United Shakes Up Marketing and Distribution Groups
Dennis Cary is out, Graham Atkinson is back in, and marketing and distribution areas and getting makeovers.

Continental’s May Numbers Prove April’s Improvement Wasn’t a Trend
May numbers are out for Continental and they don’t look so hot. No surprise, of course, but still not fun to watch.

Just How Well Did Biofuels Perform in the Air?
Air New Zealand released results of its biofuel test in January, and the results are incredibly impressive.

Online Travel Agents Permanently Drop Booking Fees
Those temporary online travel agent booking fees have been made permanent.

US Airways May Revenue Looks a Lot Like Continental’s
US Airways released its May unit revenue numbers and the results aren’t pretty. No surprises, just not pretty.

Indianapolis Airport Facing Revenue Shortfall
Indianapolis built a new terminal last year, and now with traffic falling, the airport is facing a budget crunch.

Change Happens Slowly at American, Other Large Organizations
Here’s a fun example using American’s website design showing how hard it can be to effect change at a big company.

Starting on July 1, Continental will begin thrice weekly service between LAX and San Salvador, El Salvador. Normally, I wouldn’t think twice about a simple route addition like this, but I find myself wondering if this is the beginning of something more.

This particular route is an interesting one. There is a great deal of traffic, and that’s probably why TACA and American both fly it. But why is Continental going in? It’s possible that they see a marginal opportunity and it’s a way to improve utilization, but I’d like to hope that this is the beginning of Continental’s move into an expanded role between LA and Latin America.

United used to serve the San Salvador route from LA, but they pulled out within the last couple years. Continental has a strong presence in Latin America, but ever since the airline packed up its headquarters and left LA for Houston more than 20 years ago, it hasn’t had much of a presence in LA at all. So the route may or may not have been on their radar before (they’ve tried limited Mexico night flights from LAX in the past), but now with Continental joining the Star Alliance and becoming a tight partner with United, could this be recognition of a greater opportunity?

It always surprised me that United never really tried to penetrate the LA to Mexico business markets. That’s Continental’s specialty out of Houston. So now if we combine Continental’s Latin experience and capabilities with United’s strong LA presence and feed, I’d like to think that Continental may see a golden opportunity.

Do I know anything in particular about this? Absolutely not. But it makes a lot of sense. It would be great to see someone try to tap into that market.

The long awaited day is here. Virgin America and V Australia have finally entered into an interline agreement. It’s a fairly limited set-up right now thanks to technical limitations, but eventually it will become a full-fledged interline and codeshare agreement.

So what do I mean when I say it’s fairly limited? Well, as of now, it can only be booked via V Australia’s call center or a travel agent. Starting June 8, you can also book on on the V Australia website. But nothing can be handled from the Virgin America side of the house.

There is also no frequent flier reciprocity at this point. You can only earn frequent flier points in the program of the operating carrier. That means Velocity points for the Transpacific flight and eleVAte points for the domestic US run.

So why is this so limited? It’s the same thing that prevented this whole thing from getting off the ground until now . . . technical issues on Virgin America’s side. According to Virgin America spokesperson Abby Lunardini, Virgin America and V Australia are “working towards reciprocal interline and codesharing agreements ultimately. We hope to have that functionality in our VX systems sometime in 2010.” The timeline is similar for reciprocal frequent flier earning, though that should be in early 2010.

Until then, at least you’ll be able to transfer your bags directly.

Here’s a very timely Ask Cranky that was spurred by the Air France accident earlier this week. I’m sure many of you heard that the airplane was flying in an area where there was no radar coverage, and that might be surprising. You may have had these same questions . . .

How often do commercial airline flights fly into areas without any radar coverage?

Where are these areas that lack radar coverage?

Tom

It may surprise you to know that most of the world is not covered by radar. Part of that is a technical challenge. Our air traffic system runs on ground-based radar, and most of the world is covered in water. It’s kind of hard to plant something that’s ground-based into the ocean. For that reason, once you’re more than a few miles off the coast (as was the Air France aircraft), you’re going to be out of radar range.

But even over land, radar coverage isn’t always stellar. For example, there has been much discussion about Brazil’s gaps in radar coverage over the Amazon over the last few years.

So is this a huge problem? Well it’s certainly not ideal, but it’s not dangerous either as long as proper procedures are being followed.

Look at the North Atlantic, for example. That is one incredibly busy area every single day with tons of traffic going between the US and Europe. So how do they handle all that traffic without radar? They introduce inefficiencies to keep planes far apart.

First of all, the North Atlantic operates under a track system. So every night, winds are taken into account and certain tracks are used by all airplanes. Eastbound and westbound airplanes fly different tracks at different altitudes – it used to be 2,000 ft differences but now it’s been reduced to 1,000 ft. (Those vertical separations are used over land as well.) They also have started to fly a mile or two off-center of the track to provide even more protection from a mid-air collision. There is also greater separation introduced between airplanes on the same track to give them some leeway.

So as you can see, it’s not dangerous but just slightly inefficient. It is important, however, to note that weather radar is a different story. Every commercial jet flying has weather radar to help it avoid storms regardless of whether it’s over land or ocean.

One of these days, we’ll finally have GPS systems throughout the fleet that will fix this issue once and for all. But we’ll talk about “NextGen” in another post.

It’s been well over 24 hours since we first heard that an Air France A330 disappeared over the ocean on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. In that time, I’ve seen a million different theories about what happened, and that always makes me angry. We have no idea what happened here, and really, we’ll be lucky if we ever find out. Here’s what we do know about the accident.

• Air France #447, operated by a 4-year-old A330, left Rio at 703p bound for Paris
• The airplane was off the coast of Brazil, beyond radar coverage when it hit some rough weather
• Something bad happened and a bunch of technical faults were automatically sent to Air France, but the pilots never sent a distress message
• The plane never arrived in Paris

Really, that’s all we know. And remember, while there were storms in the area alongside reports of strong turbulence, we have nothing to indicate that turbulence caused the accident. Also, those automated technical fault messages that were received by Air France stating that there had been an electrical problem and pressurization was lost (among other things)? Even if that did happen (false reports are always possible), we still have no clue why any of that happened, and there could be a million explanations.

There were no distress calls from the pilots, and I can only think of three reasons that might happen. Either the radios failed (highly unlikely), the pilots did this on purpose (even more unlikely), or it happened so fast that there wasn’t even time for a radio call (most likely). It makes me sick just thinking about what it was like on that plane toward the end.

I think it’s safe to say that this isn’t going to end up like the TV show “Lost.” This airplane is likely in a million pieces scattered on and in the Atlantic Ocean. At some point, search teams will find a debris field, and they might be able to put together some fact-based theories. But the true jewel here will be the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder; the so-called black boxes. Those might be at the bottom of the ocean, but hopefully they’ll be recovered with good data still retrievable. Without those, it’s going to be incredibly hard to figure out what really happened.

Right now, the list of suspects is long, and it’s certainly baffling. Airplanes just don’t fall out of the sky, not even during severe turbulence. There were other airplanes flying through the area that made it safely, and I’m sure those pilots will be interviewed. For example, Iberia 6024 left Rio for Madrid 20 minutes after the Air France flight. Lufthansa 507 left Sao Paulo for Frankfurt about half an hour before the Air France flight, so they might have been fairly close to each other. Air France itself had another A330 leave Sao Paulo for Paris only 27 minutes later. And these are just some of the aircraft in the neighborhood.

Hopefully we will learn more about what happened here, because none of the theories that keep being flung out there by the media seem to make sense on their own. As always, this will end up being a series of different problems that come together to form a true catastrophe.