Back at the end of April, the rule enacting massive fines to airlines who keep people on an airplane on the ground for more than three hours went into effect. The Department of Transportation just released May’s results and the numbers show that more travelers were inconvenienced. Have you been reading articles about how ground delays are way down? Those aren’t looking at the whole picture. There were fewer ground delays than the previous year, but cancellations were up significantly.

On-time percentage in May 2010 was 79.9 percent across all reporting airlines. It was 80.5 percent in 2009, so it was comparable in that respect. Then we look at cancellations. In 2010, 1.24 percent of flights were canceled. Back in 2009? It was only 0.88 percent. Had the May 2009 rate held through in 2010, nearly 2,000 fewer flights would have been canceled in May of this year. If you assume an average of 100 people on a flight, you get almost 200,000 people who were inconvenienced this year that wouldn’t have been inconvenienced last year. Many have said that it was a small increase in cancellations. That seems pretty big to me.

Now, let’s look at the number of lengthy ground delays. In May 2009, there were 34 flights stuck on the ramp for more than 3 hours. This year, there were 5. If we stick with that 100 passenger per flight number, then we’re at 3,400 people who weren’t sitting on a plane on the ground for more than 3 hours this year. Remember, that compares to an increase of nearly 200,000 people who were inconvenienced by cancellations. Let me put this in a pretty picture:

Are we really making a fair comparison here? After all, there’s no way to directly attribute all the additional cancellations to this rule. There are differences in weather that could also cause large swings. But the increase in cancellations was spread out across airlines. Of the 18 reporting airlines, two-thirds reported an increase in the number of cancellations. Weather alone is not going to cause that to be spread across the country, though it can certainly count for some of it.

But that doesn’t really matter. There’s an even better way to look at this. If only 1.5 percent of those additional cancellations were due to the ground delay rule, then more people still would have been inconvenienced by higher cancellations than were saved from three hour delays. And that assumes that the reduction in long ground delays was entirely due to the new rule, something that’s highly unlikely.

But let’s not stop there. Lets look at the five long ground delays. Four of them were on United in Denver on May 26. That was the day that not only saw thunderstorms roll through the airport, but it also saw a tornado hit. Yeah, think the weather was bad? Maybe we can forgive four airplanes being stuck for that long.

The last one was Delta flight 2011 from Atlanta to Dallas/Ft Worth on May 28. Both airports saw thunderstorms that afternoon, but Atlanta had more than an inch and a half of rain. It was an awful day.

The Delta flight was stuck on the ground for 3 hours and 2 minutes. Yeah, that’s right. It went a mere two minutes over the limit. So I asked Delta what happened. Apparently, the airplane was in a “bad spot” on taxiway and there was lightning so the ramp workers couldn’t come out to meet the airplane. Had the airplane come back to the gate, it would have canceled and the passengers wouldn’t have gotten out of town for at least 10 to 12 hours.

That’s just one more example of when a 3 hour and 2 minute delay isn’t nearly as bad as the alternative. Of course, Kate Hanni, the director of FlyersRights.org thinks it’s a good idea to gloat. She has been quoted as saying “I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.”

Despite Kate’s claim, there is nothing to gloat about. More people are being inconvenienced than before. So, Kate, I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.

It’s time once again for us to talk about airline food. I know, it’s your favorite, right? But this is really interesting stuff. As part of Form 41 data that airlines have to submit to the feds, food expense is broken out. Someone brought this to my attention recently, and I played around with the numbers to get a really interesting chart. Here it is, showing food spend per passenger by airline. (Click to blow it up.)

 
There are just so many interesting things to see in this chart. Here are my random thoughts.

