Hey everyone. I made it back from Peru yesterday morning, and let’s just say it’s going to be a VERY busy end to the week. I hope you enjoyed the guest posts while I was gone, and hopefully we’ll get both Henry and Benet to return at some point in the near future. I think I’m going to spend the rest of this week catching up on snippets of what happened while I was gone. You’ll see more in depth discussion about my trip which included new airlines, airports, and airplanes, starting on Monday. For now, let’s see what I missed while I was away.

Continental Tells United to F*&# Off - This was a welcome surprise, I must say. Continental decided that it won’t be merging with United or anyone else for that matter. That left United to go lick its wounds and see if US Airways would come out and play. Meanwhile, Continental, not exactly thrilled at the prospect of playing second fiddle to DL/NW in SkyTeam has started looking elsewhere as well, including a possible oneworld membership.

Eos Won’t See Another Dawn - Just before I left, Eos quietly disappeared from the skies. This one is a little bittersweet for me, because I actually worked with the founder back in 2003 as he was just getting this idea off the ground. I always believed in the idea, but it was going to be tough to succeed even with fuel prices at lower levels. With fuel where it is, the only funding available appears to have been from foreign sources and that wouldn’t have worked with existing foreign ownership rules.

Virgin America Pumps Up the Frequency - You know I’ve been strongly against Virgin America’s strategy of entering highly competitive markets with low frequencies. Well it looks like the airline has finally realized that’s a bad idea. Business travelers will see a more frequent flight schedule on transcontinental routes as well as Seattle to SFO. While I still think these are bound to lose a ton of money with fuel where it is, it’s still the right strategy (except for that SFO-SEA route), if there is such a thing for them at this point.

JetBlue Goes Ex-LAX - While Virgin America builds up, JetBlue walks away. The airline now says it will “delay” its new LAX service. The airline says fuel is too expensive, but you know that also means revenue isn’t where they wanted it to be. It must have been really bad to cancel this service within a few weeks of it starting. This is of course good for Virgin America, but it also shows how hard this market is. Congrats to JetBlue for not being afraid to walk away.

Alaska Throws Down with Virgin America - Alaska, meanwhile, is not going to throw Virgin America a bone at all. Right after Virgin said it would beef up flights between SFO and Seattle, Alaska said it would do the same. Oh, and how about some double miles on the route? This looks like a losing battle for Virgin America, but Alaska’s going to bleed in the process.

Southwest Turns the Knife Further - Fresh off the latest round of Denver increases, Southwest is at it again. On August 4, the airline will start nonstops to Ft Lauderdale, New Orleans, and Sacramento. You’ll also find another daily nonstop to Phoenix. The good news for Frontier? Um, well, they don’t fly to New Orleans, so, uh, that’s good, right? Also, in unrelated Southwest news. If you haven’t seen Southwest’s new blog setup, check it out. The airline continues to be leaps and bounds ahead of anyone else.

That’s all for today. You can expect an international edition of what I missed tomorrow. Then I’ll have more on Peru next week.

It’s hard to write so many posts in advance of a long trip, so I asked my coworker and Cranky Photographer, Christopher Craig, to pick out a photo from his collection that I could post while I’m gone. Now keep in mind, I wrote this post on April 26, and I’m just going to guess that there’s been more merger activity since then. So, has this merger happened yet?

I’d like to blame this ridiculous idea on my brain not getting enough oxygen at the high Peruvian altitudes, but I guess I already told you I wrote this before I left. Oh well. My plane is landing as this post goes live (assuming we’re on time), so I guess I’ll find out what really happened soon enough. I’ll be back posting on my regular schedule again tomorrow.

Poor Frontier. When they look out their windows, they must see Canyon Blue-colored vultures circling the premises. There’s no question that Southwest is going in for the kill. This week, Southwest said it would once again pump up its Denver flying.

First, here are the details. On June 4, Southwest will add an eighth daily nonstop between Denver and Vegas. The airline will also start twice daily service between Denver and both Portland and Indianapolis. On August 23, San Antonio gets a second flight from Denver.

