vegas for America West. It was one of the few routes where we actually sold a lot of First Class tickets instead of just filling the cabin with upgrades. The number of New Yorkers that wanted to blow their money in Vegas was astounding, and even the entrance of low-fare disaster National Airlines didn’t spoil the party. I suppose now with American, Delta, jetBlue, and Virgin America flying the route, it just doesn’t make sense.

So, with only around 50 or 60 flights a day (fewer than 10 of them after 9p) to about 20 cities, I think we must now officially call the Vegas hub dead. Let’s take a look back.

The hub started during the 80’s when America West realized that if there was any place where people would fly in the middle of the night, it was Vegas. Before the hub, planes would usually arrive at their destinations around the US in the evening, spend the night, and fly out in the morning again. With the Vegas hub, they could fly those planes into Vegas late night, then fly them back in time for the morning departure. The additional cost of squeezing an extra roundtrip in was minimal, so the hub flourished.

With this plan came some of the strangest people you would ever meet. Traveling through the Vegas hub at midnight was like a walk down the seediest back alley in, well, Vegas. The piercing per person ratio was probably in the double digits, and tattoos were everywhere.

Now take that group of people and cram them into a perennially overcrowded terminal (that always seemed to be under some sort of construction), throw in some clanging slot machines, and you had something that belonged in the seventh circle of hell.

Why would these people subject themselves to such pain? Two reasons. The flight times actually were great for Vegas travel. You could finish work, hop on a plane, and be drunk and broke at O’Sheas by midnight. Oh yeah, and it was cheap. Cheap + Vegas = Lots of passengers.

Certain flights stood out as being the real winners. The Thursday night flights from LA? Lots of strippers. (I think they mostly fly Southwest now.) And of course, there was the flight that was near and dear to every America West employee’s heart. The late night flight home to Phoenix.

Every night for years and years, long after most people were in bed (or at a strip club), America West would shuttle a plane or two from Vegas back to headquarters in Phoenix to prepare for flights the next morning. Sometimes there was one flight, other times there were two. Back in the early 1990s, they even operated this with the massive 747 that was acquired for Hawai’i flying. But one thing was clear: 95% of the people on this plane were America West employees coming home from a long night of drinking and gambling. Man that was fun.

My favorite experience on this flight was when a female gate agent joined me in LA for a UCLA football game. After the game, there were no more nonstops home, so we went to Vegas. And once in Vegas, you might as well have some fun right? I believe that night the last flight home was around 230a, and the flight was packed with employees. You would think that a flight like that, even if it is only 45 minutes, would be full of sleeping people, but no. It was full of employees telling stories about their night. When we landed shortly before 4a, spirits were still high.

That flight was killed a couple years ago, and I think every America West employee was sad to see it go. I have plenty of other stories about my Vegas hub flying. There was the time it took me four flights on four different airlines to get home. Or the time when a bunch of us flew to Mexico City and there were only 5 other people onboard. I can remember early mornings choosing between one of the three flights that all left at 7a to go back to Phoenix. Those were the busy days for that hub, but now it’s gone. The end of the JFK flight really is the end of an era.