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.

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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

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’re looking at the view from the pointy-end of the plane.
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As an airline pilot for a major US carrier, I’m often asked many questions by, as I refer to them, “Earth people”, or people who don’t work for the airlines. I’m always happy to answer questions from people and remember, there are no stupid questions – but I have run into a few “inquisitive types.”

One of the most commonly-asked questions is “What route do you fly?” The majority of airline pilots don’t fly any one particular route. It’s only the most senior pilots on the biggest equipment whose schedule usually brings them to one or two destinations. Pilots who fly mostly domestic routes will often fly between two and five legs a day for three or four days straight. So when you ask them what their route is, don’t take offense if they laugh, as they probably can’t remember where they were in the morning, much less in the last four days.

The routes an international pilot flies, however, are usually more defined. As a quick side note, when I say international, I mean transoceanic, and when I say domestic, I’m referring to those who stay within North and Central America. Pilots who fly mostly international trips, usually have a smaller selection of cities to pick from. While pilots of the bigger airplanes such as the A340, B777, and B747 might only get to pick from four or five cities, pilots of medium-sized airplanes like the B757 and B767 have a bigger selection to choose from, and the smaller airplanes like a B737 or A320 have even more to choose from than that.

The airline I fly for serves over 160 cities throughout Europe, North, Central and South America, the Pacific, and Asia. So for one pilot to specialize in only one city, would be quite rare. Most pilots have cities they prefer to layover in, however, when it comes to bidding our monthly schedule, we usually bid for important things like being home for school plays, family trips, and for those of us married to an “Earth person”, weekends off.

Another question I’m frequently asked is, “What is your schedule like?” Well, as my grandfather used to say, “Some days peanuts, some days shells.” The best way to describe it is “consistently inconsistent.” I typically do three-day Europe trips, sometimes they are back-to-back, meaning I might work six or nine days in a row, followed by a stretch of four to seven days off. Other times, I may just work one three-day trip followed by two or three days off. Every once in a while, I’ll do a three-day Europe trip, and the next day fly to Florida and back. Usually I’m home between twelve and sixteen days each month. Because I commute from Minneapolis to New York, I bid trips that start late and finish early. That way I can fly into work the day I start, and fly home the day I finish, thereby avoiding an extra night in a hotel.

If you’re wondering what a typical European trip is like from a crew member perspective, allow me to walk you through it. I usually wake up in Minneapolis around 6:00 AM in order to catch a 10:00 AM flight to New York. Depending on how the weather looks and how many open seats there are, I may take an earlier flight to ensure that I get to work on time. If everything went as planned, I’ll have arrived in New York between three and six hours before my report time. During that time, I’ll catch up on e-mails, grab a bite to eat, and take a nap in the crew lounge.

We usually report to the weather and flight planning room about one and one half hours before departure time. During that time, we’ll plot our route across the ocean. As an interesting side note, the routes across the North Atlantic change on a daily basis, however the routes across the Pacific are permanent airways and never change. After we taxi-out and take-off, there’s a little bit of secretarial paperwork to take care of and eventually we will request our oceanic clearance.

Once we’re out over the ocean, obviously there’s no radar control that far from land, so we make position reports to the air traffic controllers. A position report consists of our call sign, current position, altitude, a time estimate to the next position, and the position after that. The air traffic controllers use this information to separate airplanes. Because of the great area of non-radar control, they separate airplanes by ten minutes (which is equal to about eighty miles), whereas air traffic controllers in the US separate airplanes by five miles when they’re in radar contact. Depending on what kind of equipment the airplane has, we make the position reports either over a high-frequency (HF) radio, or via a computer (think of it like a text message).

If the flight is scheduled for over eight hours, we’ll have a relief pilot. So, if you ever see a pilot come out of the cockpit on a transoceanic flight and take a seat in first class, you can be rest assured that there are still two pilots up in the cockpit. The short flights, “short” being eight hours or less, don’t have relief pilots. Because most of the oceanic crossings are done at night, you can probably imagine, after waking up at 6:00 AM, by the time the sun is coming up for the second time and burning a hole in your retina, you’re about ready to be there.

