Premium Air Traffic Change Holds Steady in November, Mid-Haul Flying Rebounding – BNET
It’s time for the monthly premium air traffic report. Nothing bad here, but nothing great either.

How Air New Zealand Started the Process of Creating a New Cabin Environment – BNET
Air New Zealand explained how they went about creating a new seat over the past 3 years, and I thought it was really interesting. Here’s part 1.

Lie down all the way to LA: Air NZ – TVNZ
While at the ANZ rollout, TVNZ pulled me aside for an interview and I made the final cut.

Air New Zealand’s Process for Narrowing 30 Concepts To the Final Two Seats – BNET
This is part two of my look into ANZ’s strategy with their new product rollout.

JetBlue Prepares for Necessary but Painful Reservation System Transition – BNET
JetBlue is basically shutting down its reservation system and throwing it away this weekend. What happens on the other side should be better, but we’ll have to see how it goes.

Udvar-Hazy On His Way Out at ILFC, Differing Opinions on Firms Future – BNET
The man who is synonymous with ILFC is leaving, what does that mean for the biz?

Do you like airplanes? And do you like watching game shows? Do you wish they could be magically combined? Well, you’re in luck. I’ll be participating in the very first Aviation Jetpardy this Sunday at 5p Pacific Time, and you can watch if you’re so inclined.

I’ll be going up against my friend Henry Harteveldt from Forrester Research as well as Phil Derner from NYCAviation. The host? None other than the queen, Benet Wilson of Aviation Week fame. This is going to be a lot of fun for us, but it will probably be more fun if you watch and heckle us mercilessly.

Actually, I have no idea if you can heckle on this thing, but it’s easy if you want to follow along. Here are the full instructions:

http://www.airplanegeeks.com/aviation-jetpardy/

Come join us to see the best man win. (That’s me.)

Good morning from Long Beach. I made it back from New Zealand yesterday, and I had hoped to have a report on the return along with a review of domestic flying in NZ, but I’m just not ready yet. So, instead I’m rolling out a new feature that I’ve been working on for a little while – Travel Tools I Love. Today, I’m starting with the Great Circle Mapper.

You’ve probably seen me use these blue maps many, many times in posts. These all come from the Great Circle Mapper (GCM). The GCM has recently received a makeover, and it’s now even more useful.

You’ll now need to point your browser to gcmap.com instead of the old gc.kls2.com address. There you’ll find a newer interface that is less cluttered and easier to use for GCM newbies.

There are a bunch of things I use this tool for:

• Measuring distance between two airports
• Seeing how far an airplane can go from a certain city (max range), including various ETOPS restrictions
• Measuring distances in entire itineraries for frequent flier purposes
• Looking up airport details and maps
• Finding aviation weather info (METAR and TAF)

This might not sound particularly useful to the casual traveler, but you would be surprised. I am always amazed at how often I find myself coming back to this site for random reasons.

Oh, and yes, the site is free to use. You will see some Google AdSense on the pages, but that’s a small price to pay for getting something great to use.

I first learned about the GCM about 10 years ago when I first met site owner Karl Swartz, and I’ve never found anything that comes close. This new enhancement makes it even better. Take a look for yourself.

Good morning. Assuming we’re on time, I should be making my way toward the California coast as this goes out. I’ll be back home soon, and I’m looking forward to a nice and relaxing weekend. But first, let’s talk UK.

I realize this may not be fascinating to all of you (or, um, potentially most of you), but RDC Aviation puts out a great monthly report on UK air traffic data. The last report was for January – October 2009, and I found myself just fascinated by a lot of what’s in there. Here are some random fun facts in no particular order.

