There’s good news out there for those of you who like to book your travel using online travel agents. Expedia and Travelocity have both followed in Priceline’s footsteps and dropped all booking fees for flights. There don’t appear to be any catches, but this is a temporary move. Flights must be booked by May 31.

After Priceline did this ages ago, Expedia was the first to follow and drop fees. I think it’s safe to assume that this is a competitive move to try to shift more share from its competitors. Travelocity soon followed, apparently afraid it would lose too much share.

But Orbitz has yet to match. Will they hold out? Orbitz has done a lot to try to differentiate itself from other sites with its TLC and Price Assurance programs, but now the latter is being copied as well. Travelocity said it will also refund your money if someone books the same trip as you for less, but they will only do it for vacation packages. Not to be outdone, Priceline said it will do the same for both individual flight itineraries and vacation packages. Confused yet?

I just have to wonder if this move makes sense at all. You would think that the fee-sensitive travelers had stopped booking with online travel agent sites long ago and now go to the airline sites. Are they going to come back now? I doubt it. Of course, as I mentioned, it’s probably just an effort to bring people over from other online travel agents, like Priceline. Since Priceline stopped charging fees, they have attracted a greater share of the audience. Expedia must now think it’s significant to do something about it. And maybe Orbitz disagrees. Time will tell, though I think it’s more likely that they’re just preparing their response as I write this.

Mark over at Upgrade: Travel Better thinks this “temporary” fee cut may become permanent, and he very well may be right. Once you get into these competitive spirals, it’s hard to get out, even if it ends up not working out well for the bottom line.

I’ve seen many people criticize Delta for what it puts on its blog, but they’ve been putting more and more useful information on there lately. I’d encourage those interested in Delta to go back and give it another chance. My favorite posts are those from Marie Force, Delta’s archive manager. But in the last couple days, there have been a couple of posts with some current developments that are worth noting.

1) Upgrade and Standby lists on Delta.com and Soon, Mobile

Delta was the first that I can recall to invest in flat screen monitors to make all sorts of information available to the people waiting around at the gate. Included in that was the standby list. Did you make it on the earlier flight? Had they even cleared the list yet? What about the upgrade to First Class? The screen had all the info. It has taken them several years, but they’ve finally brought this functionality to the website.

Now when you’re flying, you can go online and make sure you’re on the standby/upgrade list. More importantly, you can see how many seats are available, and you can learn where you are on that list. Nice, huh?

This is only on the website right now, but they say it will be on the mobile version “shortly.” Then it will become much more valuable.

2) Wifi Progress

If you’re one of those people rejoicing at having wireless internet onboard, you’ll be happy to know that Delta has made some real progress. Just yesterday, they said 44 aircraft were outfitted, but this morning they said it was up to 59. As of today, 53 of the MD-88 aircraft (out of 113), 5 757s (out of 128), and the very first MD-90 (out of 16) have been outfitted with wireless internet. One more MD-88 and one MD-90 go in tonight.

If you include all 78 737s, all MD-88s, all MD-90s, and all 757s in the calcuation, that means that 17.6% of the domestic fleet is outfitted. Some of those 757s, however, are part of the international fleet, and some of the 767s are part of the domestic fleet, so it’s not exact. Of course, this doesn’t (and won’t) include regional aircraft.

Still, if you’re on an MD-88, you now have a 47% chance of getting a wireless-enabled aircraft. That’s very good, and it’s progressing quickly.

3) More Room for Crap on 757s

The rest of the updates weren’t exactly earth-shattering, but they’re still kind of interesting. And the blogger who wrote about them writes in pretty technical language, so I thought I could serve as a translator.

One update was on the “75E” aircraft. That’s actually just their internal code for the 757s that fly over the Atlantic. So what did they do? They added larger lav tanks. Apparently, people were cooped up a little too long on those 757s and they must have been running out of room in the lav tanks. Yuck. The modifications will be done on all the international 757s by June 1. Might want to avoid drinking too much water on those planes until then.