• Look at how much money Alaska spent on food in the early 1990s. That’s crazy for an airline that’s mostly short to medium haul flying. Obviously, they changed that significantly in 1993 and now they’re in the bottom half of the pack.
• United and American have been going in lockstep, as you might expect. They hit their peak on food spend in 2001 and then, completely unsurprisingly, tanked from there.
• You can really chart Continental’s success here. The airline dramatically slashed food in the early 1990s in its bid to survive. When Gordon Bethune took over and started investing in the product, food spend started to rise and it’s stayed there. Obviously, this number will start to plunge now that Continental has trashed free food in coach. Interesting that the spend is still less on Continental than United. I wonder if First Class has something to do with that?
• Look at Northwest’s climb at the end of its life. That’s the Delta influence there, but both airlines have stepped up their spending. Much of that is likely related to the airline’s strong, fresh food buy-on-board program.
• US Airways has always been near the bottom, but much of that may be because it has a much higher percentage of domestic flights than the other legacies. You can see the fight for survival after 9/11. Food spend dropped, but you can also see that food at America West started to rise a little after the merger. Now they’ve found equilibrium at a very low level.
• The most steady spender on food? Southwest, of course. Those peanuts are cheap.

Fun chart, huh? Too bad we can’t map this to revenue from food sales, but that info isn’t given to the feds.

keep track of your miles in style – AntiBride.com
The AntiBride liked my previous post about AwardWallet, so I tweaked it and put it up for the wedding crowd.

Pinnacle Acquires Mesaba — and Can’t Wait to Erase the Tarnished Colgan Brand – BNET
Delta sold off two subsidiaries last week. The first is Compass, and that’s not a surprise.

Trans States Wants to Join the Big Leagues of Regional Airlines – BNET
And here’s the other sell-off, which was a much bigger surprise. Trans States buys Compass?!

Bad News: United, Continental Merger Already Seeing Pilot Unrest – BNET
That didn’t take long. The pilots and management are already fighting at the merging airlines.

Spring Thaw: American’s Pilots Turn Toward Reconciliation with Management – BNET
More pilot fun! American’s pilots are looking to talk to management again. It’s a change for the better.

My post on Hubert Horan’s anti-merger stance generated a ton of discussion here, and that was great. While some agreed, others didn’t. Norwegian apparently falls into the latter category, because it wants to jump into the Transatlantic market in a big way starting next year.

One of the important tenets of Hubert’s argument was that these mergers and joint ventures have created an oligopoly over the Atlantic that can’t be broken. This assumes that low cost carriers won’t be able to break into the market successfully in any meaningful way. Norwegian apparently thinks he’s wrong.

In an interview with E24, Norwegian CEO Bjørn Kjos outlined his plans for Transatlantic domination. I should warn you that it’s entirely in Norwegian. Were it not for Google Translate, I would never have known anything about this. (Even with Google Translate, some of this is unintelligible.)

The airline plans to start intercontinental flights to the US and Asia just in time for summer season, 2011. The plan is to have 15 airplanes, no small amount. It’s unclear how many will be flying at the start, but this isn’t just going to be a case of the airline dipping its toes in the water.

Bjørn says he wants the newest and most efficient planes, but I have to assume that will mean something like second-hand A330s or something like that. I can’t imagine we’ll see Norwegian colors on a 787 anytime soon, but then again, stranger things have happened.

If you think this is going to be a true low cost carrier, point to point operation, you’re wrong. Bjørn says that won’t work, and he’s building a hub operation instead. At least he knows that feed is important. And Norwegian does have a fair amount of feed. Take a look at this current route map from Oslo:

Stockholm and Copenhagen are smaller, but still have similarly strong reach. Of course, these don’t all operate every day and aren’t organized in a way where they could perfectly feed into the long haul option at the same time, but if it’s cheap enough, the leisure folks will endure long layovers.

It’s not, however, the leisure folks that really matter the most here. I find myself wondering if these guys are even going to have a shot at the business travel market. If they build a true hub with efficient connections, I suppose it’s possible, but I’m not sure that’ll happen. True, they can get the local traffic in Scandinavia, but, uh, that’s not the world’s biggest market.

I’m sure SAS is just thrilled with this move. Yeah, right. The always-failing airline is now going to face much more competition, if this takes flight. Heck, SAS doesn’t even have 10 widebodies, so Norwegian is looking to just leap right over it. I would just hate to be SAS right now. Actually, I wouldn’t want to be SAS at any time in the last couple decades.

