I’m still here in Phoenix after finishing up the first day of the Phoenix Aviation Symposium, so I thought this would be a good time to dump all the remaining bits and pieces of interest from the US Airways Media Day. Let’s get going.

If you see something that interests you in particular, leave it in the comments and I’ll try to write a longer post on it if enough people have interest.

Consolidation

• No surprise that Chairman and CEO Doug Parker started by talking about the rumored talks with United. He opened with “Last week we announced we were breaking off talks with United. That took a little creativity since we never announced we were in talks with United.” You can read more on his opening talk on BNET.
• Later in the Q&A, when asked why US Airways didn’t handle the leaks about the merger discussions with United better, Doug got visibly agitated.
  

  We didn’t leak anything. And we think that’s the way you should do business. And I don’t know who did, but the way we do it, we have confidentiality agreements with the other party that we don’t violate. I’m happy to tell you that we were disappointed by how much information about the potential transaction was in the press. These talks went on for a long time and it never got out. I don’t know where it came from, and it’s not the way we want to do business.

  I think we all know where the leak came from. If it wasn’t US Airways . . .

Financial Performance

• US Airways has a 12% unit revenue disadvantage versus other hub and spoke carriers because of its weaker network, but it offsets that with a 12% unit cost advantage.
• US Airways has a 23% unit revenue advantage versus low cost carriers, but that’s more than offset by a 29% unit cost disadvantage. Why? Because, as Scott Kirby says, “running a hub and spoke operation is intrinsically more expensive than running a point to point operation.”
• Prices are up and corporate revenue is improving. Things look good, but they are only cautiously optimistic. You never know what else can go wrong (like a volcano).

Operations

• 2009 was a very good year for the airline with high on-time performance, a low number of cancellations, low lost bag rates, and lower complaint levels. This is primarily because they ran a better operation.
• They’re running this operation with relatively tight block times. This chart was in their presentation:
  
• April is a record month for performance so far. For April through the 26th, on time performance is at 88.8%.
• They launched the Aircraft Appearance Audit Program to make sure that airplanes are clean and the interiors are all functional. Over 1,400 have been done this year with good results.

Customer Experience

• The new Envoy Suite in business class is getting excellent reviews. It is on 5 of the A330-200s now with the last 2 completed in October (after the summer peak). The A330-300s will get it next year.
  
• Cushions and covers, overhead bin extensions, sidewalls, and inflight entertainment are being spruced up on the 757 fleet that goes to Hawai’i and Europe. The 737-400s are getting cushions and covers as well.
• Wifi is on 38 of the 51 A321s with the rest finished by June 1. If this goes well, they’ll expand to other airplanes. (In other words, if enough customers use it, they’ll expand the program.)
• An agreement was just signed with Continental and United to allow reciprocal access to each other’s clubs regardless of who the customer is flying. Up until now, you could only visit those clubs if you were flying those airlines.

Star Alliance

• US Airways is completely committed to the Star Alliance and is “deepening” ties.
• More than half of US Airways capacity into Europe flies into a Star Alliance hub. The connecting traffic numbers are staggering and show why Star is important to their international network.
  

  Without Star, or some other type of partnership, many of these flights simply wouldn’t be sustainable.

Yesterday was US Airways media day, and I made my way to Phoenix to attend. As usual, it was a good day but there wasn’t any big news to announce. (I think they were hoping to announce a merger, but, well, that ain’t happening. You can read more about that on BNET).

During the Q&A, there was a very interesting discussion on the 3 hour ground delay rule which goes into effect this week. I thought it was worth replaying the discussion here to show a pretty unique perspective.

Joe Sharkey, long-time aviation journalist, asked, “the tarmac rules take effect this week. What’s your prediction for the likelihood for preemptive cancellations?

COO Robert Isom took the mike first and responded:

We’ve imposed the new DOT regulations on ourselves this whole past month. It’s been a pretty good weather month, and we saw the kind of impact it would have on a small scale.

There were a number of flighst that had to turn back and a few people that wanted to get off. The biggest issues will come up during the summer. Not only is there not enough room at hub airports out on the tarmac but there aren’t enough gates to handle all the airplanes that are supposed to take off and those who are going to land.

Because there could be so much congestion, you have to leave yourselves exit points on the airport grounds in order to get planes back, so you’re going to reduce your overall capacity.

What I would envision is a lot of cautiousness. The defense we have is canceling flights.

In April, we had very little impact to the operation. It wasn’t a busy month weather-wise.

At that point, Chairman and CEO Doug Parker took the mike and went off in a surprising direction.

