I’m back from “vacation” (which I put in quotes, because I just ended up working on longer term projects the whole time instead of actually relaxing), and it’s time to get back to my Delta visit. First up this week is my discussion with Bob Kupbens, the man who runs eCommerce for the airline. Yes, that includes the website, which many of you know and hate. But there’s good news for you. Delta actually does know what’s wrong and it’s going to be fixed. (Don’t worry, they can’t fix everything, so I’m sure there will still be something to complain about.)

Bob actually comes to Delta from Target where he most recently ran Target.com. Having that big-retailer experience gives Delta a fresh set of eyes to help get things in order at the airline. But Bob isn’t just running Delta.com. He’s in charge of other digital channels like Facebook, mobile, kiosks, inflight entertainment content, wireless internet, and yes, Sky magazine (it’s only a matter of time before it goes digital in some form).

The homepage redesign (which I positively reviewed here) was just the start, but it was an important start. What you see on the homepage is going to be the base for design for other channels.

Bob said one of the biggest issues out there is design-related. All the different channels look different and that’s because, as Bob said, they were all designed by different groups. No more; it’s going to be harmonized so that Delta customers will be able to know where things are and how to find them much easier.

But that’s only part of it, and there are still some defects from the merger integration that they’re still working through. Most of those major ones have been completed, and they can start turning their efforts to more work on enhancements.

I brought up the award calendar and he nodded his head. The team is well aware that people are not happy with it, and some improvements are already there. But more is coming, he promises. Then he started talking about things that I find more exciting.

I brought up the issue of how tickets are booked and how poorly information is laid out. He agreed, and said that “when you’re booking, we want to tell you what you’re buying.” That will include things like internet and TV. But it’s also simple things like making the seat map more descriptive. “There’s no reason each seat should show up as a square.” You should be able to see what you’re getting.

It’s that kind of thinking that can make setting expectations much easier. That’s really important for an airline that seems to have a different BusinessElite seat on every other airplane.

We also talked about the new Facebook booking channel. (“A lot of our customers are on Facebook, it’s the most visited site on inflight wifi, so we need to be there.”) I highly doubt anyone is going to use that thing, and Bob realizes that it’s not going to be “the” place where people go to book. They really like that new functionality, however, for its flexibility. For example, if Delta’s people update the Delta Facebook status to show that a fare sale has launched, they can embed the booking engine right there for people to use. They haven’t fully explored what it can do, but they’re excited to try it out. Ok, I can see how that might be interesting, but I’m still not convinced it’s going to matter.

Interestingly, Bob isn’t really focusing on Twitter at this point. That’s a focus for customer service and communication, but it’s not really an eCommerce effort now. The team, which Bob explained is quite lean in numbers compared to his old Target digs, is focusing on Facebook for now.

Then it was on to wifi. General feedback, outside of Virgin America, is that very few people are using it and it’s going to take some time for it to build. Bob sounded no differenet. He explained that the take rates are increasing but they aren’t where they want them to be just yet. Still, wifi is valuable for the airline.

He believes that now that Delta has nearly fully outfitted the fleet, it is a customer expectation and it’s a differentiator. They need to do more experimenting with pricepoints and packaging (which is ultimately controlled by AirCell, the wifi provider), but he’s confident this will be important. It’s already proven to have great value from a customer perspective, something I’ll discuss later this week.

With all of these things on the table, I asked the inevitable question that makes many cringe. How are they going to monetize this? Would they look at advertising sales and things like that? The answer might shock you.

He said that while they will look at some additional opportunites to make money, much of this “could just be a differentiator.” There he goes again on building the brand as different from others. That’s the kind of thing I like to hear, and I’m eagerly awaiting some of the changes in the next year to see if it ends up being as good as it sounds.

It was a week full of guest posts on BNET as well.

The Good Side of Fees: Paying for Convenience – BNET Headwinds
Evan Konwiser wrote a guest post on the good side of fees.

Better Flight Status Information Isn’t Worth the Expense – BNET Headwinds
An anonymous guest-poster who used to put together flight status information argues why it’s not worth the expense of having better info.

