This Week’s Featured Link
Frontier Airlines and Spirit Airlines Announce Amended Merger Agreement – Spirit Airlines
The shareholder vote is a week away, and the loudest objection to the Frontier deal was the lack of a reverse break-up fee the way JetBlue had offered. Guess what? There’s now a reverse break-up fee. Your move, JetBlue.
Tweet of the Week
Two for the Road
Regulator rules Flair Airlines is Canadian, meaning the upstart carrier can keep its licence – CBC
The drama is over. Flair drank ten gallons of maple syrup in one sitting and was declared officially Canadian. Congrats to them.
Long Beach Airport Awards Two Permanent Flight Slots – Long Beach Airport
It’s getting breezy here in Long Beach. Where will Breeze use its lonely little slot? I could see daily trip to Salt Lake/Provo or even San Francisco. But the more fun thing would be sub-daily flying to places like Westchester, Charleston, or Tampa.
6 comments on “3 Links I Love: Frontier Ups the Ante, Luton Moves South, Flair is Canadian, Breeze in Long Beach”
I’m not sure if it’s truly the “original” prank sign for airliners on final approach, but the “Welcome to Cleveland” sign on a roof underneath the final approach path to MKE’s runway 19 Right has been around for almost 50 years now, and has become something of a local icon… (Reference: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/welcome-to-cleveland-sign)
I guess modern technology beats the “old” days, where VFR pilots sometimes flew by water towers to identify their locations, only to sometimes see far less helpful “Kilroy was here” graffiti instead of the name of the locality. (personal aside: That’s the origin for the handle I use in the comments on this blog)… Then again, how many people these days know how to use (or would recognize) a sextant?
Trying to understand the LGB slot allocation process is dizzying
With slot allocations (as with politics and sausage), it often seems that the less you know about how they are made, the better. :-)
The slot system manages to be fairly simple and strange at the same time – this how I’m interpreting this award (CF, am I right?)
* New entrants get put on the list at the bottom
* AA and HA hadn’t requested new slots, so they fell to the bottom of the list
* Southwest had requested slots, so they were awarded one and falls to the bottom of the list
* Swoop had put itself on the list as a prospective new entrant, declined this slot, but as a prospective new entrant gets to stay at the top of the list
* Breeze then got the remaining slot, but as a new entrant that has requested two it stays at the top behind Swoop
* If Breeze had declined the slot, with AA and HA not interested WN would have gotten it
The system doesn’t seem to take existing size into account, so with Southwest already having almost three quarters of the total slots (37 of 51 combined permanent and supplemental) they get the same treatment as a new entrant. That doesn’t seem like a particularly competition-friendly policy.
And why isn’t existing carrier DL on the list at all?
Having recently priced tickets from TPA to LAX, I’d love to see Breeze add TPA-LGB, but with AA, AS, DL, and UA all offering non-stop service on TPA-LAX already and with just about everybody offering connecting service, I suspect it’s unlikely.
Westchester is probably a stretch, but how about Islip?
CraigTPA – It’s even simpler than that. Any airline can be on the waiting list for slots, and they get added in the order in which they request slots. Then they go down the list offering one slot to each in order until all the slots are gone. Delta isn’t on the list, because they don’t want more slots. Apparently American just likes to sit on the list, but it didn’t actually want a slot, so it must have declined. Same with Hawaiian. Southwest said it wanted both, so it was given one slot. Swoop said no. Then Breeze took one and the slots were fully allocated.
I had always thought that new entrants were entitled to be at the top of the list and were able to get 2 right off the bat, if available, but apparently not.
Delta has not kept up with the minimum slot usage under the LGB slot allocation. So in the coming weeks they will be required to relinquish 2 more additional slots back to the city of Long Beach.
From what I’ve heard these 2 slots will be up for reallocation sometime in Mid July.
While Breeze only has one Slot as of Now.
Like WN has done during the beginning of its LGB service Breeze can apply to temporary use any unused slot at 180 day increments to add capacity.
WN successfully started LGB-LAS using this method with less than daily service and fluctuations of additional flights using slots FedEx and UPS weren’t using daily.
Breeze could easily do less than daily flying with its 1 slot. Do something like LGB-ISP Tuesday and Thursday. LGB-MCO Monday,Friday and Sunday and LGB-TPA Wednesday and Saturday.