We knew it was coming. When Midwest said it would ditch its MD-80s, that had to mean a lot of flight cuts and schedule shuffling. Well, now we know the extent of the damage. The new schedule not only cuts 11 cities, but it shuffles a lot of service around as well. This all begins on September 8.

That day, Midwest service to San Diego, Ft Lauderdale, and Ft Myers will end completely. Midwest Connect will also drop Baltimore, Hartford, Louisville, Muskegon (Michigan), Raleigh/Durham, St. Louis, San Antonio, and Wausau/Stevens Point (Wisconsin). Madison (Wisconsin) will lose flights to Kansas City but it will keep Milwaukee flights.

Los Angeles and Seattle will lose Milwaukee flights, probably because the MD-80 was the only plane in the fleet that could make it nonstop. The 717 will serve both those cities from Kansas City instead. Here’s a crudely drawn map as only I (or an untalented 5 year old) could put together. The slashes are Midwest Connect drops and the “x’s” are Midwest drops.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Midwest is also expanding its Northwest codeshare to include many more city pairs as part of this. Anyone get the sense that Midwest is quickly slipping into irrelevance? They’ve already asked for draconian pay cuts from their employees, but part of me thinks the ones who keep their jobs are the unlucky ones. My guess is that as the airline strengthens its ties with Northwest, more and more Midwest service will slip away.

As you can see in the map above, the airline now is essentially connecting Milwaukee and Kansas City with a handful of cities on the coasts. Is that not something Northwest could build up overnight if they really wanted to? It may just be a matter of time.

There’s no question that American has done an absolutely terrible job of managing the latest round of MD-80 maintenance issues from a PR perspective. It’s been so bad, that I’ve seen articles start to question the MD-80 as an airplane, even though there’s no reason for them to do so. The MD-80 is a safe plane, and it’s unfortunate that American has let this thing get away from them. So, as Milli Vanilli might say . . . blame it on AA, yeah, yeah. (No? Too ridiculous?)

It all comes back to American’s unwillingness to push out a full explanation of what was happening. Finally, yesterday, they did, though curiously it came from their EVP of Marketing and not from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. Airline Biz blog has the info here.

Basically, a couple years ago, there were concerns that wiring could arc and start fires or cause a variety of other problems. The FAA put out an Airworthiness Directive (AD) and made the airlines comply within 18 months. Now, they clearly didn’t think this was a problem of imminent doom, or they wouldn’t have allowed the airlines to make the fixes over 18 months.

By now, the fixes had been finished, but not 100% to spec. Now the FAA, fresh off being burned by the Southwest fiasco, is getting anal. They’re enforcing every little detail, so when they found that the spacing between ties holding the wire bundles together weren’t exactly one inch apart, they called foul.

So, the airlines flying the MD-80 are making these tiny changes to meet the requirements, even if it isn’t really a safety issue. How American wasn’t able to fix this last week when the planes were first grounded, I’ll never know. But it’s probably the FAA’s attempt to show the public that they’re doing something that’s making all this happen. It could have happened to any aircraft, but this is like the one kid in class who gets pulled to the front of the room so the teacher can make an example out of him.

Since it took American awhile to finally discuss the full details, it gave the media plenty of time to cook up stupid, stupid stories. The worst piece of irresponsible journalism comes from the AP. They put out a story entitled “Plane type Under Review Has Had Mishaps.” Uh oh. This awful piece of work goes on to link completely unrelated incidents, most of which were not even due to problems with the aircraft. And now CNN is jumping into the ring by talking about some landing gear problems that American MD-80s have had on extremely rare occasions over the last few months. The scaremongers are revving up. Let’s put a stop to that.

The MD-80 is a safe plane. Douglas built planes like tanks, and they tend to last forever. It’s no surprise that Northwest continues to operate 40 year old DC-9s. They may not be fuel efficient compared to newer planes, but they’re definitely solid aircraft.

I mean, take a look at this plane. Does it look unsafe?

Ok, so maybe it looks like a giant flying wiener, but it’s not unsafe. I know a lot of Americans living out here on the West Coast often associate the MD-80 with the Alaska Airlines crash off the coast of Southern California. It’s not often that we see accidents of that magnitude in our own backyard, so it tends to leave a mark. But once again, that wasn’t the fault of the plane. That was improper maintenance by Alaska Airlines.

If you’d like to review all the previous accidents the MD-80 has had, the Aviation Safety Network can help. You’ll see that most if not all the accidents in there were not due to problems specific to the MD-80.

Don’t believe me that the plane is safe? I actually booked a flight on one yesterday. My fiancee and I will be flying on a Midwest MD-80 in August, and I didn’t think twice about it from a safety standpoint. American, Delta, Allegiant, Midwest, and Alaska all still fly the MD-80 in the US thousands of times per day without incident. There’s no reason you should avoid them.

Recent media reports might make it seem like the sky is falling; as if every airplane you encounter may be unsafe. Just over the last few days, we’ve seen a rash of very public maintenance issues:

• Southwest rechecks 737s after maintenance record problems found
• United checks 747s for improperly calibrated altimeters
• American reinspects MD 80 aircraft wiring
• Delta follows American and reinspects MD-88 and MD-90 aircraft
• FAA orders 737s to be inspected for fuel leaks

It’s a pretty long and scary list, huh? Well, let me just say this.

You still shouldn’t worry about flying on any of these airlines. Many of these things have to do with record keeping issues. It’s usually just double checking something that’s already been addressed, and I haven’t heard of any major problems discovered in any of these inspections so far.

Now that the FAA has been scared into action after they messed up the whole Southwest debacle, they need to look like they’re doing good things. (And to be honest, they are, I think.) The carriers are going to comply as quickly as possible with this stepped up oversight. This can only be good, because it’ll clear out the cobwebs. I’m not expecting to see any major safety issues come out of this.

So, now that we have that out of the way, let’s discuss this from the perspective of someone flying this week. You guys might want to panic. Ok, ok. Panic is a little strong, but all of these checks are causing a ton of canceled flights. If you’re booked on an MD-80/90 type aircraft (also known as Super 80 in American’s marketing speak), you might want to rethink your travel plans while the airlines scramble to get these checks done.

If I went up to 100 people in the US asked them about Allegiant Air, my guess is almost all of them would pose the question asked in the title of this post. I’ve mentioned some of their seemingly random route announcements before, and you’ve probably asked the same question. So, who the f*** IS Allegiant Air?