There absolutely will be cancellations that won’t be canceled otherwise. I don’t want to sound like we’re complaining, like some other airlines out there. Fact is, we [the industry] got ourselves in this mess. Fortunately it wasn’t us [US Airways] but in some of these siutations, maybe we’re just fortunate.

This has been going on for awhile and we’ve been warned that we needed to get it fixed so shame on us. If you don’t fix it you’ll get legislation. The legislation is not going to be perfect and there will be unintended consequences, but we just have to deal with it.

More than likely, it’ll be preemptive – we’ll start canceling flights. $27,500 per passenger is a little more than each passenger pays.

The really bad part of this legislation is that when you look at these events, almost every one of them landed somewhere – diversion or something. Let’s have fines for that, but let’s not have fines for people trying to get out of airports, but that’s the problem we’ve now created.

We’re going to have airplanes never depart that should depart and that’s unfortunate. But again, we did it to ourselves.

Bet you didn’t see that coming, huh? The man has got a point. We can talk about whether it’s good or bad, but hey, they just have to deal with it regardless. I have no doubt that SVP Public Affairs C.A. Howlett is doing what he can to advocate for US Airways in Washington, but from an operational perspective, it’s just time to deal with it.

I’m looking forward to seeing the operational numbers. There have already been some cancellations, but we haven’t seen much because of the benign weather. Just wait until the first massive summer thunderstorm hits and then we’ll have some interesting numbers.

One thing is clear. We’re not going to see planes on the ground for more than 3 hours at US Airways. They’ll just be canceled before that even becomes a possibility.

Ok, so Frontier and Midwest are uniting under the Frontier name, and now they’re trying to standardize the brand and offerings. So what do they do? They go out and decide to purposefully create a split brand offering by adding internet to the Embraer 170 and 190 aircraft only. I guess we did see this coming, right?

These guys are developing quite the variety of inflight entertainment options. It’s just too bad that they aren’t all available on every airplane. Instead, it’s a hodge-podge. I suppose that’s fitting since their largest competitor is probably United, the king of hodge-podge. Here’s how it’s going to break down.

How do I feel about this? I really don’t mind not having anything but a window on the little Embraer regional jets. I mean, those are flying mostly (if not entirely) dedicated routes to small markets. They fly short routes and inflight entertainment just won’t be worthwhile for those.

But the Embraer 170s and 190s, I’m not thrilled. Those planes fly side by side with the Airbus aircraft. In fact, I’ll be flying one way out of Long Beach on an Airbus and the other way on an Embraer. So having differing products on planes that fly alongside each other on identical routes will be annoying.

I understand why they’re doing it. It’s a lot cheaper and easier to pop a wireless router and an antenna on an airplane than it is to put televisions in every seatback. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right decision.

Ultimately, none of this is a surprise. When I first wrote about the decision to consolidate around the Frontier brand, I said this:

I’m glad to see the TVs sticking around, but I’m wondering what’s coming on the rest of the fleet. I would hope that they’d put TVs on their Embraer 170/190 fleet since those go pretty long distances. But the way this is worded makes me think that their version of inflight entertainment may very well just end up being inflight internet. We’ll have to see.

Unfortunately, it looks like I was right.

Now that European airports are open and (as far as I know), no planes have fallen out of the sky, it’s time to look back on the aftermath of the Icelandic volcano. We worked on some pretty crazy itineraries at Cranky Concierge, so I thought I’d share some of them with you, because, well, it’s just fun to dork out on itineraries like these.

Perhaps the craziest one we found was one that wasn’t actually used. We had a client, let’s call him Doc, stranded in London when his flight canceled last Monday. Doc had to get to Toronto by Wednesday. So what happened? We came up with this:

*Eurostar from London to Paris Tuesday morning
*TGV from Paris to Irun (at the Spanish Frontier)
*Overnight train from Irun to Lisbon, arriving Wednesday morning
*SATA from Lisbon to Toronto via the Azores on Wednesday afternoon

Anyone ever flown SATA? I’d love to hear what that’s like, but Doc decided not to go and instead just wait it out in London. (He made it out last Friday.)

---

The very first call we received about the volcano was at 230a PT on Friday, April 16. A new client, his name will be Thor, called from Halifax saying he was heading to New York and then was on Delta to London that afternoon. He fully expected the flight to be canceled, so he asked us to help. (It canceled soon after.) We were able to snag the very last seat on the New York – Keflavik (Iceland) flight that night on Icelandair connecting to Glasgow in the morning. At that point, Glasgow was still open.

