First Class is Disappearing in Name Only – BNET
Qantas is the latest to reduce First Class onboard, but it’s not really going away. It’s just changing names.

Premium Air Traffic Surpasses Previous Year for First Time Since 2008 – BNET
Yes, it’s true. More premium passengers flew in December than in last December. Granted, they were paying 20% less . . .

Airline Labor Unrest – Is This Catchy? – IAG Podcast
I sit down with Addison Schonland to talk strikes.

American and United Switch to Small Planes for Big Routes – BNET
American is shifting its 70 seaters to compete with United’s 70 seaters. Go figure.

End of the Affair: Are American and Alaska Set to Compete? – BNET
It’s only one little route addition, but I tend to think it could mean big things.

High Speed Rail May Hurt Airports, But How Much? – BNET
High speed rail is coming to California, and the aviation world is gearing up to fight it. Boo, I say.

I’ve long sung the praises of Air Canada’s efforts to create fare product categories, but really, I’ve never gone through the purchase process for my own ticket. When Frontier adopted a similar structure, I felt the same way, but again, I hadn’t gone through the process myself . . . until now. I love it even more.

I have a trip coming up in a couple of months that will take me to both Chicago for a reunion of sorts and then Indianapolis to see the in-laws. The Chicago decision was an easy one – I’ll be on the JetBlue flight from Long Beach. But coming back, I had my pick of the litter. In fact, there were three appealing options, all within about $10 of each other:

1. Frontier Lv Indy 645a Arr Long Beach 1015a (1h7m stop in Denver)
2. Delta Lv Indy 7a Arr LAX 836a (no stops)
3. Delta Lv Indy 815a Arr Long Beach 1209p (1h7m stop in Salt Lake)

While I normally want to fly nonstop whenever I can, I’ll take Long Beach over LAX if the connection isn’t painfully long every time. The choice of Frontier over Delta was an easy one as well. Frontier is new to town, and I always want to support the new guy. We need to fill those planes if we’re going to keep them around. (Besides, I love LiveTV.) So I went to Frontier’s website to book.

Frontier deserves kudos for actually showing the full fare amount instead of the misleading pre-tax amount that other sites show. I saw the fare I expected to see, but then I saw more. In fact, I saw this (click to enlarge):

Hmm, I was going to buy an Economy fare, but for only $30 I could get a Classic fare. What was that again? Oh yeah, they have a link. Here’s the comparison:

It was time to break out the math. What mattered here? Well, I wasn’t checking a bag, but if I was, this became an easy decision to buy up to the higher fare. I was definitely going to pay for LiveTV, though I knew we’d only have it on one of our flights. So that’s a $6 savings. I might think about paying up for Stretch at the time of check-in, but I wasn’t ready to count that yet. Really, it came down to the seat assignment. I wanted that seat assignment in advance. Was it worth $24? Yep, I bought it.

While all this was going on, I had completely blocked the other flights out of my mind. Sure, I could have had an assigned seat on Delta at the cheapest fare level, but I had already made up my mind what I wanted to fly. Frontier was able to get an extra $30 out of me, and I had no problem paying for it. It was completely fair and I expected to get more out of it than the $30 it cost.

I hate when airlines throw fees at you every step of the way, but a product like this allowed me to pay for what I wanted up front and be done with it. I wish everyone would do this.

This week Finnair retired its last MD-11 airplane with a flight from Delhi to Bangkok. With that retirement, only KLM is still operating an MD-11 commercially. In fact, there are only two airlines operating any Douglas widebody commercially anywhere in the world. Biman Bangladesh still flies a couple DC-10s around. As a resident of Long Beach, where Douglas built those airplanes for 60 sixty years, this is really very sad.

Though the DC-10 had some serious problems when it rolled out in the 1970s resulting in devastating accidents, once the issues were fixed, the plane went on to be a reliable flying tank. Personally, I have great memories flying DC-10s. My first intercontinental flight was on an SAS DC-10 from LA to Copenhagen in 1985. Most of my other DC-10 flights were taking me to Hawai’i. (No wonder the memories are good.)

I can remember flying Western, American, United, and even Delta (when they briefly operated the DC-10s they inherited from Western) to Hawai’i. I even flew on some more interesting characters – World Airways when they had scheduled flights, for example. One time, I remember flying on a Leisure Air-operated ex-United DC-10 flying under the Suntrips banner. It’s probably fitting that the last time I flew on a DC-10 was on a Hawaiian aircraft from LA to Maui on July 11, 2001.