After the descent and landing, we’ll make our way through customs and out to the hotel van. This is when the day starts to get long. Some rides to hotels are upwards of an hour, and as you can imagine, after being awake all night long, those van rides are usually pretty quiet. When we get to the hotel, sometimes our rooms are ready, but because the hotels often “recycle” the crew rooms. Sometimes we might have to wait a half hour for them to be cleaned. This is usually the time when people are deciding what to do with the day.

Occasionally, if you’re in a city you’ve never been to before or won’t get to visit very often because of your juniority, you may jump in the shower and head right out to explore the sights. Those are usually pretty long days because by the time you get back to the hotel at the end of the day, you’ve probably been awake for 30 hours or more. Most layovers start with a nap, usually about four hours of sleep is enough to recover but still be tired later that night. After my nap, I usually try to fit in a workout, then head off to dinner with the crew. When you go to bed at night, getting to sleep isn’t usually difficult, but staying asleep is. I’ve sometimes found myself wide awake at 3:00 AM, which can make for a long flight home.

So after what was hopefully a restful layover, and if it wasn’t restful, hopefully it was fun, it’s time to head back home. Back to the airport, back through security, back across the ocean, and back to New York. This is when being a commuter is hard. If you’ve ever seen those signs on apartment buildings that read, “If you lived here, you’d be home now,” that’s about how I feel when I get back to New York. Because I choose to live in Minneapolis, I have to run back through security, and try to catch the next flight to Minneapolis. Hopefully on that flight, I’ll have a real seat in the back (as opposed to the cockpit jump seat), that way I can take a snooze on the way home.

That brings me to the last question I’m often asked, “What’s your favorite place to go?” That’s always a hard one for me to answer. I’ve been all over this great world of ours; I’ve toured the Grand Canyon, rode motorcycles in the Los Angeles canyons, partied in Times Square, drank wine under the Eiffel Tower, stared up at the Sistine Chapel, walked around Stonehenge, explored the Acropolis, and drank 40 year old scotch in Scotland. So what’s my favorite place to go? Home.
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Paul has been flying since the young age of 13, he has worked in the airline industry for the past 9 years and is currently a 757/767 first officer for a major US carrier based in New York. You can read his blog at www.smilingpaul.blogspot.com.

Photos were taken by the author

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 have a former reservation agent telling about life on the phone. This has nothing to do with my recent visit to Delta.
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As long as I can remember, I’ve loved flying. I think I got this gene from my grandma who is one of the most traveled little old ladies I know. That’s definitely an accomplishment given that she’s an African American woman who grew up in the Jim Crow South. When I graduated college into a bad job market in 2003, I decided to wait it out in the airline industry. Here’s a view behind the scenes of my 18 months working as a Reservations Agent for Delta Air Lines.

One man, many hats
Running a bunch of call centers gets expensive, so the company tries to balance keeping the agents utilized with reducing customer wait times. Every call into reservations goes into a different bucket:

• General Sales (GS) handled regular calls
• Skymiles handled award reservations and account-related information
• Reissues handled changes and refunds
• Delta Direct (DL Direct) acts like a gate agent and is whom you reach when you use the phone banks at airports
• Special Member Services (SMS) handled our most important customers
• International handled, of course, international reservations

Agents could also be trained to be second level support for other agents (Customer Service). On a day where Atlanta had delays, it’s possible that I would get only DL Direct and Reissues calls because that’s where the issues were. While reissues can be a one-button click affair, many times they would take 5 to 10 minutes and have to be done by hand in a sorta commandline shell.

Agents were coached that bad things would happen if we tried to do skills above our training, but given that the app was a dumb graphical user interface, it didn’t care. So if you ever called in to ticket a reservation and then asked to change a seat assignment on a Skymiles ticket and the person said they had to transfer you, that’s why. We were told when in doubt, transfer the call. I, on the other hand, would do my best to help and even on a couple occasions ticketed reservations to Canada. I properly informed the passenger about the fees but was fussed at afterwards.

Adding to the one man, many hats problem is that though DL Direct training gave me the power to waive fees, issue vouchers, and Skymiles, technically I wasn’t allowed to exercise those abilities on a non-airport call. Going by the book I would have to call Customer Service and tell them what I wanted to offer. In most cases, they would have me execute it so they could take another call.