How to Boost Airport Revenues After a Summer Slowdown – BNET Headwinds
Laura Jackson argues for airports to get creative to keep revenues up.

Registered Traveler Programs Return, but They Still Don’t Look Like Viable Businesses – BNET Headwinds
Benet Wilson guest posts about the uphill battle the relaunched registered traveler programs face.

I know, it’s Saturday, so you’re expecting Cranky on the Web, right? Well that’s going to have to wait, because today is not just any Saturday. It’s September 11th.

Believe it or not, this is actually the fifth September 11th that I’ve written a post, and it’s the fourth in which I’ve followed Holly Hegeman’s tradition of publishing the names of the flight crews killed that day.

So, let’s focus on those airline employees who lost their lives just doing their jobs. Please read through the following names and remember what they went through nine years ago today.

American 11 (Boston to Los Angeles)
Crashed into World Trade Center
John Ogonowski, Dracut, Mass., Captain; Thomas McGuinness, Portsmouth, N.H., First Officer; Barbara Arestegui, flight attendant; Jeffrey Collman, flight attendant; Sara Low, flight attendant; Karen Martin, flight attendant; Kathleen Nicosia, flight attendant; Betty Ong, flight attendant; Jean Roger, flight attendant; Dianne Snyder, flight attendant; Madeline Sweeney, flight attendant

United 175 (Boston to Los Angeles)
Crashed into World Trade Center
Victor J. Saracini, Lower Makefield Township, Pa., Captain; Michael Horrocks, First Officer; Amy Jarret, flight attendant; Al Marchand, flight attendant; Amy King, flight attendant; Kathryn Laborie, flight attendant; Michael Tarrou, flight attendant; Alicia Titus, flight attendant

American 77 (Washington/Dulles to Los Angeles)
Crashed into the Pentagon
Charles Burlingame, Captain; David Charlebois, First Officer; Michele Heidenberger, flight attendant; Jennifer Lewis, flight attendant; Kenneth Lewis, flight attendant; and Renee May, flight attendant

United 93 (Newark to San Francisco)
Crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania
Jason Dahl, Colorado, Captain; Leroy Homer, Marlton, N.J., First Officer; Sandy Bradshaw, flight attendant; CeeCee Lyles, flight attendant; Lorraine Bay, flight attendant; Wanda Green, flight attendant; Deborah Welsh, flight attendant

[Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/79493961@N00/ / CC BY-SA 2.0]

Cranky is on a much-needed vacation and won’t be responding to emails this week. Fortunately, before I started drinking too heavily, I put some posts live. Today, Court Miller takes us through the terrifying world of P.A. announcements. (Seriously.)
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“Just key the mic and start talking. You’ll figure it out.”

That’s probably the single worst advice I’ve ever been given as a pilot. Public announcements (P.A.’s) from the cockpit can be utterly terrifying as I was finding out at 30,000 feet over western New York. It was my first flight with passengers in the back and to my surprise, things were going pretty well. That changed about 80% of the way between Cincinnati and Rochester, NY when my training captain noticed Niagara Falls.

“Why don’t you make a P.A. and point out the Falls?”
  ”And say what?” I asked.
“Just key the mic and start talking. You’ll figure it out.”

Again, not the reassuring words you expect to hear the first time you address 50 passengers relying on you to bring them from 500 mph and five miles high to a stop on a mile long strip of concrete.

Flash back to my training, which was one week of indoctrination, four weeks of detailed aircraft systems, three weeks of intense simulator sessions, and only 20 minutes worth of P.A. guidelines. You get my point. (It’s worth nothing that the 20 minutes of P.A. guidelines consisted entirely of an unfortunate story of a pilot who gave a P.A. in the voice of Ross Perot to a plane full of Ross Perot’s campaign staff. My notes on the subject filled all of one line: “Don’t talk like Ross Perot during a P.A.”)

