Cranky Weekly Review Presented by San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport: Southwest Shakes Things Up, Delta Shirks Responsibility from Totally Not Self-Inflicted Operational Misadventure

A New Era is Coming for Southwest

Southwest Airlines dropped a bombshell on Thursday, confirming the worst-kept secret in the industry. The carrier plans to ditch its open seating policy and introduce extra legroom in the front of the plane, breaking with more than 50 years of tradition. The announcement was coupled with its Q2 earnings report as it showed a $367 million profit on $7.4 billion in gross revenue for the three month period but with a very weak outlook for the second half of the year.

Southwest says that 80% of its customers — and 86% of potential customers prefer an assigned seat — a figure which only goes up when asking customers in middle seats in the back of the aircraft. The airline’s research says its open seating policy is the most oft-cited reason a customer chooses a competitor — not a distrust of Salty Death Mix. Along with assigning seats, Southwest will begin to offer an extended legroom option, expected to consist of about one-third of the aircraft, finally giving customers an ability to display their superiority to fellow passengers based on who’s in the upgraded seats and who’s not.

As if this wasn’t enough change for you, Southwest also is finally ready to begin operating redeyes. It loaded the first round of overnight flights into its schedule, and they are available for booking with service beginning in February. It’ll start with five redeye routes — Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix to Baltimore, LAS to Orlando, and LAX to Nashville. It plans to add more redeye flying in the future, but for now, you can read more about Southwest’s foray into late night fun in yesterday’s post on crankyflier.com.

Delta Slowly Recovers from Crowdstrike Outage, Is Totally Not at Fault

It’s not been a good week for Delta Air Lines, but the carrier heroically climbed out from the hole it dug itself this week after canceling more flights in a three-day period than it did for all of 2018 or 2019.

Delta has been keen to blame CrowdStrike for its ills — and admittedly it is the CrowdStrike outage last Friday that started Delta down this path — but Delta stands alone as the carrier that has struggled the most. Several thousand flights were canceled, with a multiples more delayed, with a staggering amount of luggage not where it’s supposed to be despite heroic efforts from Delta’s employees all week long according to CEO Ed Bastian.

The carrier got its cancellation figure under 500 for the first time Wednesday when it also relented and finally agreed to reimburse stranded passengers for planes, trains, and cars secured at the last minute when Crowdstrike Delta dropped the ball. Bastian heroically flew to Paris on Wednesday for the Olympic Games, and his flight operated on-time, and really, that’s what matters here. At the peak of the self-inflicted chaos, Delta even suspended its unaccompanied minor program, stranding some children at destinations across the country without a way home — a blessing to some parents, but likely an inconvenience (at best) and a serious issue to others.

What was once America’s most reliable airline, Delta will have a lot to prove as it recovers from this upheaval of its operational reliability. On its behalf, it did get several customers to their destinations this week, and some of them even got there within a day of when they had originally planned. In the meantime, please accept a few hundred SkyMiles to hold you over.

AA’s Q2 is Profitable, Its Q3 Outlook is Less Rosy

American Airlines Q2 earnings showed a modest profit of $717 million on record gross revenues of $14.3 billion. The revenue figure is a jump from the $14.06 billion it took in a year ago during Q2, but the profit was cut by nearly half after the carrier was $1.34 billion in the black last year.

AA’s two largest rivals — Delta and United — both posted profits of about $1.3 billion for the quarter, doubling up American, which also saw its PRASM drop 6% from $18.63 to $17.54 and its CASM leap from $17.07 to $17.21. Most troubling, however, is its outlook for Q3, where it currently expects revenue to drop as much as 4.5% and that it may only break even for the quarter.

It ended the period with $740 million in cash, most of which is earmarked as back pay for its FAs under its pending agreement, with the rest allocated for its buyout fund when it considers another shakeup at the top of the corporate ladder in the coming months.

JetBlue Adds One, Subtracts Many More

JetBlue Airways announced a new airport, adding service from Manchester (NH) to three cities in Florida, plus beefing up other flying between New England and Florida — burying the lead that its ending service on 18 routes, fully exiting seven airports.

First for the good — it’ll begin flying in January from MHT to Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, and Fort Myers, with the Orlando service operating daily. It’s also adding four seasonal routes for the winter, beginning in late October including Buffalo to West Palm Beach, Providence to both Fort Myers and Tampa, and Portland (ME) to Orlando.