It was kind of a bummer when someone who had a consolidator fare from Cheaptickets.com or Hotwire would call. I had to send them to the airport to change it even though they would be using a DL Direct agent anyways. There were a couple calls that I sent to the airport and took their call again on the DL Direct line. Thankfully they didn’t know it was me.

A rose by any other name…

To break up the monotony and help remember calls better, we were allowed to establish aliases. My alias for everything besides DL Direct calls was Matt Murdock from Daredevil. (I don’t care what anyone says, I think the Ben Affleck vehicle was grossly unappreciated.) Aliases also give the agent a little buffer. I could say to myself, “they aren’t yelling at me (James), they are yelling at the situation (and Matt).” Aliases were registered so if you weren’t treated well and you called back to complain, they could track it to the proper person. Who else can say that they worked with Madonna? Though that was someone’s actual given first name, not an alias.

Honesty will get you everything.

One of the policies at Delta when a person missed a flight was to charge a $25 Same Day Confirmed (SDC) fee. One day I got an airport call into my DL Direct line from a father traveling with his son. He owned up to missing the call for his flight explaining that they had arrived at the airport early and were playing in the terminal. He said he knew that it was $50 and he was okay with the charge.

Passengers that were aware of the charges and went along with them were a rare find. I can’t count the number of times people got to the airport ten minutes before departure and thought they should be reaccommodated for free. When I put this person on hold to do the SDC, I was expecting to charge him. Something told me to verify the check-in times on his record, and to my surprise, he was telling the truth.

It was plausible for the airport he was in (Atlanta I believe) that if he and his kid were playing in the concourse, he wouldn’t have heard the announcement. Though I had his ok to charge him and it was totally in my right to do so, I decided to waive the fee. It was the right thing to do and I couldn’t fault a dad for spending time with his kid.

When in doubt, take the money…

Depending on the duration of inconvenience for a given problem, we had tiers that we could offer. It was usually a certain dollar amount in a Delta travel voucher or Skymiles. They could be the same amount, 5,000 Skymiles or a $50 voucher, and people would take the Skymiles. I won’t get into whether Skymiles should be called Skypesos or not but I think people got fooled by the numbers.

Let’s make it clear, through its relationships with AMEX and other vendors, Delta gives out Skymiles like candy. At best, the airline evaluates them at a penny per mile. It’s in Delta’s best interest for you to take Skymiles because it’s a future liability that may never be realized (like if your account goes dormant and you lose the miles). Vouchers on the other hand will probably be used. Skymiles are selling the possibility of a SkySaver award, not the availability. Just as you should request cash for a voluntary bump instead of a voucher, request the voucher instead of Skymiles.

Though the pay wasn’t the best, my time at Delta gave me a chance to the world and has made my flying experience on all airlines better.
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James Williams is Software Engineer based in Silicon Valley and blogs after more geeky programmer stuff over at http://jameswilliams.be/blog

[Photo via Flickr user vlima.com, CC 2.0]

We’ve got a special guest post today from someone who is an aircraft dispatcher for a major US airline. This person wrote in to me after my interview with Kate Hanni with an enlightening piece on lengthy ground delays that I thought would be of interest to everyone here. Here is his take on things . . .

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If folks want the systemic, “big picture” view of why the new 3-hour limit is such a BAD idea, they need go no further than an airline’s central dispatch office, or any air traffic control facility, and chat with the actual working dispatchers and air traffic controllers, respectively, who are the front-line troops in the annual weather war.

Dispatch is an airline’s “Mission Control” center, and I’ve worked in one as a dispatcher for upwards of 30 years. A flight crew might operate 3-5 flights per day, but the average dispatcher works ten times that many flights in a single shift, and has a more-detailed awareness and understanding of the various problem areas within the airline’s route system. The dispatcher is also the one that plans the flight, including the routes, the alternates, and the fuel load, and is also the one passing along updated info to the crew while enroute. When weather hits, we’re also the ones that divert flights, and sometimes, if need be, we also cancel them.

