Last week, Allegiant paid for me to come out to Vegas and speak to the attendees at its annual conference for the airports it serves. This is a great event that lets Allegiant talk about its own business to the airports so that it can further beat into them the importance of low costs. My speech wouldn’t have surprised any readers here since it brought up a lot of topics I’ve written about including small city service, ancillary revenue, and airport infrastructure. But it was a fun event, and I have to thank the Allegiant folks for bringing me out.

This trip wouldn’t be complete, however, without a trip report. Allegiant picked up the tab for the flights, so I don’t have exact amounts. I had hoped to fly out of Long Beach both ways, but there wasn’t a flight early enough on the way out so I had to go to LAX. In fact, my talk was originally early enough that I had to do the 6a flight on Southwest. When my talk was pushed back 30 minutes, they moved me an hour later. On the way home, I could still fly back to Long Beach. Both flights were uneventful.

On the way out, I got to LAX at 6a and was thrilled to find the security line inside the terminal. Still, it took me about 20 minutes to get through. My new laptop case was TSA-friendly, as promised, so that was a nice change of pace. By the time I got through, I went over to the cramped gate 2 for the flight.

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May 10, 2012
Southwest 2404 Lv Los Angeles 705a Arr Las Vegas 810a
Los Angeles (LAX): Gate 2, Runway 24L, Depart 1m Late
Las Vegas (LAS): Gate C5, Runway 25L, Arrive 2m Early
N762WN, Boeing 737-7H4, Canyon Blue, 100% Full
Seat 6F
Flight Time 48m

From the looks of the gate area, this flight was going to be full. It was. We boarded on time and I grabbed a window seat on the right side. This airplane unfortunately had the old seats. I was hoping to try out the new Evolve ones.

From my seat, I saw a very un-Southwest site. There was a mountain of bags outside the window, all with a pink “transfer” sticker on them. Point to point? Not quite. The flight attendants were friendly but were smart enough not to get too cutesy at this early hour. They took drink orders before we pushed back so that they would be ready to go once we were in the air on our short flight.

We took off into the shallow marine layer and you could tell these pilots were enjoying themselves. We climbed quickly and had some sharp turns in there to get us on our course to Vegas. A couple bags of peanuts and pretzels later, we were landing in Vegas. (Unfortunately, it was the lightly salted peanut’s turn instead of honey roasted.)

I was off the plane quickly and on my way to New York, New York, where the event was being held.

I stayed the night in Vegas so I could join the airport folks for dinner and a show (Ka, which is kind of awesome). The next morning, I headed to the airport for my flight back to Long Beach. The line of cars getting into the terminal area was massive. I was reminded that it was mostly cabs coming in to pick up people coming to town – Friday in Vegas. I hopped out of the car as soon as we were near the terminal.

I had checked in the day before but I didn’t have a seat and none were on the seat map except for Even More Space seats and I didn’t want to pay the $15 for the short flight. So I checked in again at the airport, and it just printed out a boarding pass with no seat, saying to go to the gate.

As usual, the security line was insane. It took probably 20 minutes to get through, however, because they move those lines pretty well. The boarding pass said gate D18, but when I walked by D16, it said Long Beach on the board so I stopped there. The agent said no, that was next door and this flight was JFK. Ok.

I went next door and asked for a seat. They had me in a middle in Even More Space. I said, “I assume there are no windows open, right?” She said there actually was one but it didn’t have the extra legroom. I was fine with that. (JetBlue’s normal generous legroom is more than enough for me.)

So I grabbed seat 21F and boarded.

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May 11, 2012
JetBlue 287 Lv Las Vegas 1048a Long Beach 1157a
Las Vegas (LAS): Gate D18, Runway 1R, Depart ~15m Late
Long Beach (LGB): Gate 2, Runway 30, Arrive 8m Late
N579JB, Airbus A320-232, Blueberries Tail (name Can’t Stop Lovin Blue), 100% Full
Seat 21F
Flight Time 42m

This flight was packed, and it was hot when I boarded. Fortunately it cooled down. We were ready to go on time, but the captain came on and said we’d be delayed 3 or 4 minutes due to “stuff.” Seriously. Really helpful announcement. Despite what the JetBlue flight status showed, we actually didn’t push back until about 15 minutes late. With LiveTV to watch, it was only mildly annoying.

We taxied out to what for me was a rare departure off runway 1R. We bounced out along the desert until we climbed above the heat for the short flight home. JetBlue has an express service so I just had a bottle of water and I passed on the snacks.

