It always seems to sneak up on us, but this week is the fifth annual Cranky Network Awards presented by Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. The nominees are ready, the trophies are engraved, and by the end of the night on Thursday, we will have some newly-minted winners.
We will also have a completely exhausted Cranky. For that reason, I won’t be posting anything more this week. That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to interact, however.
The Awards Are Not Live, But We Will be Announcing Winners Live
We stopped live-streaming the Cranky Network Awards last year, because this is a night for the network planning teams who work so hard day-in and day-out to figure out where to put all those airplanes. We don’t want them to have to sit there worrying about what they might say.
When we say this is for those teams, we mean it. Of the expected attendees this year outside of Cranky staff and the host airport in Phoenix, about two-thirds work for an airline or aircraft manufacturer (and the vast majority of those work for an airline). Like last year, we will have a short wrap-up video so you can see the winners and some highlights. I’ll post here once that’s ready.
In the meantime, you might really want to know who wins in real-time, and we don’t want to deprive you of that, so we will be live-skeeting which is apparently what we’re calling posts on Bluesky. And yes, for those of you who still use Twitter/X and haven’t seen the light, we will post there as well, but this may be the last year.
Follow along on BlueSky @crankyflier.com. As far as I can tell, you do not need to have an account to see the posts. If you’re still stuck on Twitter, then @crankyflier is what you need. That account is almost never active, but we will tweet during the show.
Listen to The Air Show
We’ve got a couple of good episodes to listen to, or at least, we’ll have the second one soon if it’s not there right away. It has been recorded, I can confirm that.
First up was last week when Jon Ostrower and I took the reins alone and did a deeper dive into the situation at Chicago/O’Hare that I previously wrote about. This gets into the weeds… but not too deep. It’s more about how United may very well see this current situation as a path toward a fortress hub. This is a quick listen at just shy of 23 minutes, but it’s a good episode which has generated a lot of thoughts and feedback from listeners.
Next up this week? It’s time to talk about Southwest again in light of the layoffs last week. It’s easy to blame Elliott, but I think that’s misguided. As terrible as Elliott’s model may feel to a lot of people, it was former CEO Gary Kelly who set this airline up to make it so attractive to a corporate raider like Elliott. Come see if you agree tomorrow when this goes live.
Of course, you should just subscribe with your favorite podcast player so you know exactly when the new episodes are released.
I hope to be back with you Monday, but if I run out of time, it may be Tuesday. This is one of the busiest weeks for me all year, and now that we’ve added the Cranky Confab with discussion panels, it has just gotten even busier. (And no, sorry, you can’t see those either. We use Chatham House Rule for this and the forecast breakfast.)
1 comment on “It’s Cranky Network Awards Week, and That Means No More Posts”
Don’t support Twitter anymore. There is no reason to post there anymore.