The Southwest route map from Denver is starting to look quite similar to the Frontier map. Really, the big cities are mostly covered and now Southwest is getting into the secondary ones. To compound the problem, Frontier also announced this week that it would be terminating its contract with Republic to do some regional flying for them. That means they will no longer serve Missoula, Sioux City, Jacksonville, Little Rock, Tulsa, and former mini-hub Memphis. None of those are cities to which Southwest flies nonstop from Denver, so that means Frontier will only have even MORE exposure to the airline. The Republic service must have been an unbelievably poor performer for Frontier to want to ditch it that quickly.

This effectively leaves Lynx and its small fleet of Q400s (they launched Durango the same day this Southwest release came out) to keep the airline away from Southwest, but that’s not going to really cut it. Sadly, Frontier’s time may be up soon.

The airline is in bankruptcy, very low on cash, and looking for funding. With Southwest moving in heavily on Frontier’s only stronghold, I think it’s going to be tough to find someone willing to pour money into the airline. It’s sad, because I really like flying Frontier, but I just don’t know how they can get out of this mess.

It’s been awhile since I put up some good airplane porn, huh? Well, let’s break that streak. Southwest has a long history of painting airplanes to look like the state flags of its biggest operation locations. Texas, Arizona, and California, for example, have them, but there’s been a gaping hole for some time . . . Illinois.

So now they’ve painted a plane to look like the state flag of Illinois. Since Southwest took over ATA’s space at Chicago/Midway, they’ve really grown like a weed, so this seems appropriate. And speaking of weed . . .

Am I the only one thinks this Eagle looks like he’s got a pot leaf in one claw while he tears through someone’s artery with his beak? Ok, maybe I am the only one. Southwest’s PR team sent this to me, and I must admit that the eagle hanging out in front of the plane is a little intimidating.

In case you wondered what the Illinois state flag actually looks like . . .

Hmm, it definitely is a little easier to see what’s going on when you see the flag. That’s not an easy one to put on to a plane, but it’s a lot better than, oh, Maryland.

We’ve got a lot going on today, so without further adieu ado, let’s get started.

• Southwest and the FAA Fighting - If you haven’t heard, there’s been a steel cage match in Washington lately. In one corner, we have Rep Oberstar breathing fire and brimstone. In another corner, we have the FAA trying to pick up the pieces, and in a third corner we have Southwest claiming ignorance. In the fourth corner? Um, uh, Congressional pages? I don’t know. Let’s just say it’s a triangular cage.
  
  The hearings have been interesting, and if you’d like a play-by-play, I’d recommend reading Evan Sparks’s Aviation Policy Blog. In short, the FAA came out looking absolutely terrible for really not adequately overseeing Southwest’s maintenance operation. The FAA effectively allowed Southwest to violate the rules despite the attempts of some lower level FAA people to do things properly. What a mess. Neither the FAA nor Southwest looked good here, though the FAA definitely took the brunt of it.
  
  In a post yesterday, Evan Sparks argues that independent oversight might be necessary for now. I tend to think I agree.




• American Grounded Again - Remember how I said the FAA looked terrible? Well they’re trying to make up for it by flexing their muscles ineffectively. Once again, we have grounded airplanes that may not really need to be grounded, and this time it’s unbelievably the same American MD-80s that were grounded before. Apparently, AA didn’t do it right, and now cancellations are rising. If you’re flying AA today, start crying now.




• 787 Delayed Again - Bet you can’t wait to get onboard one of those fancy new 787s, huh? Chill. It’s not going to happen any time soon. Boeing, doing its best Airbus impression, delayed the plane again this morning. Now the first flight won’t even be until the fourth quarter of this year. And you wonder why they didn’t start crowing when Airbus faced A380 delays? Now you know. Bleh. Check out FlightBlogger for ongoing coverage.




• Oasis Hong Kong Is Dead - I know, I know. You guys love Asian news, and I rarely talk about it. Well, here’s a little bit of bad news for those who had tickets on Oasis Hong Kong. The airline is toast. Man, you wanna talk about going down in a blaze of glory? According to JetPhotos.net Daily Aviation News, the airline has been burning through $128,000 per FLIGHT! Now that’s impressive.
  
  Flights were between Hong Kong and both London/Gatwick and Vancouver. I say “were” because all flights are done. IIRC, these guys were owned by some crazy rich couple that is now likely a lot less rich. At least they got out now. If you had tickets, Cathay is helping.



There’s your fun-filled update for today. You might want to start the day with a little scotch to numb the pain.