So this Norwegian experiment may very well be the first test for substantial low cost long haul over the Atlantic. I’m skeptical that it’ll work, but hey, stranger things have happened.

[Original Photo via Flickr user kjetil_r]

The details of the British Airways 747 near-accident in South Africa are out, and man, was that scary for the pilots. They did a great job of keeping that bad boy in the air, but it could have ended very differently. Here’s what happened.

On May 11, 2009, BA flight 56 prepared for its evening departure to London/Heathrow. Afternoon rain had cleared out and it was a clear evening with light northerly winds and temps in the mid-50s (something like -358 degrees Celsius, I’m told). Boeing 747 G-BYGA was ready to bring 265 passengers and 18 crew members back to the UK, so it was about 80 percent full. It probably looked a lot like this one (though this was in Cape Town, not Jo’burg):

Photo via Flickr user Sara&Joachim

They buttoned up and headed for the runway. Engines spooled up as usual and they started rocketing to the north on runway 3L for the long flight home. When the airplane hit 167 kts, just about the time for it to rotate, all hell broke loose. Somehow, due to a technical fault, the airplane showed that thrust reversers had been deployed. Thrust reversers deflect the air within the engine to push it forward instead of backward. This is generally only a good idea when you want to stop the airplane, so it happens with wheels on the ground during the landing rollout. Here’s what they look like on a Lufthansa 747.

Photo by Flickr user wbaiv

Fortunately, the thrust reversers didn’t actually deploy and it was merely a faulty warning, but it did bring with it some unintended consequences. When the thrust reversers deploy, the slats Krueger flaps automatically retract. What the heck is a slat Krueger flap? I’m glad you asked.

Original photo via Martin20

See those little things hanging over the front of the wing? Those are slats Krueger flaps. Like flaps behind the wing, they’re meant to help increase the surface area camber of the wing to provide more lift. When you’re cruising, you don’t want this because it provides drag and slows you down. But when you’re taking off and landing at slow speeds, it makes it more stable and allows you to fly slower. That’s good.

When it’s not good is when they retract just when you need them most. So picture a 747, just about reaching take-off speed, that suddenly loses its slats Krueger flaps because they think it’s time to retract. Lift goes away and the pilots see less and less runway ahead. Holy crap. So what happened? Well, they took off and sat at about 40 feet above the ground trying to pick up speed. It kind of looked like this:

Photo by user klever

Ok, so I lied. It looked nothing like this. Instead, replace that airplane with a hulking, slat-less 747 barely clearing the terrain below. Yeah, I’d freak out too. Ultimately, the slats Krueger flaps were back in their deployed position a mere 23 seconds after they ran away, but those were the 23 most critical seconds of the flight. The airplane then started climbing, but the pilots weren’t content to continue on. They dumped fuel and eventually returned with everyone safe.

My guess is that there might have been some people in the back wondering what was going on, but it happened so quickly that they unlikely would have had a chance to even register that this was a real issue. The pilots, however, must have absolutely flipped. Fortunately, they did a fantastic job. The pilot in command happened to have aerobatic training and was well-versed in how to fly at near-stall speeds. There’s no question that those guys saved that airplane and all the people onboard.

But it’s not just them. There was some serious luck here. Johannesburg sits a mile high, and that reduces aircraft performance. But had this been in summer instead of winter, it would have been much worse. Hot weather makes it harder for airplanes to gain altitude, so the mild temperature undoubtedly helped here. It’s also a blessing that the airplane was only 80% full instead of 100%. The added weight would have hurt. On the other hand, it certainly didn’t hurt that they had a slight headwind and the the weather was good.

Anytime there’s an accident, it always requires a handful of things to go wrong. In this case, while one awful thing went wrong, everything else went right. And that’s why the airplane was saved. One other thing going wrong could have resulted in disaster. Fortunately, that didn’t happen here and changes required by the FAA mean this particular incident shouldn’t happen again.

Update at 917p on July 9 – Thanks to the readers who corrected me here. There are no slats on the 747 but rather Krueger flaps. Wikipedia has a good explanation of the difference: