You all know I was a big fan of the idea behind ExpressJet’s branded service, but the combination of high fuel prices, the wrong type of plane, and the lack of connectivity into a larger network/frequent flier program conspired to bring it down. So how is it that I found myself walking on to one of these jets (at left) long after the branded flying had been killed?

Once the branded stuff shut down, those planes had to go somewhere. Many were returned, but others were used to grow the Corporate Aviation group. They had one of their corporate birds in Long Beach recently, and that’s what I was able to get onboard. Sadly, we didn’t go anywhere, but it was an interesting visit.

If you’re expecting lavish couches and beds with champagne, that’s not quite what they’re doing here. Picture one of their 50 seat Embraer regional jets. Ok, now remove all the scheduled passengers and put charter customers onboard. That’s it. Well, at least that’s the case for 22 of the planes in the fleet. The other 8 actually have only 41 seats onboard and seat pitch grows from 31″ to a comfy 38″ (at right), but it’s still just a regular seat. I had the chance to hop on one of the 41 seat aircraft, and it definitely had plenty of legroom.

Is there a lot of demand for this? Apparently ExpressJet thinks so, considering how the group has grown. The group started with only 4 airplanes at the same time as the branded flying, but it had grown to 12 by the time the branded flying was shut down. Then it grew to its current level of 30 airplanes. According to John Yeng, the Sr Manager of Marketing who showed me around, business is good, and January and February were actually booked very well.

Who is flying on these planes? They’ve flown sports teams, bands, and employees from some Fortune 500 companies to name a few. The range is 1,600 nautical miles, and they’ll take you anywhere in the Americas. John mentioned a recent Mexico charter so international boundaries clearly aren’t an issue, and the brochure even talks about South America, though that’ll probably require some stops.

Is it really just the same as any other plane you might fly? That’s entirely up to the people paying for the charter. They keep upgraded pillows and blankets on hand for those who really want to pay more for it. They also can cater the plane with anything, though one big drawback is that they don’t have any ovens onboard right now. (They’re looking into it.) They did keep XM radio in each seat from the old branded service, and they’re looking into wireless internet onboard the aircraft as well. But for the most part, it’s just a regular plane.

How much for one of these charters? He gave me a rough estimate of $25,000 for a charter, and the brochure says $27,600. Of course, that can change depending upon how much time you need, but you get the idea. Cheap at twice the price, right? Not so much, but if you can pack every seat and you’re going somewhere that doesn’t have convenient (or any) commercial service, it actually can make good sense.

This is an interesting idea in that I don’t think anyone else is doing it. Sure, you can charter bigger airplanes from any number of sources, but who is offering a regional jet in a normal passenger configuration? I’m sure you can get one from all the usual suspects, the regional airlines, but they don’t have any aircraft dedicated to this as far as I can tell. Let me know if you know of others who are offering this.

Glad to see the ExpressJet livery live on, though I’m still bummed that the branded flying is done for. I’ll be watching closely to see if this group is able to succeed for the airline or whether they’ll eventually just have to go back to being a regional feeder and nothing else.

It’s time once again for the third annual edition of “Airlines We Lost.” This was a pretty active year, as you can probably imagine. Sadly, my wish last year for Alitalia to be on this year’s list has not come true. That airline soliders on while others have not been so lucky to have a government behind them to prop them up. As I said, last year, let us hope that all the former employees of these airlines find new jobs with ease. I’m probably taking Friday off, so I’ll be back again Monday. Happy New Year!


AlpiEagles – January 3, 2008


We were barely into 2008 when AlpiEagles became the first airline of the year to shut down. To be honest, I don’t know much about these guys, but if I couldn’t include Alitalia, I had to at least find one Italian airline. A Google search found some references that make me think it wasn’t much of a surprise that these guys went under. In fact, I’m somewhat amazed they lasted as long as they did.



Boston-Maine (Pan Am) – February 29, 2008

It’s not often that I’m happy to see an airline go out of business, but this is most certainly one of them. When the Pan Am name and colors were slapped on this two-bit outfit flying old 727s into backwater airports, it was an embarrassment. To make things even worse, this airline was effectively a union-buster that was given the Pan Am name and routes when the previous version of Pan Am was shut down by the parent company. Earlier this year, the DOT put out a scathing report that the airline was financially unfit, lacked proper management oversight, and didn’t follow rules.


Big Sky – March 8, 2008

Big Sky was a sad loss, at least for those who relied on the airline to get around the upper Midwest for years. Big Sky was acquired by Mesaba’s parent, but when Mesaba was sold to Northwest, the parent company wanted out of the airline business. The 19-seaters weren’t making much money, so it was time to call it quits. I remember when I was at America West and we signed a codeshare with Big Sky. There were very few airports they served that I’d even heard of before, but they were the lifeline for the people who lived in those places.



Adam Air – March 18, 2008

If anyone is actually surprised by this one, you must not pay much attention to aviation accidents. Adam Air came out of Indonesia and did a good job of convincing people not to fly it. There were a number of accidents and incidents over its relatively short life span, and ultimately the Indonesian government mercifully shut them down. We should all be able to sleep easier at night knowing that this airline is gone from the scene.



Aloha Airlines – March 31, 2008

For me, this is the saddest failure of the year. If this were the Academy Awards when they show the people who died in the last year, Aloha would undoubtedly get the loudest applause. The oldest airline to fail last year, Aloha succumbed to a brutal competitive environment thanks to the entry of go! into the Interisland Hawaiian market. Lawsuits have dragged on, but it appears they have recently been settled with the understanding that go!, the very airline that killed Aloha, will rebrand as Aloha. This was so unpalatable that even the judge put a temporary stop to it.



ATA – April 3, 2008

Though ATA was an airline that many people hated, I actually never had a bad experience flying them. In fact, I always had good experiences. They reached their zenith in the early 2000s as they grew their Chicago and Indianapolis hubs under now-United drone John Tague but collapsed mightily soon after. Southwest picked up the remains, and the airline limped along for awhile, but ultimately, the owners bought a couple other airlines and shut down the original. A sad end for an airline with a long history.



Skybus – April 4, 2008

Ah yes, remember Skybus? It seems like it was only around for a few minutes, so you may have forgotten them by now. The idea was to offer ultra low fare flights originally only from its Columbus hub. Columbus? Yeah. That might go a long way to explain why it didn’t work. But this airline called it quits before it actually had to. In fact, there was money left in the bank, but the management decided it just wasn’t going to work in the end. By this time next year, we’ll probably have forgotten completely that they ever existed.



Skyway – April 5, 2008

Poor little Skyway, better known as Midwest Connect, died because of Midwest’s insistence on not actually flying any airplanes itself. Skyway was Midwest’s wholly-owned regional subsidiary, but Midwest decided it would rather have SkyWest operate the routes instead. So while Skyway lives on as a ground operations company, it no longer has any planes. Then again, Midwest doesn’t have many of its own planes left either.



Oasis HongKong – April 9, 2008

Like Skybus, Oasis HongKong had a meteoric rise only to come crashing down hard. The airline was running long haul, low fare flights between Hong Kong and both London and Vancouver. Apparently, it’s fares were too low, because one day it just disappeared. Many have argued that the long haul, low fare model doesn’t work, though Air Asia X is currently going to do its best to prove that hypothesis wrong. (Nonexistent labor costs help, by the way.)



Eos Airlines – April 26, 2008

There’s a special place for Eos in my eyes, because I interned with the airline during business school, long before it got started. In fact, it was just me and David Spurlock in a Palo Alto office working on getting funding for the airline back in 2003. The experience was great, but high fuel prices, a very small niche market, and, according to others, weak management, did the airline in. With fuel at today’s prices, it undoubtedly could have held on longer, but it’s not clear that it would have survived.



Nationwide Airlines – April 29, 2008

I’m sure there were a few thousand airlines in Africa that failed this year, but none had a higher profile than Nationwide. This airline, based in South Africa, grew to have a fairly sizable operation that even served London. In 2007, Nationwide was shut down for regulatory non-compliance, but it briefly came back. Of course, a temporary shut down like that is just as bad as being shut down for good, so it did just that and decided to call it quits.



Far Eastern Air Transport – May 12, 2008

I don’t know really know a ton about Far Eastern Air Transport except that their tails had FAT spelled out in big block letters. That’s good comedy. I was surprised to find that this airline was actually around for fifty years, primarily as a very strong domestic carrier in Taiwan. Increased competition (in the air and on the rails) put this airline into financial trouble, and it finally called it quits after struggling to the right the ship for awhile.