There are two separate and distinct problems with delays, yet Ms. Hanni and her band of followers don’t seem to be able to discern the critical differences between them. In the last decade or so, there have been a handful of scenarios that produced 7+ hour delays, including, of course, the thunderstorms that caused Ms. Hanni’s American flight to be diverted to Austin. Admittedly, all the above situations were intolerable and handled poorly, and these are the “apples” when it comes to the issue of ground delays.

With respect to the delay Ms. Hanni suffered, I captured an image of the radar that night, and there was a big low pressure system anchored over west Texas resulting in a lengthy line of thunderstorms oriented north-to-south in central Texas. I’m sure Ms. Hanni and her ilk probably think a thunderstorm is a thunderstorm, but there are many variables associated with them that vary the net operational impact, such as coverage (Isolated? Scattered? Broken? Solid line?); movement; trend; tops (Permitting aircraft to fly over them, or not); and the potential for the weather to “train” over the same location on the ground. The cells in that line of thunderstorms in Texas the night of Ms. Hanni’s flight moved south-to-north and kept DFW in the weather much longer than had this been the more typical line of thunderstorms one sees with an approaching cold front which quickly moves W-E or NW-SE.

I’ve already mentioned the rare “apples” of the ground delay issues. The “oranges” are the much more common 2-4 hour delays one sees when thunderstorms impact major airports or regions, especially on the east coast. Ms. Hanni’s “solution” to the “apples” problem is NOT going to solve the “oranges” problem, yet I think the majority of Ms. Hanni’s success with her movement has been the ability to tap into the general public’s mistaken notions that ALL delays are equally evil no matter how short the duration; that EVERY operational situation is predictable by the airline with 100% accuracy; and that ANYTIME anything goes wrong it’s the automatic fault of the airline. There is no one-size-fits all solution here. Let’s look at some common-sense tests, assumptions, misassumptions, and observations:

• The general public can relate to the fact that their cross-town car trip will take 1x time in good weather and with dry roads, 2x time if it’s raining, and maybe 3x time if there’s snow or ice. Is it such a stretch to conclude that aircraft are similarly slowed down in such conditions?
• Does it make sense that airlines enjoy delays, or perhaps are they just forced to tolerate them, since (last time I looked) the airlines have no control over the weather? Nobody at an airline “likes” delays, but we realize that a good many of them are the unfortunate cost of doing business within the current ATC system. (The “oranges”, not the “apples.”)
• Likewise, does it make sense that airlines have the ability (at 11:07am) to predict with absolute certainty that a thunderstorm (or fog, or whatever) will impact XYZ airport at 5:23pm, or 6:03pm, or 7:16pm? Once bad weather starts occurring, will it end 1:23 from now, or 2:10 from now, or 3:33 from now?
• The concept of airspace capacity constraints is a foreign one to the general public, as they look up at all that sky and assume (incorrectly) that it has unlimited capacity. All that open sky, and there’s no room for my one flight? Again, that’s an individual flight perspective, and one that ignores systemic issues.
• As far as “just returning to a gate” and “just getting some portable stairs and buses” go, where can airlines (and airports) find the magic wands needed conjure up these extra resources (and additional gates) when needed on short notice? Should every airport have double the number of gates normally used “just in case” problems occur? Should Phoenix have the same number of snow plows that Anchorage does? What’s reasonable for an airport to have?
• Airport capacity is a variable commodity, and not a constant one. Look at the San Francisco airport acceptance rate (AAR) chart, for example. Notice that the AAR (a per hour figure) can vary greatly depending upon what runway(s) are, or are not in use. AAR is the “supply” and the flights that airlines (and non-airlines) fly into the airport are the “demand”. When demand is less than supply, things are good, but when the weather such as surface winds, cloud ceilings, visibilities change (often suddenly, despite forecasts) and drive a change to the runways in use that involve a drop in the AAR, demand then exceeds supply, and delays ensue. Some flights in the air will need to circle, and may even have to divert. Some flights that haven’t departed (still on a gate, or on a taxiway awaiting departure) will be delayed (think metered freeway on ramp here).

