This Week’s Featured Link
Owners Fear Planes ‘Are Gone Forever’ After Russia Shields Them From Seizure – Bloomberg
It is not a great time to be an aircraft lessor… or an investor in an aircraft lessor. The idea that these airplanes could just be gone is fairly insane.
Image of the Week
Two for the Road
Avelo Airlines Announces Two New Nonstop Destinations from Hollywood Burbank to the Inland Northwest – Avelo Press Release
Avelo is going to take a swing at two more from Burbank after it keeps striking out elsewhere. Will this stick? Well, they’re bigger markets, but they also have competition from LAX. And only 1 of Avelo’s last 5 attempted new destinations from Burbank is still on the map (Ft Collins, CO).
ANA HOLDINGS Announces Transformative Measures to a New Business Model – ANA Press Room
There is nobody better at announcing a convoluted new plan and making it even more confusing than the Japanese. If you understand this, congratulations.
21 comments on “3 Links I Love: Russia Steals Airplanes, Sun Country Quality, Avelo Adds Two, ANA Confusion”
Gotta say it out loud. Non-reclinable seat is a feature not a bug in the back of the plane where the pitch is 30 in or less.
Exactly.
Unless the seat pitch is 31 or 32+ inches and I’m on a flight of 5+ hours, I never think of reclining the seat; just never crosses my mind one bit. If all US domestic coach/economy seats were not capable of reclining, that would be fine with me.
Why didnt they include the cost of up to 2 checked bags? That is part of the product. Seems like they were cherry picking statistics, to me.
Outer Space Guy – totally agree. But, wait, isn’t that what all marketing is these days – using stats the way you want to promote yourself?
Obviously, they cannot maintain their perfect line at the top of the chart if they included that stat.
Is SY going to include the number of destinations as well? No….
I guess the Russian airlines aren’t planning to ever fly their stolen aircraft anywhere outside Russia or Belarus again.
There’s always the lucrative North Korean market.
And Cuba. Sunny beach vacation destination for pasty White Russians, with a huge detour to avoid western airspace.
Don’t tell me you’ve never wondered how a very poorly maintained Boeing plane (say, one that hasn’t been able to be serviced with the correct parts and fluids for several years due to international sanctions) might fare if it had a forced landing in the Siberian tundra and the passengers were forced to fend for themselves…
I guess I better stop before I write the rest of the script for the next reality show or action movie. :-)
> … the passengers were forced to fend for themselves…
I have seen that movie.
Regarding ANA, and their very well thought through plan….. when are the major airlines of the world going to realize that you cannot be everything to everyone?!?! Sure, add another ‘airline within an airline’ project [awaap] – I am sure this one will succeed! I guess they are the Japanese cousins to Lufthansa.
CF – perhaps for a future post…. how many of these awaaps have succeeded in aviation history? And, not just that they are still flying, but actually making the parent company a profit? Not sure if that data is available…..
German Wings was working up until the suicide crash in France of Flight 9525. Also, Eastern Air Shuttle worked.
Was the Eastern Shuttle really an airline-within-an-airline, or just a part of Eastern with a dedicated sub-fleet and pilot group (to allow adding extra aircraft as needed), but not separate labour groups? I’m not sure it was a full-fledged subsidiary of the holding company – the later sale to Trump was described as a sale of assets, not a separate corporation.
Air Japan has existed for quite a while, operating flights for ANA. The only difference is ‘operated by Air Japan’ added to the ticket, painted on the airplane and mentioned during onboard announcements but the service and everything else is pretty seamless.
The difference is that the branding and product will be different now but I wouldn’t be worried about the operational side of things.
What are Russian airlines going to do with all those planes? Obviously Russia’s a big country (to say the least), but presumably much of the demand even for narrowbodies is international travel. I’d imagine it would be tough for these planes to fly even to China now (really anywhere but Belarus) without fear of lessors retaking them.
I’m curious about how this’ll unroll after the conflict is done.
I’d almost expect that one of the requirements of getting OEM support and spare parts is that the airlines in question bring their leases and loans with foreign companies current, or negotiate an acceptable agreement with the aircraft owners.
I expect this’ll either come via government regulation, or more likely it’ll come from the OEMs refusing parts etc unless the airplane owners are happy. I’d expect the OEMs put a higher value on keeping the owners happy versus the Russian airlines.
ANA is retiring one of its Honu A380s according to that release. That sucks. But I guess flying joyrides around Japan isn’t much of a money maker when they were intended for Hawaii (but only because they took them as part of the Skymark deal).
I fear I’m never going to fly on an A380 now…
Avelo will enter the Chicago MDW Market sometime in May. They’ll operate out of A or C Concourse. Avelo will join the growing list of ULCC’s operating out of MDW;
Allegiant – A Concourse
Frontier 2.0 (Returns in April)
Avelo
Southwest – A & B Concourse (32 Gates)
Porter – A Concourse
Volaris (Owned by Frontier’s Parent) – A Concourse
Delta – A Concourse
Sun country is an engineered scam, not an airline. It’s made to look like an airline on the surface of things, but is really there to extract your money and to insult and frustrate you in the process.
Russia is taking hold of aircraft in contravention of lease agreements and international treaties. What lessons does it give regarding foreign ownership rules for U.S. airlines and the Civil Reserve Air Fleet? These regulations, which appear to be burdensome in an environment of international cooperation, make a lot more sense in an emergency like the current one. And that’s exactly what they were designed for: to make sure that the United States has control of its own aviation market, when other countries are not willing to cooperate.
Nah. That’s not the lesson to take from this. The lesson is for the US not to invade Canada, Mexico, Cuba, or Bermuda. As that’s likely to piss off some airplane owners based outside of the US.
Sent from my computer that moonlights as a phone.