Silverjet – May 30, 2008

Like Eos, Silverjet tried to do the all-premium airline model and failed miserably. I’m told Silverjet had a very nice facility at London’s Luton airport, but that wasn’t enough to make it successful. Locating the airline at Luton probably didn’t help much either. Toward the end, there was all kinds of drama. It was said that a Middle Eastern firm would pump money into the airline and refocus it, but that never came through and the airline ran out of luck . . . and money.



Champion – May 31, 2008

Though Champion flew charters with its 727 fleet toward the end, its 2 letter code “MG” alludes to its roots as MGM Grand Air. MGM was a luxurious airline flying between LA and New York, but Champion did a lot of sports charters and some leisure work as well. In the end, the aging fleet wasn’t competitive in the charter market and the airline simply opted to shut down and go quietly into the night. Fortunately, it didn’t go away until after delaying the Spurs to a playoff game against the Lakers. Thanks, guys.



Air Midwest – June 30, 2008

Little Air Midwest was another casualty in the 19 seat aircraft market that really took a hit this year. This airline had been owned by Mesa for several years, and ultimately Mesa opted to completely shut down its 19 seat operation. I had the chance to fly Air Midwest on one of its little Beech 1900s from Yuma to Phoenix, and I certainly had no complaints. Then again, the weather was good that day. Were it not, I might have had a different opinion of the little airline.



ExpressJet (branded service) – September 1, 2008

Let’s get one thing clear. ExpressJet still exists and is still flying around as Continental Express and as a charter airline. The piece that died was the “branded” ExpressJet operation that was set up to fly point-to-point between smaller cities; sort of a Southwest Express in my mind. If Aloha’s failure tugged at the heartstrings, this one bothers the brain. This model still looks interesting to me, especially with lower fuel prices and a different aircraft type. I just think ExpressJet was ahead of its time on this one.



Zoom – August 28, 2008

This quirky airline had a very strange setup. The original airline was Canadian and began flying Transatlantic from Canada. Then they wanted to fly back across the Atlantic to the US from the UK so they set up a UK subsidiary to do the work. Flights went from London to places like San Diego, where no other nonstop service existed. The idea may have made sense in someone’s head, but it didn’t work at all. They collapsed under their own weight.



XL – September 12, 2008

You knew XL was set on being a low cost carrier when it decided that letters were too expensive and shortened its name from Excel. The British low cost charter operation focused on shuttling pasty white Brits to sunspots, but apparently it wasn’t concerned about getting them back when it stranded fifty thousand travelers after its shutdown. Another 200,000 had future bookings so this was likely a more expensive winter than many had planned.


AeroCalifornia – October 4, 2008

Wait, didn’t these guys already shut down? You know it, but somehow the Mexican airline didn’t make my 2006 list. AeroCalifornia operated aircraft so old they were actually flight tested by Charles Lindbergh (um, maybe not), but they were considered airworthy enough to fly to the US until 2006 when it first shut down. The airline made a brief comeback with only domestic Mexican operations, but that again ended abruptly when they ran out of money.



Sterling – October 29, 2008

Sterling quickly rose to be a massive low fare airline in Scandinavia and Europe in general, especially after acquiring Maersk. I flew Maersk once and loved the product, but Sterling had plenty of ownership shifts and never fully found its groove. It didn’t help that its most recent owners were Icelandic, not exactly a good place to be from a financial perspective these days. Cimber Air says it’s going to resurrect the airline, but, well, we’ll see about that.



European – November 30, 2008

Oh man, am I finally done? European wouldn’t get a mention here except for two things. First, it was one of the last operators (if not the last) of the 737-200 in Europe. And second, it operated for Palmair, an airline I really enjoyed learning about this year. Palmair was surprised by the failure of European, but it has found an aircraft from Jet2 to pick up the slack for now. Meanwhile, European will probably disappear quietly without any fanfare at all.

[Airlines We Lost in 2007]
[Airlines We Lost in 2006]

Sorry I’m a little late this morning, but we’re (finally) getting some serious rain here in Southern California and that knocked out our power for awhile. We’re back up and running now, so let’s get to it.

If you read other blogs, you’ve most likely seen that the DOT has released the latest Air Travel Consumer Report with October delay information (PDF) inside. As you can imagine, October was a great month for the airlines. The combination of less capacity and the usually benign fall weather led no airline to have less than 80% of flights arrive on time. That’s great.