• If a thunderstorm event precludes aircraft from landing at XYZ airport for 2 hours, and XYZ normally handles 50 flights per hour, that’s 100 flights that are going to be affected, and they don’t just all disappear. Some will be able to hold and get in, others will hold and divert to alternates. Of those flights diverting, some will cancel, and some will refuel and try and go back to XYZ. Once the weather improves at XYZ, ATC will be working a backlog of traffic—things don’t immediately snap back to normal once the weather clears out.
• If airline schedules are restricted such to always be able to fall within an airport’s worst-case AAR, you’ll be “solving” a problem that maybe occurs 20% of the time and unnecessarily restricting things during the 80% of the time when it’s not warranted.
• If we say it’s foggy at XYZ and you tell the customer service agent the weather is OK at Aunt Tilly’s house nearby, that’s nice, but it’s only relevant if we’re shooting approaches to Aunt Tilly’s house and landing in her driveway. It’s the weather at the airport that counts. (You’d be genuinely surprised at how often this comes up.)
• One hears a great deal about “NextGen” ATC stuff, and while it will help in some operational contexts, it won’t in many others such as runway capacity. Also, if one is trying to get from LaGuardia to O’Hare and there’s a solid line of thunderstorms from Toronto to Atlanta topping 50,000 feet, it matters not whether the flight is navigating using VORs, GPS, Boy Scout compass, or taxiing on Interstate 80–you’re NOT going to get through the weather, and there will be delays.
• Please keep in mind that airline employees are not all interchangeable. Customer contact personnel don’t have detailed knowledge of the specifics of ATC delays, only that there are ATC delays. Likewise, many pilots only have their viewpoint of their specific flight, and not much awareness of any systemic issues. It’s no different than walking into a hospital. It’s unreasonable to expect detailed surgical questions to be answered by anyone other than by a surgeon—an admissions clerk won’t do–and it’s unreasonable to expect that clerk to be trained to answer surgical questions.

In closing, I’ll reiterate that nothing that I’ve written should be construed as acceptance of the delay that Ms. Hanni and others experienced in that handful of really lengthy delay situations. Irrespective of however well-meaning her efforts might have been, her pushing of a one-size-fits-all solution is going to end up being severely counter-productive. By DOT’s new 3-hour rule and the huge fines the airlines are now facing, it is the height of financial irresponsibility (if not insanity) for any airline to risk allowing EACH aircraft that busts the 3-hour limit to incur a multi-million dollar fine. Pre-emptive cancellations will occur earlier than the 3-hour mark, so as to ensure aircraft can get through any taxiway gridlock and get back to the gate before the bell does “ding” at 3 hours.

“The Cardinal” is back once again with another guest post here on Cranky Flier. I’ve been absolutely swamped with Cranky Concierge’s launch (adding new clients daily), and he had something he wanted to write about. Here, he’s taking on the EU.
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The European Union (EU) has generally done a decent job in pursuing European airline deregulation. When European airline deregulation has been stymied, it’s generally been through the actions of individual European governments, often in Southern Europe, where, for some odd reason, airlines are viewed as a symbol of national virility. Cranky’s done a good job of covering the machinations of the Italian govt to keep Alitalia flying, but he could have just as well picked on the French govt for its blatant subsidy of Air France in the early 1990s (which, trust me, the French govt would do again in a heartbeat, if it again became necessary) or the Greek govt for its support of various versions of the chronically loss-making Olympic Air/Airways/Airlines over the past 20-25 years (during this time, Olympic has been overtaken by private Greek carrier Aegean, though Olympic was itself finally sold to the private sector last month…). We should mention that the plucky Belgians, by contrast, let their late, unlamented flag carrier, Sabena, crater in 2001. Yay Belgium. Boo Italy. Boo France. Boo Greece.

However, with the downturn the EU has, unfortunately, come to the rescue of the traditional carriers. And of course, the traditional carriers want even more.