• About 100 million passengers went through Heathrow, Gatwick, or Stansted through October. That’s more than half of the entire country’s air traffic.
• A full 20 percent of the traffic at Gatwick is charter. That’s the largest charter airport in the UK.
• Quick – what’s the largest destination country from the UK? Nope, not the US. It’s Spain with more than 27 million passengers. The US sees a paltry 14 million yet it is number one from London. There are nearly 16 million people going from the rest of the UK to Spain and that makes the difference. (Should I make my pasty white Brits comment again?)
• Outside of the British Isles, Amsterdam is the number 1 destination. I’m surprised to see that Paris is #8 from London. Considering that most of that traffic is now on Eurostar, that shows just how big that market is.
• Only one route within the UK carries over 1 million passengers – Heathrow to Edinburgh. If you add in the other London airports, you get to 2.5 million.
• The largest domestic UK route not touching London? That’d be Belfast to Liverpool with 336,000 (another 123,000 if you include Belfast City airport).
• #1 international? New York, of course. Heathrow to JFK has over 2 million people. Adding in Newark, you get close to three.
• The largest US market that doesn’t touch London? How about those sunseekers in Manchester – more than 300,000 headed to Orlando.
• The #1 charter route from the UK is from London to Dalaman. Manchester to Dalaman is second. Dalaman, by the way, is in Turkey.
• Heathrow is the largest cargo airport, but #2 is actually East Midlands. In last place, we have Wick, which had one single tonne for the first 10 months of 2009.

See, I told you that was fun. Wait, hello? You guys still there? Definitely come back tomorrow for the Air NZ product launch coverage.

Delta may have lost over $1 billion in 2009, but that’s not stopping them from pushing forward on improving their product offerings. In fact, the day before they announced earnings, they also announced a slew of onboard improvements. I’m glad to see it, but there is still one glaring omission here.

Delta is now committing to putting lie flat seats on all 777, 767, and 747 aircraft that fly internationally. That’s great news, because right now it’s a crapshoot on some of these fleets. The 777 LR aircraft have flat beds but the ERs don’t. The 767-400s have some with flat beds but others don’t and the 767-300s don’t. Now all 777s will have the same flat bed while all the 767s will have an alternate flat bed. I think it’s time to break out my old chart, updated with this news:

The big question (literally) is what they’ll put on the 747. They haven’t picked which seat they’ll use, but I’m sure it’ll be completely different from the 767 and 777 just to make things confusing. After all, the cabin width dictated that they use different beds in the 777 than the 767, so I don’t see why that wouldn’t impact the 747 decision as well.

The A330s will apparently still have the old Northwest WorldBusiness seats, and the 757s will keep the old Delta Biz Elite seats. But what about those CRJ-700s?

Ok, so those likely won’t be the exact seats, but Delta is installing First Class on 66 CRJ-700 aircraft operated by Connection carriers. This is undoubtedly meant to compete with United’s ExPlus and American’s recent decision to do the same on its CRJ-700s. These planes are flying more and more longer, former mainline routes so they need something to reward the elites, I suppose.

But what are they doing for the back of the bus? First and most importantly, the 747s and the 767-300s will have audio/video on demand installed at each seat. I assume this is a cost savings, because it gets expensive to pay for the monkeys that actually sit in the projector and run the movie on the big screen today. There is already AVOD in coach on the rest of the international fleet, so that will now be standard.

They’ll also be putting Delta’s blue leather seats on the Northwest fleet (eh, I like cloth) in coach, and more importantly, they’ll be installing the bigger overhead bins on Northwest’s 757s so you can fit rollerbags straight in.

Anything else? Yeah, they’re going to renovate the SkyClub at LAX and open new clubs in Seattle, Philly, and Indianapolis. The Philly one surprises me, but the Indy and Seattle ones don’t. This will be the only lounge in Indy, so that’s nice, and it’s a sign that they aren’t planning on abandoning the city as a little Heartland focus operation. With in-laws in Indy, I’m happy about that.

What’s the one big piece that I said they were missing at the beginning of this post? No word on JFK terminal upgrades. Seriously, this needs to happen. I shot off a question to Delta after seeing nothing regarding New York and they assured me that I’ll be notified as soon as something is ready to announce. You’ll know as soon as I do.