It was a very hazy day in the LA Basin, as we descended, but I had still a great view of Lake Arrowhead. Final approach was surprisingly bouncy. I was half expecting a go-around, actually, but he ended up putting us down almost halfway down the runway. We used all of what was left before taxiing back to the gate.

One of the perks of being at the back in Long Beach is that I was able to come down the back stairs. For a dork like me, that’s a great way to end a trip.

There’s nothing I like more than ripping apart the Department of Transportation (DOT) for its poor rule-making abilities, but every so often, the department does something right. We might as well celebrate on the rare occasion when that happens. Yesterday was one of those days as the DOT doled out slots at Washington’s National Airport.

The DOT had four slot pairs to give away at National as part of the recent Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization. As a quick refresher, National has a rule that prevents any flights longer than 1,250 miles from operating at the close-in airport. About a decade ago, Congress started allowing exemptions, primarily so Congressmen could fly nonstop to get to their home district (my interpretation, at least).

As part of the reauthorization bill this year, eight more slot pairs (one takeoff and one landing) were added to the pool. Four of them were meant for the big incumbent airlines at the airport. These airlines could convert one normal slot to one long haul. Here’s what they did.

• American will start a daily flight to its Los Angeles “cornerstone”
• Delta will add a second daily flight to its Salt Lake hub
• United will start a daily flight to its San Francisco hub
• US Airways will start a daily flight to San Diego

With the stage set, there were four more to give away either to new entrants or limited incumbents. There was a lot of competition for these, so the results weren’t easy to predict. Let’s start with the losers.

• Air Canada wanted to fly to Vancouver, but it’s a small, highly seasonal market.
• Alaska wanted to fly to San Diego, but that was its second choice. Once US Airways announced it would fly the route, this became a tough sell.
• Frontier wanted to fly to Colorado Springs, but that’s a very small market and would have been hard to justify.
• JetBlue wanted to fly to Austin, but that was also a second choice and Southwest put that up as its first choice.
• Sun Country wanted to fly to Vegas, but there are already a lot of flights in that market and Sun Country couldn’t connect people anywhere from there either.

Each of those had a big flaw, especially when compared to the four that seemed to deserve the flights far more. Incredibly, those four are actually the ones that won. Here they are.

• Alaska gets one daily flight to Portland. Portland is the airline’s second hub and has a decent-sized local market. Alaska will not only bring good service to the locals, which are largely loyal to Alaska, but it also adds good connecting options for a lot of small cities. This one seemed like the most obvious winner to me.
• JetBlue gets one daily flight down to San Juan. This one is a great move since JetBlue has been building up its presence in San Juan. This gives nonstop service to a place that will benefit from it, and it also opens up new connecting opportunities into the rest of the Caribbean. I like this route and how it fits into JetBlue’s strategy quite nicely.
• Southwest gets one daily flight to Austin. Nobody flies to Austin from National today and if anyone can serve it well, it’s Southwest. That’s why Southwest was obvious for this route while JetBlue was a longshot. It’s no surprise that Southwest won this.
• Virgin America gets one daily flight to San Francisco. Even though San Francisco will already get its first nonstop to National from United, that certainly won’t be a low fare service. Besides, Virgin America was the only applicant with no service to National, so you had to figure that the airline would get a foot in the door. The airline actually wanted two pairs, but the DOT rightfully shot that down and spread the wealth. This market should do well.

So, for once, I’ll say “good work, DOT.” Something tells me this praise won’t last very long.

If you’d like, you can read the full decision at regulations.gov.

Yesterday I wrote about the possibilities for JetBlue to bring partners into Terminal 5 at JFK, but there was one other nugget in the earnings call that caught my eye. This one comes from Robin Hayes, JetBlue’s EVP and Chief Commercial Officer. He talked about why the airline likes one-way codesharing.

What is one-way codesharing, you ask? It’s where Airline A places its code on the flights of Airline B, but Airline B doesn’t place it’s code on the flights of Airline A. Anyway, here’s what Robin had to say.

…if you look at what a lot of the costs really come with code-share, it really comes around when you are placing your code on another carrier, because you now get into an exhaustive list of disclosure requirements. You are providing a lot of training for your staff or crew members at JetBlue, whether that is in the call centers or ticket desks, and we have been careful to avoid two-way code. We have started doing it in interline where we have sizable interline partnerships and we see benefits that take that to the next level, which has been one-way code, which puts the onus on our partner to manage that complexity.