The rumors started swirling yesterday, and it was confirmed overnight. ATA is shutting down effective this morning. They lost their military contract, and so they’re done. I’ll have more on this tomorrow (my regular post here today will be up soon). If you were booked on them, try to get a refund from your credit card or see if any other airline will accommodate you. If you booked them via a Southwest codeshare, Southwest will take care of you.

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.

My brother lives in Philly, and Wednesday night he had the unfortunate task of trying to fly out of that place in a soaking rain. Now, you know rain in general doesn’t cause problems, but in that magical Northeast corridor, it means congested airports like Philly basically grind to a halt.

He had to work a full day and then take the last flight out to Phoenix on Southwest (via Chicago/Midway). When he headed to the airport, there were average arrival delays of 3h 43m, and you know that, of course, means that departures weren’t going out on time either. Needless to say, his flight was going to misconnect in Chicago by a couple hours, leaving him stranded overnight.

What could he do?

I thought I’d piece together how I helped him with the thought that it might be helpful for others as well. Remember, in situations like this, the airline employees just want to get you out of there as quickly as possible, because they have thousands of people to help. So, the rules that may have applied to your ticket before are out the window. If you do the legwork and present a viable option, they’re likely to let you do it.

1) Determine Your Goal

When the weather is a mess like that and delays are rampant, you need to figure out your goal. For some people, it might be worth rescheduling your trip and going home. For others, you may need to have a certain time you need to be at your destination. Still others may just prefer to take the easiest option, even if it isn’t the quickest.

For my brother, he needed to be in Phoenix by 8a Thursday morning. With that in mind, I went to work.

2) Look for Earlier Flights

Knowing that his flight to Chicago would be delayed for a long time, it’s a natural move to look for any earlier flights. Those are probably also delayed and can end up getting you to your connection point at about the same time you were supposed to arrive. Sure enough, there was an earlier flight to Chicago, but the chances of getting on it very slim to none. Besides, there were other options out there that looked more appealing so he passed on trying for standby.

3) Look for Nonstops

My brother took the late connection because the last Phoenix nonstop was too early in the day. With delays, however, he had a chance on getting it. As I mentioned, when operations are horribly messed up like this, most airlines will get you there anyway they can; forget about fare rules and restrictions. So, he went to the gate and got on the standby list. With #26, his chances weren’t good, but they looked better than the earlier Chicago flight that was leaving at about the same time. He didn’t make it.

4) Grab the Route Map/Timetable

While he waited for the nonstop, we looked into backup plans. For smaller airports, this may not be necessary because there aren’t very many options. But in bigger airports where there are many destinations, the best thing you can do is figure out what options are out there. Most airlines offer a timetable on their website, so you can just download that and take a look. It’s a good idea to do this before you travel, just in case you need it. If you’re at the airport without it, just scan the departure screens to see where flights are going. Still, you’ll be much better off with an internet connection so log on or call a friend if you can.

I just started looking through all the cities Southwest flew from Philly and tried to manually build connections. Nothing worked that would get him there that night. So then I started going back to the goal. He needed to be in Phoenix by 8a. Now, my brother is used to not getting much sleep (he’s a doctor), so I knew that he would be willing to give up sleep to reach his ultimate goal.

His worst case scenario was that he took the Chicago flight, spent the night, and flew out first thing Thursday morning. That wouldn’t get him in until 915a, still a little too late. So, I looked for better alternatives. The closer I could get him to Phoenix that night, the easier it would be to get him to Phoenix early in the morning.

Sure enough, I found a flight to Austin that would allow him to take an early morning flight to Phoenix arriving at 740a. And besides, who wouldn’t rather spend the night in Austin than Midway?

He was fifth on the standby list, but that flight took none. Damn. But wait, there was one more chance. There was a slightly later flight that actually went through Nashville before arriving in Austin. He tried that one.

Success! Sure, he didn’t arrive Austin until just before 2a, but he did get about 3 hours of sleep before taking the 7a flight on Thursday to Phoenix. In the end, he made it by 8a, and for him that’s all that mattered.

So remember, keep your ultimate goal in mind. You won’t always get lucky like this. That last flight could have just as easily not worked out. He would have had to go to Chicago and fly out later Thursday morning. But knowing your options means that you have a much better chance than a lot of other people.