I’m not afraid of public speaking, heck I quite enjoy it, but for some reason I kept seeing the image of 50 Ross Perot’s sitting behind me waiting for a reason to call the Chief Pilot’s office to have me fired. So what did I do? The only thing I could do, really. I picked up the mic and started talking.

“Folks, from the flight deck, good morning. We’re about 100 miles southwest of Rochester and will be beginning our decent soon. For those of you on the left side of the aircraft, if you’ll look left you’ll see Niagara Falls. For those of you on the right side of the aircraft…”

Crap.

There’s nothing out there. I have 25 people waiting on bated breath for that sight to the south of us spectacular enough to rival Niagara Falls. My two-hour-old career flashed before my eyes as I keyed the mic once more.

“For those of you on the right side of the aircraft, if you look left, you’ll see the people looking at Niagara Falls.”

I distinctly remember breaking a sweat when I lied to the training captain saying it went well. It took me 3 weeks to finally garner the courage to check my mailbox in fear of finding that “see me” letter from the Chief Pilot. It never came, and eventually I started making P.A.’s at audible levels again.

Delivering the perfect P.A. is an art. Some choose to script everything out, others choose to simply not do any, and yet others ramble on for ages. My goal was to master the art of the perfect P.A. Spoiler alert: I never did.

There’s something about hearing that magic voice from the cockpit that seems to assuage the airline passenger. Such was the case on a stormy summer day in 2002 when our flight attendant asked us to make a P.A. to remind the passengers to keep their cell phones turned off. We had been first in line for takeoff with a line of 20 aircraft behind us and a wall of black clouds in front when the flight attendant made the request. I obliged:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, from the Flight Deck, we understand you’re anxious to tell those waiting on you in Appleton that your flight may be late, but safety is our number one priority. With the storms and with our reliance on our radar, it is extremely important that you keep your cell phones off.”

In itself, a fine P.A. The only problem was that while I was saying the words “keep your cell phones off,” my cell phone rang. Being the traditionalist I am, I like to have the loudest, simplest, ‘no mistaking Courtney’s cell phone from 30 yards’ ring. The good news is that half of the passengers had forgotten about it by the time we landed in Appleton. The bad news is the other half did not.

All told, I probably said something undeniably stupid over the P.A. at least once a month. Some were inadvertent, like the time I was excited to tell the people on a flight to Detroit that they were lucky enough to be on the first revenue flight for that aircraft. Turns out, some passengers took that to mean the plane had never flown before and a few asked to get off.

At other times, the stupid remarks were intentional. In 2005 it was difficult to find an airline that was not in bankruptcy. So I mentioned it:

“We’d like to thank you for flying with us today. We know that you have a choice when it comes to bankrupt airlines, and we’re glad you chose this one.”

As my career progressed and I realized that I wasn’t going to be fired for my P.A.’s, I became more bold.

“Unfortunately it looks like Atlanta has instituted a ground-stop program and it could be a two-hour delay. We do have some good news, though. The Captain and I just saved a bunch of money by switching our car insurance to Geico.”

You’d be surprised how well that worked.

“Folks, from the flight deck, we’ve stopped short of our gate to allow for some traffic, however we do have an indication up here that some of you have already unbuckled your seat belts. We’ll need that indication to go out before we can proceed.”

We could hear the clicks of the seat belts from the cockpit. That one was a flight attendant favorite.

Finally the time came for me to step out of the cockpit and into a different career. For those who have made the switch, you know what an internal struggle it can be. I spent a month saying good-bye to my window office, and reflected back on the times we took the aircraft out and how she always brought us back. It was during this time of introspection that I was able to chat with a new pilot just starting his career. He was nervous about the job ahead of him, but nothing worried him more than the public announcements.

As I packed my flight bag and stepped out of the cockpit, I could think of only one piece of advice to give him:

“Just key the mic and start talking. You’ll figure it out.”

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Courtney is the co-creator of the Airplane Geeks Podcast, founder of AirlineEmpires.net, currently works for a commercial aircraft OEM, and is a self-proclaimed stud muffin. You can find him on LinkedIn or Twitter @miller22.