Other good news: they put headrests on the coach seats while this was going on.

4) More Business Class on 777-200LR

Delta’s longest haul aircraft, the 777-200LR, is slowly entering the fleet. The third aircraft was just delivered, and they’ve apparently found a way to squeeze in another two business class seats. So instead of 43, there will now be 45 onboard. The first two aircraft will be modified to have two more business class seats in the next couple months as well.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say that they wish airlines would just be more honest with them about delays. Sure, airlines promise to update you every 15 minutes these days (yeah, that happens), but often, the agents aren’t given all the information they need to keep you up to date. That’s why when I received a note from the guys behind FLTAdvisor, I immediately saw some promise in the idea.

FLTAdvisor’s goal is to find out if a flight is really going to be on time, despite what the airline says. The idea is great, but can they pull it off? So far, so good, but keep in mind that you will have to pay for it. (More that later.)

For the most part, customer service agents and passengers are constrained by whatever the systems are displaying for actual flight time information, but we all know that’s not the whole story. I can often trace a plane back a couple legs to see that it’s going to be late, but airlines generally suck about letting us know about that for fear that aircraft changes may be made and it won’t be accurate.

FLTAdvisor is full of operations guys that used to work for airlines, and they put together this model to help find delays earlier. Yeah, they trace planes back to see if there are delays already, but they do a lot more than that. They use a lot of assumptions about how quickly airplanes can turn around, which runways are operating that day, etc to come up with an accurate prediction. I spoke with John King at the company, and he said that so far accuracy has been very good. I decided to put it to the test.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t as easy as I had thought. I picked a handful of flights, and somehow they all ended up being on time. (This even includes a flight from JFK to Philly on a bad weather day. Come on!) But then I found one. United flight 1166 from SFO to LAX on Sunday, Feb 15 (I wrote this post a little while ago). Here’s what I received. My first email came in at 230p (you can choose when emails should be sent).

United 1166 San Francisco-Los Angeles:
FltAdvisor analysis indicates your departure from San Francisco may be at 5:42 PM, 12 mins late.
FltAdvisor analysis indicates your aircraft is flying from San Francisco to Santa Ana and is currently 80 mins late.
Your aircraft is routed through Santa Ana and then back to San Francisco.
SFO Weather/Rain may cause additional delays.
United reports your 5:30 PM departure from San Francisco is on-time.
Additional Information:
Current Departure Gate 73
Estimated Arrival in LAX at 6:55 PM
Current Arrival Gate 70B
Scheduled – 735 type aircraft.
The following information is from the FAA’s ATC Command Center.
These are general airport conditions and are not flight-specific.
Real-Time Airport Delays for SFO:
Due to WEATHER / WIND, there is a Traffic Management Program in effect for traffic arriving San Francisco International Airport, San Francisco, CA (SFO). This is causing some arriving flights to be delayed an average of 2 hours and 58 minutes.
Delays by Destination:
No destination-specific delays are being reported.

Excellent. My plane was already looking to be in bad shape, so at least I could mentally prepare for the delay. There’s also an option in each email to click for alternate flights. It shows those with the actual expected times of departure for those as well, so that’s a helpful tool if you really need to be somewhere. At 430p, an hour before the original departure time of the flight, the half-hourly updates started pouring in.

• 430p: my flight would now be 71 minutes late because the plane was stuck in Orange County (United.com said 55 minutes late)
• 500p and 530p: once the plane had left Orange County, it said the flight would be 90 minutes late
• 6p: revised downward, probably due to lifting traffic restrictions, saying that it would be only 68 minutes late
• 630p: pushed it up again and said it would be 80 minutes late, 10 minutes from the time of that email

Ultimately, the plane ended up departing 75 minutes late, so certainly within an acceptable range. The most important thing here is that FLTAdvisor gave me notice that a delay was a good possibility long before United did. Were my flight times very important, I could have switched to an earlier flight (that probably also would have been delayed) before others would even know about it.