The MD-11 first flew in 1990 with Finnair, an airline which stayed loyal to the type for 20 years. Unfortunately, not many others felt the same way. The MD-11 was a longer, more efficient update of the DC-10 but it didn’t live up to its performance specs. Airlines walked away early and it never regained its footing. Besides, why buy 3 engines when you could stick with 2? The MD-11 did find a very successful home as a cargo airplane, however, and it continues to fly in great numbers in that capacity today.

I had two experiences on the MD-11. My first was in the early 1990s flying from LA to Portland on Delta. Seems like a strange route, but remember, Delta has tried to make Portland its transpacific gateway. This airplane fed that network.

The other was, conveniently, on good ole’ Finnair. In October 1998, I flew roundtrip from New York to Helsinki on my first big trip using pass travel as an airline employee. We flew over there for the weekend, and I just thought that was the coolest thing ever.

Over 600 Douglas widebodies rolled off the line here in Long Beach, and now it’s almost impossible to find one flying passengers around. If you’d like to get on one, your best bet is to ship yourself via FedEx. If that’s not your idea of fun, you can always try to get on one of the two remaining passenger operators worldwide.

As I mentioned, the last passenger MD-11 operator is KLM. They still are flying their fleet from their Amsterdam home to the following cities:

• Bonaire
• Delhi
• Guayaquil
• Montreal
• Panama City
• Paramaribo
• Quito
• St Maarten
• Toronto
• Vancouver

In addition, for most of September, the airplane will go to Atlanta and Dubai.

If you want to fly a DC-10, well, that’s a lot tougher. The last passenger operator of that airplane is Biman Bangladesh. They are quickly phasing them out for 777s, but they still have some flying from Dhaka to the following cities on random days:

• Abu Dhabi
• Chittagong
• Dammam
• Doha
• Dubai
• Hong Kong
• Muscat
• Riyadh
• Sylhet

My guess is you won’t see these flying for much more than a couple years, so get out there and hop on one while you still have the chance.

Photos
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianfuller/ / CC BY-NC 2.0
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33465428@N02/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
http://www.flickr.com/photos/husseinabdallah/ / CC BY 2.0

Long-time readers of the blog know that I’ve been following the development of Branson airport with interest. I even took a tour of the place back in 2008 when they were still building it out. Branson has actually done a decent job of attracting new service, but they’ve decided it’s not enough. If nobody else will do it, they’ll do it themselves. (And no JetBlue, I’m not singling you out in the pic – your name just sounds closest to Jobu, for those who get the reference.) I think this might work.

First let’s do a brief recap here. For those who don’t know, Branson sits in the southwest corner of Missouri, smack in the middle of the Ozark mountains. It’s a big regional destination for music and shows, but it’s never really become more than that. Until last May, the city was served only by the Springfield airport, about an hour north of town. Springfield is like many small towns in that it has limited service, mostly on regionals, to hub cities. It also has service from Allegiant, but that’s meant to take people out of town to hot spots, not bring them in. The people of Branson weren’t happy.

So some investors got together and decided to actually fund the building of an airport 15 minutes outside of town. The airport was literally built on a mountain. It’s a heck of an interesting site to see. But what’s most interesting is that they haven’t taken any public funding for the airport, so they have a lot more mobility. For example, they can offer exclusive access to an airline who comes in from a certain city.

They built this new airport for a small sum – seriously. It only cost $155 million to get it ready for service, and that includes razing the top of the mountain. When they built the airport, the hope was that they could attract low cost carriers from around the country to service the place for cheap. The goal was to expand the catchment area and make it easier to visit.

AirTran was the first to dive in with service to Atlanta. They added Milwaukee, but that failed. They now also have weekly service to Orlando. Sun Country also came in with service to Dallas and Minneapolis, but that’s not flying now. Branson Airport’s website says it’s coming back in the spring, but Sun Country doesn’t have it on their route map or in their schedules. Just recently, Frontier announced it will join the party from Denver starting in April.