But this month’s report was a little thicker than usual as the DOT has started reporting specific tarmac delays. Apparently there were six flights in October that had tarmac delays of over four hours. Five of those were on ExpressJet operating for Continental in Houston over two days, October 15 and 22. Why? Well, there were thunderstorms around Houston, of course.

The worst was flight 2356 from Birmingham to Houston on October 15. That plane sat on the tarmac for 5 hours and 8 minutes. Holy crap. And if that isn’t bad enough, these people were stuck on an CRJ ERJ! Oh, the horror!

The odd man out on this list was actually an Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle to Juneau that sat on the ground on October 23 for four and a half hours. Seattle had rain that day, but it wasn’t anything unlike every other day up there between October and May. Juneau, on the other hand, had an inch and a half of rain with winds gusting to 56 mph. Ok, maybe that was the problem. But still, four and a half hours? Come on guys.

The report also gives the total number of flights with more than 3 hours on the ground for each airline. ExpressJet was the king with 24 of them. That could very well mean there were more than 1,000 tortured souls on an CRJ ERJ for that long. Continental had 12, but none crossed that four hour threshold. Nobody else had more than two. Kudos to Hawaiian, Frontier, JetBlue, Pinnacle, Northwest, American Eagle, and Southwest for not having a single one.

Updated 12/15 @ 907a: Changed from CRJ to ERJ – my stupid mistake!

I’ve seen unleaded gas for $1.75 a gallon here in Oklahoma, a barrel of oil is hovering around $60, and jet fuel is just over $2.00 a gallon, nearly 30% less than where it was a month ago. With this plunge in fuel prices, is it time to revisit ExpressJet’s now defunct model of providing point to point service between smaller cities? I hope so.

Jim Ream and the rest of the ExpressJet crew received a lot of flack for going out on their own and starting what I called a “Southwest Express” type of model. Instead of using 137 seat planes to link larger cities as Southwest does, ExpressJet used 50 seat aircraft to link smaller cities like Ontario and Tucson or Sacramento and Colorado Springs where no service currently existed. I loved the idea, but with fuel prices climbing, the ERJ 145 became a very difficult plane to make this work. (That wasn’t their fault – they had to use those planes.)

In August 2007, the airline reported a very low 63.8% load factor during the height of peak season. A year later in August 2008, after pruning the flights that didn’t work, the airline turned in a very healthy 78.4% load factor and showed that there was demand for the service. Unfortunately with the price of oil, there was no way they could make this one work, so they shut it down.

But even with lower prices, the Embraer still isn’t the right plane for this operation. Actually, I think the 70 seat Q400 turboprop might be the perfect aircraft for it. It can handle the relatively short stage lengths with ease, and it sips fuel compared to the 50 seat jets. So who is the right airline to try this?

Horizon.

Horizon is in the middle of retiring its Q200 and CRJ-700 aircraft in favor of an all-Q400 fleet, but that transition takes time. The airline has to remarket its 70 seat jets before it can get rid of them, so it has been trying to work with Bombardier on slowing down the Q400 deliveries to coincide with their ability to ditch the 70 seat jets. So why not start taking those Q400s as planned and open some new routes in old ExpressJet cities? Fares are higher in general right now, so that will only help, though of course the weakening in demand is alarming.

But there would be several advantages for Horizon over ExpressJet here. The flights would be operated by an airline with a connection to several major frequent flier programs, unlike ExpressJet, and they could offer codesharing with major airlines as well.

I always liked the ExpressJet idea, and I’d like to think that this could now work. It’s never a great time to start to try something like this, but this doesn’t have to be a major rollout. They can just start picking and choosing the best ExpressJet routes and grow from there if it works. Come on, Horizon. Give it a shot.

Bombardier Kicks Off Farnborough by Launching the C-Series
Bombardier has talked about it for years, and now it’s official. The 110 to 130 seat C-Series has launched, and it’s promising massive fuel savings.

ExpressJet Ending Branded Service with Full Planes
ExpressJet may have announced the end of branded service, but those flights are flying full this summer, showing this may work one day with lower fuel costs.

Is US Airways “Intimidating” Its Pilots?
US Airways wants to use less fuel, so the airline is training its pilots to do just that. Is this stepping over the line?

Farnborough Order Counts
Farnborough Air Show is more than halfway through. That means it’s a good time to step back and see where the aircraft orders are coming from.

Delta To Keep Pinnacle Flying
Delaying entry into service of a handful of planes may have convinced Delta not to drop Pinnacle’s contract, but the reliability question still hangs in the air.