Yes, it’s always possible that United could have switched planes at SFO and made the flight go on time, and that’s why you can never rely completely on this service. (They’ll send you an email as soon as they see a move like that happening.) But it’s a great early warning system that helps set expectations.

Of course, something like this isn’t going to be free as I mentioned earlier. It’s either $8 a month ($88 a year) or you can buy packets that give you a certain number of flights to track. For example, 10 flights will cost you $15.

If I were a frequent business traveler, I imagine that would be extremely helpful.

Last month, I talked about how the British Airways 777 accident and the Delta 777 incident had been connected by an interim report from the UK. The NTSB has, after review, agreed with these findings and is now requiring “urgent” action. But “urgent” is not as dire as it sounds. It does not require aircraft to be grounded, and it will take at least a year, most likely, before the work is complete.

The NTSB has told Rolls-Royce that it needs to redesign the Fuel Oil Heat Exchanger (where cold fuel passes hot oil and they cool/warm each other to proper temperatures) to prevent ice accumulation and subsequent blockage of the the fuel lines. You may remember that the hot oil wasn’t properly warming the cold fuel and ice was forming. This has, so far, only been a problem on the Rolls-Royce Trent 800 engines, though Rolls believes that this could ultimately have a larger impact after further research is done on icing for long flights at very cold temperatures. But that’s another story.

Rolls is working on the fix already and expects to have it ready within a year. Once the redesign is complete, airlines will have no more than six months to implement the fix. So if this is so “urgent,” why aren’t the planes being grounded? Well, procedures have already been put into place to help avoid these types of incidents, but the NTSB doesn’t think that’s a good long term solution. In the NTSB’s words:

While the procedures may reduce the risk of a rollback in one or both engines due to [Fuel Oil Heat Exchanger] ice blockage, they add complexity to flight crew operations, and the level of risk reduction is not well established. And because the recovery procedure requires a descent, the aircraft may be exposed to other risks such as rising terrain or hazardous weather, or the inability to achieve maximum thrust during a critical phase of flight, such as during a missed approach.

So while the fix they’re using right now does work, it’s not satisfactory in the long term. So should we worry about stepping on a Rolls-Royce powered 777? I wouldn’t. But it is clear that there are problems and it’s good to see them being addressed sooner rather than later.

News and Notes From United’s 10-K
United’s 10-K gave us some interesting bits on its Mileage Plus redemptions, bmi partnership, and its credit card processing agreements.

Visiting Lumexis, a New Competitor in the Inflight Entertainment World
Lumexis put its first inflight entertainment test system on an airplane this week, and I visited the company recently to learn more about the system.

Delta Reaffirms 787 Order
Rumors swirled that Delta had canceled its 787 order, but that’s apparently not true.

AirTran Continues to Diversify Beyond Atlanta
In a presentation this week, AirTran detailed how much it has really diversified beyond its Atlanta hub. It’s interesting to note how much the airline has changed.

Virgin America Shareholders Cash Out, Airline Reports Negative 25 Percent Fourth Quarter Margin
Virgin America is full of bad news this week as it posted another steep loss as its major US shareholders pulled out.

Delta Cuts International Flying on Weaker Demand
Delta is making cuts to international capacity, and that’s good news for the industry. But is it quick enough?

Alaska Sees Rising Costs on Capacity Cuts
All this capacity cutting may be good for the industry, but it has an unpleasant side effect . . . rising unit costs. Alaska has shown us some numbers.

Airlines May Suffer From Increasing Danger in Mexico
Violence along the border has been increasing, but it’s bound to affect resort towns as well. Which airlines stand to hurt the most as demand drops?

Best and Worst Airport On-Time Percentages in January
Only one surprise in this list, and it’s not a “good” surprise at all.