Branson Airport, meanwhile, has been engaged with consultants galore to try to find ways to bring service in to town. Christmas in Branson is a big deal, so last holiday season, they chartered some airplanes from ExpressJet and flew a few roundtrips to Rockford and Shreveport. At the time, I thought it was a good idea, but I figured its utility was limited to peak seasons. Now, Branson Airport has stepped up to make this a full time deal.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present Branson Air Express. To me, this seems like a similar idea to what we see with Direct Air out of Myrtle Beach. They need visitors and they don’t have enough air service, so they’re going to do it themselves. That’s what Branson is trying, apparently thanks to the advice of consulting firms Seabury Airline Planning Group and Contour Flight.

Branson will be chartering regional jets from ExpressJet to fly to Branson from Austin, Des Moines, Houston, Shreveport, and Terre Haute starting in May. So apparently that Shreveport service must have worked out pretty well last year, but the Rockford service? Guess not.

There’s no website with information, just a booking engine, so it’s hard to get full details. From my random June check, it looks like there’s no flying on Thursday and Sunday, for some odd reason. You’d think those would be big days for a weekend destination, but maybe ExpressJet couldn’t offer them the aircraft time on those days. Austin, Des Moines, and Houston will see service the other 5 days. Terre Haute and Shreveport will get flights Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.

So can they make money bringing people in from places like Austin and Terre Haute on a 50 seat jet? I suppose it depends on how they look at this. From a straight flight profitability standpoint, my guess is no. But these guys are looking beyond that. They can make money off people staying in hotels in Branson and signing up for vacation packages. They also have lower costs since they’ll effectively be paying landing fees to themselves. So looking at it holistically, it might just make sense.

At least, some of these might make sense. Terre Haute? That might be a stretch. But we’ll see. It’s an interesting concept. And for ExpressJet, it’s just more money in the bank.

Ah, spring. The days become longer, the temps get warmer, and, apparently, it’s a great time for airline strikes. Lufthansa pilots just struck for a day and postponed the rest for later. Meanwhile, British Airways is on deck as the French air traffic controllers wreak havoc in their own country. And don’t worry, Alitalia has struck in the last week as well, of course. What the heck is going on here?

With Lufthansa, the pilots aren’t happy so they walked out yesterday. That left the airline canceling about half their daily flights and plenty of passengers stuck going nowhere. Last night, the pilots agreed to suspend their strike until March 8 so they could rejoin talks. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Lufthansa will magically start operating at full speed today. It takes a little while to get everything back into place for a normal operation, so check with the airline if you’re flying.

As for British Airways, well, we’ve talked about this one before. Remember that the BA flight attendants were going to strike over Christmas but then the courts told them to screw off because of some voting irregularities. Well, they’re back and now with a new vote showing 83 percent support, the strike could come with only a week’s notice. At least they’re promising it won’t disrupt Easter flying. Not sure why Christmas was ok but Easter isn’t, but I’m not complaining.

The French air traffic controllers? They’ve been on strike this week and have hurt a lot of the air traffic running through the country. For example, Air France has announced that today it will operate all its long haul flights but only 75 percent of European flights will operate from Paris/de Gaulle with only 50 percent from Orly.

Why do we keep seeing all these strikes? Well it’s more of the same. It’s usually an issue of job retention, outsourcing, and of course, pay. The problem is that the industry today is not what it was 30 years ago when pay was high and so were fares. Some airlines have been able to adapt but none have done so without serious pain for most involved (except of course, those insanely-misguided CEOs who think that taking a big bonus in the face of all this pain is a good idea).

What we’re seeing now, however, is two different types of unions based on how they react. The labor unions that realize that this is unfortunately a necessary change will be in better shape because they can participate in the discussion and work to find ways to help reduce costs with the least amount of pain to their members. Those unions that simply want to strike if they don’t get everything they want, no matter how delusional, will end up watching from the outside as the industry changes without their participation.

As a result, customers end up suffering, of course. If your flight is canceled because of a strike, then I would just cancel and rebook at a later date if you can. If you need to be there, well, you can look at other airlines but they will be bursting at the seams trying to accommodate everyone. Just remember that a strike doesn’t mean the airline shuts down. Most airlines are able to get together enough of a skeleton crew to operate at least some flights, as Lufthansa showed by operating half theirs. But running only half your flights is still a recipe for lots of stuck travelers.

Oh, and Alitalia? Well it’s hardly worth mentioning, but they struck on February 16. Ho, hum. Nothing to see here.

[Original Photo via Steinsky on Wikipedia]