I’m not going to spend too much time talking about what happened today, because it’s been covered by just about everyone. (I should say overdramatized by just about everyone.) In short, Southwest had to take 38 planes out of service to perform a 90 minute check to see if there were any fuselage cracks. They canceled a fair number of flights today (Wednesday), but they should be back to normal tomorrow.

The reason I’m not going to spend much time on this is because I just don’t know much about what’s going on. Southwest says that there was an “ambiguity” related to the required checks that they discovered last night when they were going over maintenance records. So, they decided to be conservative and pull the planes out immediately.

What was this ambiguity? If they self-reported the problem to the FAA a year ago, shouldn’t those ambiguities have been discovered then and not a year later? I said before that we need to wait before condemning Southwest as being unsafe. I still stand by that, because there’s a lot that we don’t know, but this “reinspection” of aircraft certainly does not help their cause in my eyes. I still tend to think that the FAA is going to come out worst of all here, but Southwest isn’t going to come out smelling like roses by a longshot.

This is definitely the hot topic of the last couple days, and I must admit I’m still trying to sort it all out. This is what I’ve put together so far (with the help of some good reporting from the Dallas Morning News).

Back in 2004, the FAA issued an Airworthiness Directive (AD) saying that operators of certain 737s needed to inspect their aircraft for fatigue cracks. On March 15, 2007, the airline notified the FAA that it actually hadn’t completed all the inspections necessary on all the aircraft and it would do it immediately. Up until that point, the airline had flown almost 60,000 flights with those aircraft without knowing there was an issue. For that, the FAA has proposed a relatively minor fine of $200,000.

The inspections were completed between March 15 and March 23, 2007. During that time, they didn’t pull the planes out of service completely, with the blessings of the FAA, and they actually operated an additional 1,451 flights even though they knew they hadn’t done the inspections. For that, the FAA threw down a major $10m fine.

These, of course, are serious issues, but the media and a certain Congressional rep have blown this way out of proportion to try to scare everyone. It all comes down to this letter from the FAA to Southwest detailing the charges. You’ll notice the following.

The aircraft . . . were unairworthy when they were operated on the flights above because the required AD inspections had not been accomplished.

Oh boy, the media had a field day with this one. CNN put out an article entitled, “Records: Southwest Airlines flew ‘unsafe’ planes” and Rep Oberstar was quoted as saying that “The result of inspection failures, and enforcement failure, has meant that aircraft have flown unsafe, unairworthy, and at risk of lives.”

But before you freak out and stop flying Southwest altogether, let’s review what exactly it means when an airplane is “unairworthy.” It sounds pretty scary, but in this situation, it’s more of a technical description than anything else. If an aircraft has not complied with an AD by the required date, the aircraft is automatically considered unairworthy. If you want to read the entire definition, take a look at our National Policy on Airworthiness Certification of Aircraft and Related Products. Ok, maybe it’s best if I just point you in the right direction. In section 45 on page 20, you will see described the “Basic Eligibility Requirements.” It says that “Before a standard airworthiness certificate can be issued, the applicant must show the following . . . All applicable ADs have been complied with . . . . .”

So as you can see, this was more of a technical description as opposed to saying that the planes were truly unsafe. But that doesn’t mean that they weren’t. They did, after all, find 6 aircraft had small cracks that needed to be fixed. So were they unsafe? Probably not. There are so many strange political moves in here that I get the feeling we haven’t heard the whole story. Check these out.

• The FAA came out with the fine a week before congressional investigators were to have issued a report. Why not wait?
• FAA supervisors actually permitted Southwest to keep flying those planes after they admitted they hadn’t complied with the AD. Why?
• Boeing says “In Boeing’s opinion, the safety of the Southwest fleet was not compromised.”
• Southwest says We assure you that this issue never compromised the safety of our fleet.

As you can see, there is a lot of conflicting information out there. What we do know is that Southwest failed to respond to an AD in time, self-reported when it uncovered that fact, and then continued to fly those aircraft until they were fixed with the blessing of the FAA.

When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound that bad. In fact, the worst part of the whole thing is what drew the smallest fine - that Southwest simply failed to perform the work required in the AD in the first place. Will this make me less likely to fly Southwest? Nah. This kind of stuff does happen, though I’m obviously not thrilled to see it. I do want to know more about what Southwest is doing to make sure this doesn’t get overlooked in the future.