Thor made it to Iceland, but the airspace closed in Glasgow before he was able to get there. Fortunately, Icelandair put him up for the first night and paid for his meals. That was far better than he would have received from Delta in New York. Icelandair started to send airplanes anywhere they could fly: they sent several flights to Trondheim, Norway. (And now that Keflavik is impacted by the volcano, they actually just started operating flights via Glasgow instead – amazing flexibility which you can read more about on BNET today.)

Thor didn’t want to mess around with visiting Norway and not having a way to get out of there, so he hung out in Iceland where the high speed internet gave him everything he needed. He spent three nights in Iceland before finally being booked on Tuesday to go to Heathrow. When Heathrow didn’t open, they sent him to Edinburgh and he hopped a train home.

---

The toughest challenge we faced was a client, we’ll call her Oksana, heading to the first Theatre on Ice world championships being held in Toulouse. She wasn’t going to watch; she was there to compete. When her British Airways flight on Monday canceled, she had to find a way to get there.

After looking at several different options that involved everything from Dubai to Tripoli, we settled on the best option and it wasn’t going to be easy.

Oksana was in San Diego, but she ended up buying a ticket from LA to Tel Aviv on El Al on Wednesday connecting to another El Al flight to Madrid on Thursday. From there, she booked an overnight train from Madrid to Barcelona, arriving Friday morning. Then she would rent a car and drive the 3 hours or so to Toulouse, getting in just in time for her mandatory practice.

Unfortunately, British Airways wasn’t nearly as flexible as Icelandair and refused to simply cancel her outbound and let her keep the return. So we had to find Oksana another return. This one was easy – Swiss from Barcelona to Zurich and then on to LA. Then it would just be a short hop on American down to San Diego.

As you can imagine, this combined option wasn’t cheap (in fact, if you’d like to help defray the additional cost, they’re accepting donations via Paypal to helpctoi@gmail.com), but it got them there, and that was the name of the game throughout this entire couple of weeks.

Now that the backlog is clearing out and airlines are starting add flights, people are finally getting where they need to go. It’s incredible to think about how many special occasions were ruined because people couldn’t get there. These are just a couple stories out of a sea of hundreds of thousands, if not more. Just imagine how many didn’t turn out this well.

One of the biggest complaints that I see when we start talking about long ground delays here on the blog is that nobody seems to have a good solution. We can all jump on bad solutions like the DOT rule we have now, but there are rarely better suggestions that are workable. I’ve found one, and it’s actually temporarily in place at JFK right now.

Some of you may know that I write the monthly newsletters for PASSUR Aerospace. PASSUR is a very cool little company that actually has its own private radar network at over 100 airports, primarily in the US and Canada. There are a million things that they do with this data, but as I was putting together the current newsletter, I found out about a temporary but truly awesome project going on at JFK during the runway construction that’s happening today. They’ve effectively created virtual queues so that airplanes don’t have to push off the gate until it’s closer to actual departure time.

Here’s how it works. During peak periods (operational for ten hours a day), a central command coordinates all departures and arrivals at the airport. A couple hours before scheduled departure time, each flight is assigned an actual departure time by the system. So maybe your flight was supposed to leave at 1p, but at 11a, the airline will be advised that the departure time will now be 2p. That means they can keep you at the gate and let you roam free. If they need that gate for an arriving flight, they can still board you and then push you out of the gate, but you’ll have a very clear picture of when you will actually take off. Expectations can be set appropriately, and they shouldn’t push you off the gate if a 3 hour delay is anticipated.

The result of this is that at any one time you end up with no more than eight airplanes waiting to take off (you need some kind of buffer in there) instead of 30 or more. This is good for passengers, but it’s also good for airlines. When they’re in that long line waiting for takeoff, they have to keep an engine running, sucking up gas as they wait. Now that won’t be an issue. In addition, if the winds shift and the airport needs to turn around and use different runways, there are fewer planes that need to be turned around so it can be done more quickly.

Awesome, right? Now this isn’t a fail-proof solution. When bad weather rolls in, that messes a lot of things up. A version of this system is actually used during severe weather events now at JFK for metering departures, but it doesn’t solve everything. If you have a ton of planes coming in on diversions or several planes landing while others can’t take off, you may need to free up gate space due to storms. Things can and will still go wrong, but this process is a big improvement.

So how has this been working? Well, during March 2010, they were able to handle just about the same amount of traffic as they handled in March 2009 but with one runway down for construction. Taxi-out times are virtually the same. And the average delay has actually gone down by about 5 minutes. Great stuff.

Unfortunately, this program is currently scheduled to end on June 30, when the big construction work on the runway is done. With any luck, the airport will see the benefit and decide to keep it around . . . and then hopefully other delay-prone airports will consider it as well.

[Original Photos via AZ DOT and abdallahh]