JetBlue is an increasingly popular participant in this kind of arrangement. The airline recently announced codeshares with both Japan Air Lines (JAL) and Emirates. In these codeshares, you can buy a ticket on, say, JAL from Tokyo to Buffalo, but you can’t do the same on JetBlue. Why not? Because it’s a real pain.

JAL, as a longtime flag carrier and member of oneworld, is used to dealing with complex relationships like this. In fact, most global carriers deal with these types of situations every day. For JetBlue, it’s easier to sit on the sidelines and take advantage of the opportunity without having to add the complexity.

That means JAL needs to train its people on knowing JetBlue’s rules while JetBlue just has to carry passengers and bags that JAL delivers to JetBlue’s door.

I still don’t like codeshares, but I get why JetBlue does this. It means more traffic for JetBlue because of the way tickets are sold today. But it’s not enough of a benefit for JetBlue to want to put its code on the other airlines.

That makes some sense to me. I mean, nobody is thinking about flying JetBlue to far flung destinations, so if people saw flights on JetBlue to Japan, they’d probably be scratching their heads anyway. But for people in Japan, they certainly expect to be able to fly JAL to the US and that could very well include Buffalo.

The funny thing is that JAL already offers that with a codeshare with American, but now it can offer even more options with JetBlue as well. I’m not surprised to see this is how JetBlue views the world of codesharing and I bet we’ll see more of it down the road.

It’s earnings season, and that means it’s time for a slew of long analyst calls to talk about the events of the last quarter. I don’t listen to them myself, because I’d never get any work done if I did. Instead, I just read PlaneBusiness to get the details on what happened. This quarter, a couple of things on JetBlue’s call jumped out at me, and it got me thinking. It looks like JetBlue might have the tools to bring not only its own flights, but also those of partners under its own roof. That would be huge. Take a look at this quote from the earnings call:

And then if you go over to JFK, just a little update. Of course, terminal five, we’re close to celebrating four years of really just optimum performance through that facility. We’re very close with the Port Authority of extending terminal five. We call it T5 International internally. It’s on the footprint of the former terminal six. Terminal six is — was not landmarked. It was obviously, as you know, originally there to support National Airlines decades ago. It is now a tarmac, and we are very hopeful that we will be breaking ground on an international arrival facility similar to what you see happening over at terminal four. There’s a lot of growth happening at Kennedy. We believe that having all of our operation under one roof — and again we will have Hawaiian Airlines in here very shortly — is really exciting.

This might not be breaking news, but it’s the first time I’ve really thought about this. An international facility at Terminal 5 would do wonders, wouldn’t it? Of course, it would allow JetBlue’s own international arrivals to land at Terminal 5 instead of running a split operation today, but it can do much more than that.

JetBlue has already announced that its partner Hawaiian will begin flying out of T5 when it comes to JFK. Hawaiian, however, is the only partner that can do that right now. American is certainly too large and it has its own new facility there anyway. Cape Air, the only other domestic partner, doesn’t fly to JFK. All the other partners are international, though I do wonder if Aer Lingus could move today because of its pre-clearance. I’m not sure. But, if JetBlue builds a new international wing on the footprint of the old Terminal 6, that opens a whole new opportunity, and it comes at a good time. Here’s JetBlue’s corner of JFK:

Remember that Delta is actively working to take over a huge chunk of Terminal 4 as a replacement for Terminal 3. With that, all existing airlines in Terminal 4 will be pushed to the eastern concourse, I believe. And you know which airlines are included there?

Aer Lingus, El Al, Emirates, LOT, Singapore, South African, TAM, and Virgin Atlantic are all both partners with JetBlue and tenants in Terminal 4. Given the opportunity to make connections simple and move to a brand new facility, you would think that many of these would jump at the chance. Sure that might not include airlines like Virgin Atlantic, which have invested a significant amount of money in facilities, but others don’t quite have those deep ties.

That would create a monster of an opportunity. Keeping all those flights in the same terminal reduces minimum connecting times and allows airlines to schedule tighter connections. For an airline like El Al, it could help make connections more competitive by reducing total transit time. The shorter the travel time, the higher those flights show up in reservation system displays. That could be a big deal for some of these airlines, which might be at a disadvantage versus other airlines that can connect within the US on their own flights.

I haven’t seen a ton of information on this Terminal 5 expansion yet, but it seems like a great plan for both JetBlue and its partners.

We all know now about JetBlue 191 with the captain who broke down and was restrained on his flight. To me, it seems like the first officer handled this perfectly by getting the captain out of the cockpit and then locking the door. But does this concern anyone out there as a traveler? Something you’ll be thinking about on your next flight or no?