Cranky Weekly Review Presented by OAK: JetBlue Traverses the Country, Gol and Azul May Buddy Up

JetBlue Digs Deeper and Shorter Into Leisure This Summer

Remember that weird time during the pandemic when every airline thought Traverse City was an untapped goldmine? Well, JetBlue just realized there might have been some truth in that. The airline rolled out is new planned summer flights this week with a big focus on smaller leisure destinations from the Northeast, including Traverse City itself.

Alongside 3x weekly to that city which makes Green Bay seem tropical, three other new dots will land on the route map with 1x daily summer seasonal service from Boston: Halifax, Norfolk, and Wilmington (NC). Boston will also score a long-desired 1x daily flight to Islip for the summer. This will finally put an end to all those people just rowing across Long Island Sound.

Another new city in the network is San Pedro Sula which will get 1x daily year-round from JFK. Other than that, it’s mostly a retro look from JFK with the return of service to Burbank, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Washington/National along with Newark to LA and Santo Domingo. All the JFK routes are year-round except Burbank. Am I missing something? Oh right, just the biggest news of all… there will now be — wait for it — 1x daily flight from JFK to both Hartford and Providence.

Most of these flights are ho-hum, but the new Boston – Islip and JFK – Hartford/Providence flights give us hope that eventually JetBlue will start Westchester – LaGuardia, Hartford – New Haven, and Providence – Boston to really give Amtrak some serious competition.

Gol Takes a Step Toward Its Goal to Merge With Azul

Abra Group — majority owner of Brazil’s Gol Linhas Aéreas Inteligentes — has opened its arms wide and embraced competitor Azul with a non-binding memorandum of understanding to merge the two airlines, apparently surprising Gol in the process. This means that absolutely nothing is guaranteed to actually happen, but at least two-thirds of this throuple really want it to work out.

There are only a few small, teeny hurdles. As outlined in the press release, the airlines need to agree on economic terms, complete due diligence, enter into definitive agreements, obtain corporate and regulatory approvals, satisfy closing conditions, consummate Gol’s Chapter 11 plan of reorganization, and determine what to do with all those old Varig 737-200s and DC-10s that are believed but not confirmed to still be flying under Gol’s brand in the jungles of northeast Brazil.

The merger would create the largest airline in Brazil, vaulting ahead of current number one LATAM. Reportedly, the initial plans to merge the two airlines under a resurrected Avianca Brasil were shot down when Christ the Redeemer said there would be no resurrection under his watch.

Southwest Gets Sued for Delays, Frontier Gets Fined

The federal government appears to be getting a steep discount on court fees as it has once again decided to sue an airline. This time, Southwest is feeling the Department’s wrath for chronic delays on two routes that operated (very poorly) between April and August 2022.

The flights in question were between Chicago and Oakland as well as Baltimore and Cleveland. They were disrupted a combined 180 times in that short span. When asked for comment, Southwest said “we were just as surprised about this lawsuit as our passengers on those flights in 2022 who explicitly asked us to not make them actually go to Oakland or Cleveland until absolutely necessary.”

DOT is asking for the maximum possible penalty, which could be over $2 million if the court rules in its favor. DOT also planned to sue Frontier for chronically delayed flights, but it decided to speak the airline’s love language and instead just charged it a fee of $650,000. Frontier only has to pay half of it now, and the rest would be forgiven in the completely magical unicorn fantasty of a scenario where Frontier has no other chronically delayed flights in the next three years.

Condor Gets Some EC Help

The European Commission has given Condor hope that its dying deal to get feed from Lufthansa may be given a second life. The EC has said it will order the airlines to continue to cooperate under the terms agreed upon in June 2024.

This all stems from the EC’s sniffing around the so-called A++ joint venture between United, Air Canada, and most Lufthansa Group airlines over the Atlantic. As the story goes, the EC has found that A++ is anti-competitive on the New York – Frankfurt route, and the elimination of this special prorate agreement between Condor and Lufthansa might cause Condor to exit that market. So, the EC wants to stop that.

Apparently, Delta and Singapore, each offering up to 1x daily service on the route, are chopped liver. It’s really that Condor flight that keeps the whole thing from collapsing into a black hole of doom.

ITA Officially Joins Lufthansa Group

There’s no turning back now. ITA — the airline formerly and always in our hearts known as Alitalia — is now officially part of Lufthansa Group after the deal to buy 41 percent of the airline closed. A new Board of Directors and CEO have been set up to fail sworn in to help fix the airline.

LHG went with Jörg Eberhart as new CEO due to his traditional Italian name. He ran Verona-based Air Dolomiti for LHG from 2014 to 2021 before moving back to the mothership to be Head of Strategy for LHG. Jörg clearly used that time to devise a strategy to acquire an Italian airline so he could go back to Italy and live out his days drinking grappa at lunch instead of having to live any longer in Frankfurt.

ITA employees celebrated the news by instantly going on strike. Or maybe it was just a long lunch. We can never be sure.

• Air France-KLM made some “enhancements” to FlyingBlue
• Air Serbia and China Southern are finally launching the partnership we’ve all dreamed about
• Air Wisconsin is no Eagle, but it’ll keep flying anyway
• Akasa Air has a lot of employees and not a lot of airplanes
• Alaska is giving Oregon three more things to love (two if it’s not possible to love a flight to Houston)
• American thinks if it babbles on about AI, it’ll sound cool
• Arkia is sick of El Al being the only Israeli airline to fly to the US
• Delta wants a little more Walmart at the airline
• FAA found a new reason for flight disruptions: spaceship explosion
• ITA is heading back to Tripoli, but only twice a week
• Korean is probably keeping those A380s around longer
• LEVEL is supersizing the New York market
• Mokulele thinks actually flying airplanes is optional despite being the only real lifeline to the outside world for Molokai and Lānaʻi
• Porter will sell and lease back anything it can
• Riyadh Air is delaying its launch until 2027. Thanks, Boeing.
• Southwest says Denver and Nashville will follow Baltimore as international gateways, but not San Antonio where it just wants to sue over gates
• SriLankan has a plan to get it to the end of the decade
• United has a new corporate contract with the Roadrunner… meep meep