Europe’s traditional carriers are represented by the AEA — the Association of European Airlines — which bills itself as the alleged “trusted voice of European airline industry for over 50 years.” Yeah, like we’d trust the fox with the henhouse. The AEA is the rough equivalent of the US ATA — the Air Transport Association. The ATA represents the likes of American, United and JetBlue (that JetBlue pals around in the same trade association as American & United is another indication that notwithstanding its hip image, at heart JetBlue is the youngest legacy major). Similarly, the AEA represents dinosaurs such as British Airways, Air France, KLM (which has a separate membership, despite being the same company as Air France), not to forget the ultimate European throwback, Alitalia. European low cost carriers have their own organization, the ELFAA, which is where Ryanair and EasyJet, among others, hang out.

So what has the EU done for the AEA and what does the AEA want it to do?

Many European airports, particularly the big main airports (e.g. London Heathrow, Frankfurt, etc) are slot controlled, and of course these are the airports where AEA airlines play. EU rules say airlines have to use such slots 80% of the time or lose them. That the traditional airlines have most of the slots (and the European low cost carriers don’t) provides the traditional types with a degree of protection from the barbarians. The barbarians are largely relegated to the alternative airports, despite which they’ve done a great job of eating the AEA’s intra-European lunch.

The problem is that in a downturn like this, the AEA carriers can’t afford to keep using all their slots 80% of the time. So surely this means a breach in the city walls through which the barbarians can enter?

Oh, except that the EU has waived those rules to accommodate the AEA. Life is tough, says the AEA, you should let us off the hook and let us keep our slots even if we’re not using them. And the EU did just that. City walls intact, barbarians largely remain mostly outside them.

This, of course, is pungent bull-merde (appellation controlee, no doubt). Use-it-or-lose-it becomes meaningless if the moment the traditional airlines can’t afford to use the slots, the EU allows them not to. There are airlines in Europe doing just fine, they, unfortunately, just happen to be low-cost airlines. God forbid they should somehow gain better access to the biggest airports. Frankfurt might become overrun with airlines that don’t (shock!) offer business class. And where would we all be then?

Unfortunately, there’s a precedent for such sordid and blatant protectionism on the part of the EU for the AEA. It did exactly the same thing for the AEA after the airline downturn after 9/11. Again, there were
European carriers that continued to make money at the time, they just happened to be, from the point of view of the AEA, the *wrong* airlines. Yeah, Ryanair and that rowdy bunch.

The EU should know better — putting your finger on the scales of economic justice once just encourages the beneficiary to ask for more (just ask the Obama administration about all the favors they’re being asked to do for their Wall St pals after having pulled their undeserving chestnuts out of the fire).

In particular, now the AEA wants the EU to, get this, finance aircraft for its members. Yes, the AEA wants the European Investment Bank (EIB) to step in and provide credit to its members to purchase aircraft. This, of course, is ridiculous. If AEA members can’t finance aircraft purchases, then said members should make do with what they have. Period. Again, it’s not as if aircraft finance is unavailable to all airlines — it’s just that the financeable airlines happen to be the same barbarians (e.g. Ryanair) who don’t offer business class on their flights. If AEA members were profitable, chances are they’d be able to finance their aircraft. That they’re not profitable suggests that they need to either shrink or die. But going back to the issue of airlines as symbols of national virility, Seinfeld-style shrinkage is not something many European governments view with equanimity.

Unfortunately you have to imagine that such financing is, at the very least, a distinct possibility. Many AEA orders are for aircraft made by… wait for it… Airbus. So by financing AEA airlines, the EIB would also be helping out Airbus. We cannot rule out the EIB financing aircraft deliveries even to antediluvian specimens such as Alitalia. Also, to be thoroughly cynical (but probably not totally wrong) if the barbarians end up killing too many AEA members, EU bureaucrats might have to travel with the great European unwashed (there’s a cheap joke here, but I’ll leave it be) on the likes of Ryanair and EasyJet.

The only silver lining to the gruesome prospect of the EIB financing aircraft for Alitalia is that it would provide Cranky with rant material for the foreseeable future. I like Cranky, but that would be so not worth
it.

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The Cardinal is a long time industry observer, who is currently a [redacted] at [redacted]. Prior to working at [redacted], he worked at [redacted], [redacted] and [redacted]. He resides in [redacted] and in his spare time enjoys [redacted with extreme prejudice].