Cranky Weekly Review Presented by OAK Airport: Delta and Korean Look West, Contour is in Good Spirits

Delta, Korean Acquire 25% of WestJet

Delta Air Lines and Korean Air are teaming up to purchase 25% of SkyTeam’s best direct source of poutine, maple syrup, and hockey — WestJet. Delta will acquire 15% of the carrier at the cost of $330 million and a year’s supply of Biscoff, while Korean will purchase 10%, for $220 million, and it must provide a commitment that it will do everything in its power to destroy WestJet’s hated arch-rival Korean LCC Eastar Jet..

As part of the deal, Delta also retains the right to flip 2.3% of WestJet to its JV partner Air France-KLM in exchange for $50 million and a player to be named later. The agreement comes about five years after Delta’s proposed JV with WestJet was nixed. DL puts most of its focus on its JV and equity partners, leading to the potential that it will increase collaboration with WestJet on transborder travel if it can get federal approval this time. WestJet already flies to four Canadian cities from Atlanta — Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Winnipeg — none of which are served by DL from its Atlanta hub.

Spirit Partners with Contour

Spirit joining forces with Contour sounds like an airline madlib gone wrong, but it’s a real thing. The yellow-planed, fee-loving, ULCC carrier will form a strategic partnership with Contour Airlines. Contour is the second biggest EAS carrier in the country, currently with service to 22 EAS cities. It flies a grand total of zero yellow airplanes. For now.

Contour has been around for just shy of a decade, and it currently operates just over 2,000 flights a month on 26 airplanes, all of which are configured with 30 seats. Despite this new partnership with Spirit, Contour will continue to interline with American, United, and Alaska provided they pay Contour’s recently added interline fee that it totally came up with on its own.

The routes the two will partner on have not yet been announced, but Spirit says it plans to introduce service to its existing leisure markets to many of Contour’s EAS destinations. When asked if it would introduce new fees on EAS routes Contour president Ben Munson declined comment except to say that it would not rule out a backwater fee for any customer that lives in an EAS market and chooses to fly on his airline.

JetBlue Seeks New Ventures

Nearly a decade after founding JetBlue Ventures, the carrier is spinning its subsidiary off, with SKY Leasing, an aviation investment manager acquiring the property.

JetBlue Ventures was created to invest in startups across tech and transportation. It invested in 55 early-stage startups and made over 40 follow-on investments which led to eight exits via acquisitions and public offerings. It was also claims credit for such innovations as “putting a hub in Boston,” and “Mint.”

The spun-off asset will maintain its current brand as part of a licensing agreement with JetBlue. By divesting itself of this potential distraction, it’s expected that the carrier and its CEO Joanna Geraghty will be able to maintain a laser focus on turning the airline back to a consistently profitable one. Early ideas thrown around included some sort of collaboration with some airline in the northeast of the country and scrapping expensive Jet-A fuel and flying its planes on Dunkin’ coffee instead.

Breeze Blows Into Fort Lauderdale and Salisbury

Breeze Airways is adding two new cities and 21 new routes to its map, as the carrier will start service in both Fort Lauderdale (otherwise known as the Salisbury of south Florida) and Salisbury, Md.

Salisbury (SBY) located on the Delmarva Peninsula and with close access to Ocean City (MD), will see 2x weekly flights to Orlando on Breeze beginning Oct. 1. The airport is currently served by hometown carrier Piedmont Airlines flying on behalf of American Eagle to both Charlotte and Philadelphia.

As for Fort Lauderdale, several elected official both in the city and throghout Broward County have remarked recently that what the city is really missing is more service to Akron, as Allegiant’s sub-daily service just wasn’t cutting it. Enter Breeze. Flights from FLL to both Akron and Wilmington (NC) will begin in November.

The 21 new routes includes additions to Akron and Wilmington, with CAK adding six destinations and ILM getting five. NW Arkansas is adding the rest, including seven in Florida and other places that we’re sure have overwhelming desire for increased service to Arkansas.

Avelo Stretches Seating Options

Avelo Airlines announced two new seating options — Stretch and Stretch+ — for customers, with the new options becoming available for flights as of September 3.

The airline won’t have to reconfigure any planes — it’s taking its current configuration and putting a fresh coat of marketing paint on it. Anything to distract us from its new book of business flying from Arizona to Central America, we suppose. It’s as if Avelo’s senior leadership sat around the last week and concluded they had to come up with something — literally anything — to change the most recent story when its name came up, so it decided to take its already existing seating and give it new names. Brilliant.

What is happening? It’s taking its pre-existing extra legroom seats (consisting of about one-third of the seats on each plane) and giving it a fancy name. (And by “fancy,” we mean a name even Frontier decided wasn’t worth keeping.) The first couple rows will also come with a blocked middle seat — hence the “+” in Stretch+. The remaining rows of extra legroom seating will be part of the “Stretch” category. The existence of a Stretch+ implies that Stretch- must also exist, right? Or is that just for its Sierra Vista to San Salvador shuttle service?

• Air Canada has to do something with all those planes it won’t be flying to the U.S., and for now, that something is Latin America.
• Avianca is moving to Terminal 6 in New York.
• BermudAir will start its E190 service in Boston and Providence.
• Cathay Pacific reopened The Bridge, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers immediately sat under it.D
• Delta updated its app. It still won’t work half the time and won’t have nearly the functionality of United’s app. But the colors will be pretty.
• Emirates Group reported a $6.2 billion profit for its fiscal year and to celebrate it will offer a 22-week bonus to its employees.
• Flynas is likely to offer up to 30% of its shares in an IPO, reminding many that sleep is a cousin to death.
• Frontier is adding a couple frontiers.
• Icelandair saw a 25% jump in capacity last month.
• Hong Kong Air Cargo is now friends with Turkish Air Cargo. Turkish coffee and dim sum for everyone.
• IAG is buying widebodies. It also had a great Q1.
• ITA says it made money, but no one really believes it.
• JetBlue left the good people of Halifax feeling blue.
• Norse Atlantic is reducing much of its passenger service, swapping it out for cargo. That’s always a good sign for the health of an airline.
• Porter began year-round service between Toronto/Pearson and New York/LGA.
• Qantas will begin flying between Perth and Johannesburg in December.
• Qatar is reportedly unphased by tariffs.
• Ryanair Flight 4797 landed yesterday with one more passenger on-board than when it took off.
• Silver might be someone else’s gold.
• Virgin Atlantic will begin flying to Seoul early next year.
• Wizz Air ended the dream of nonstop service between Milan and Abu Dhabi. For now.

My neighbor invited me over to see if I minded if he planted a pear tree in his yard but near our property dividing line. “It typically can grow up to 18-20 feet” he told me.

Confused, I asked him “why wouldn’t to get one that grew pears instead?”