Cranky is on a much-needed vacation and won’t be responding to emails this week. Fortunately, before I started drinking too heavily, I put some posts live. Today, we’ve got a guest post from a guy who helped open up Africa for Pan Am and is now doing the same for Delta.
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People often ask me what has changed in Africa over the last 25 years to make it possible for Delta Air Lines to fly to a continent that my former employer, Pan Am, largely abandoned in the 1980s. How could it be financially prudent for a major airline to invest large aircraft and resources in a continent with a gross domestic product equal to a fraction of U.S. GDP, they ask?

Vastly improved technology, stronger, consolidated global airlines and accelerating economic growth across Africa are the simple answers.

When I began my aviation career with Pan Am in Johannesburg in 1973, Africa was still a wild frontier for Western-style commerce. Phone lines were unsecure and unreliable. Computer systems were not connected. And airport infrastructure was generally not available unless you bought it or built it yourself.

To illustrate this point, Pan Am owned Intercontinental Hotels and constructed new properties around the globe to provide appropriate crew and passenger accommodations in many of the new cities it served.

And even after 30 years of air service development, in the 1970s many flights arrived from points across Africa with little advance notice of how many passengers were on board or how many customers would be making connections. Reliable data services simply were not available between the opposite coasts of Africa in those days.

Today, many of the age-old African political and infrastructure challenges remain. But new technology, improved communications and intra-Africa geopolitical improvements are making it possible for air travel to advance the pace for expanding global commerce on the continent.

As an example, this month Delta is returning to Monrovia, marking the first time U.S. airline service has existed in this market since the mid-1980s. When Pan Am served Liberia in the ’70s, we had to physically drive between the airport at Robertsfield and our commercial office in Monrovia to transfer information because we had no reliable way to communicate between the city and the airport.

Now, it is possible to use a Blackberry to stay connected to the world as we zig zag across Liberia or any country in Africa developing service. Improved intra-Africa airline service by the likes of Kenya Airways also make it possible to do business in many parts of the continent without making circuitous flight connections back through Europe as we had to do in the early days.

Advances in aircraft also have made Africa a more attractive theater for global aviation. When I started with Pan Am we never imagined the possibility of a Boeing 777-200LR aircraft flying nonstop in both directions between Atlanta and Johannesburg. And, in 1941, my predecessors certainly couldn’t have imagined these types of advances when they launched Pan Am’s first scheduled commercial service from New York to Senegal with intermediate stops in Bermuda, the Azores and Lisbon. Operated with Boeing 314 Flying Boat aircraft, the total travel time on this route exceeded 60 hours. Yes, 60 hours.

Today, Delta operates the same New York-to-Dakar route nonstop using Boeing 757 jets with a flight time of just over eight hours – not the three days required for the original Pan Am flight.

Pan Am served more than a dozen cities in Africa at its height, but the trail blazed to reach that point took more than three decades. In three years, Delta has grown to serve seven destinations in Africa with plans to grow to at least 10 once additional government approvals are received.

As our example shows, airlines that reach the market first, make lasting investments in infrastructure, customer service and pan-regional partnerships will create the most value for their customers and, most importantly, the African nations that so badly want to boost their economic outputs.

Growing relationships with carriers like Air Nigeria and Kenya Airways are indicators of the investments we must make beyond the airfields we serve. And the relationships the industry is building with governments across the continent mark a critical step in advancing the growth of Africa’s own aviation infrastructure in the years to come.

While I won’t be here to see the next 40 years in Africa, I’m sure they will be even more exciting than the last. There are very few places left on the globe with such promise of development as Africa. And this bodes well for airline managers everywhere.

–
Jimmy Eichelgruen is Delta’s regional sales manager for Africa. He is based in London but spends most of his time on planes flying to and from points across Africa. He began his aviation career in 1969 with South African Airways and in 1973 joined Pan American Airways as a sales representative advancing to Director of Sales – Africa with assignments in Johannesburg, Nairobi, Monrovia and Abidijan. He became part of Delta’s London office when the airline acquired Pan Am’s trans-Atlantic routes in 1991.

Images are from the author