On the flip side, JetBlue is bidding farewell to Burbank, Charlotte, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Palm Springs, Pointe-a-Pitre, San Antonio, and Tallahassee. Outside of those market exits, the carrier is also ending Los Angeles to Nassau, Los Cabos, and Salt Lake City; Raleigh-Durham to Cancun and Orlando; Newark to Montego Bay and Santo Domingo; and Fort Lauderdale to both Guayaquil and San Diego.

Avelo Goes Worldwide

Avelo’s largest route expansion in its vast, storied history was announced this week and included its first two international routes and a heaping of new service to Lakeland, Florida.

Unfortunately for Avelo, its base in New Haven doesn’t have CBP capabilities, so for its international debut, it had to shift 40 miles across the Nutmeg state to Hartford where it will debut 2x weekly flights to both Cancún and Montego Bay, the two cities ironically known as the New Haven and Hartford of the Gulf of Mexico, respectively. Also for Avelo out of Hartford will be new service to 2x weekly flights to Charlotte Concord, Daytona Beach, Houston/Hobby, Lakeland, and Wilmington (NC).

Speaking of Lakeland, the airline is setting up a new base in the hamlet, adding 2x weekly flights to seven cities including the aforementioned Hartford. Most notable of the new options is Atlanta, with these twice-weekly flights finally filling in much-needed capacity in the criminally-underserved Atlanta – Florida market. Other cities from LAL will include Boston Manchester, Charlotte Concord, Philadelphia Wilmington (DE), Rochester, and San Juan.

Rounding out the additions for Avelo are Wilmington (NC) to Fort Myers and Charlotte Concord to Boston Manchester, Wilmington (DE), and Rochester.

• Aer Lingus pilots accepted the latest offer from the carrier.
• Aerolíneas Argentinas confirmed via fax that it would begin an interline agreement with SAS.
• Air Antilles is back, baby.
• Air France-KLM‘s Q2 profits weren’t great. Thanks, Crowdstrike.
• Air Tahiti will be outfitting four new ATR 72-600s in its bitchin’ livery.
• Air Serbia is launching 2x weekly service to Guangzhou.
• Alaska opened a fancy new lounge in San Francisco Bay San Francisco International Airport.
• Awesome Cargo — which is a real thing — wants to fly to the United States, and we are fully in support of this.
• Berniq Airways, which apparently is the national airline of Libya, placed an order for six A320neos.
• Cabo Verde Airlines is finally boosting domestic capacity.
• Cathay Pacific had a busy June.
• Cebu Pacific signed an MoU for up to 152 A320neos with Pratt & Whitney engines.
• Finnair completed a slot swap with AA at London/Heathrow.
• FLY CORALway is in a bad way.
• IndiGo wants to know where all its profit IndiWent.
• JAL is ordering 10 more Dreamliners with an option for 10 more.
• JetBlue is doing its best Ryanair impersonation.
• KLM is wisely looking at using driverless cars and buses on active taxiways. This will surely end well.
• Korean made a pinky promise with Boeing to buy 50 new airplanes.
• LATAM raised $456 million in its U.S. IPO.
• Lufthansa‘s new lounge in Newark is finally open, so we can all get back to living our lives now.
• Luxair ordered two new B737-10s with an option for two more.
• Porter congratulated WestJet for announce it would begin to add WiFi next year.
• Qatar wants 20 more B777-9s.
• Ryanair‘s Q2 earnings weren’t great – expect someone to be sued.
• Southwest is turning its back on a portion of its Canadian customers.
• SpiceJet raised some cheddar.
• Turkish is going to have free wifi on all flights by 2026, which is about when Delta’s operation is supposed to be back on track.
• United selected Honeywell to pimp out the flight deck on its B737 MAX fleet.
• Virgin Atlantic ordered seven A330neos.
• Widerøe, or “Slash” as it’s known to its most ardent fans, added the two used Dash-8-400s you didn’t know it needed.
• Wizz Air celebrated its 7th million passenger at London/Gatwick earlier this week. The customer was supposed to fly through Heathrow two days earlier, but got lost in a maze of duty free and has no memory of how he or she actually ended up at Gatwick. It’s also growing in Budapest.