Also on The Onion is this report about John Madden and his fear of airplanes.

I quote:

“Airliners have a not unreasonable fear that, were John Madden to board them, it would increase their chances of crashing,” said FAA administrator Robert A. Sturgell, reading from the report.

Filed under: Airline News, Trivia by ajax
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The Onion, a humour and satire website and newspaper, is reporting on American Airlines and new charges this morning.  Enjoy.

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Using FlightAware.Com, I’ve been able to see some (but I don’t think all) of the government flights from around the world heading to Washington D.C. for the G20 Economic Summit.  So far, I have identified these:

The British Prime Minister on British Airways Flight 001

The Indian Prime Minister on Air India Flight 001

The Argentinian President on Aerolineas Argentinas Flight 1001

The President of the Indonesian Republic on Garuda Indonesian Flight 001

The President of South Korea on Korean Airlines Flight 63

The Prime Minister and his government on Japanese Air Force Flights 1 and 2

The Russian President and his government is on the Russian State Transport Flight 9031 and Russian State Transport Flight 9001.

The Saudi Arabian government is flying in on Saudi Flight 1B

The Chinese government is flying in on Air China Flight 17

The President of Mexico is arrving on Mexican Air Force Flight 001.

No doubt there are others that are not being tracked inbound. The mix of aircraft will include a 777, several 747 aircraft, Airbus A330 and A340 aircraft, a 757, IL 76, IL 62 and IL 96 aircraft from Russia and even a 747-SP (Saudi Arabia).

Filed under: Airline Fleets, Airline News, Airplane Spotting, Trivia by ajax
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Every now and then you see an airline flying a flight to some very unusual destination.  Two Airtran aircraft were spotted flying to Keflavik, Iceland en route to Europe.  You can see HERE that the aircraft looks as if it departed the Miami area normally and just got lost. 

One reader of FLying Colors is a huge Airtran B737 fan.  Don’t worry.  They sell their aircraft relatively young and buy more.  The fleet will remain the same.

Filed under: Trivia by ajax
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1)  Robert Forman Six, legendary CEO of Continental Airlines, once had a Wild West Fast Draw team called “The Six Guns”.  Made up entirely of Continental management, these men were genuine “fast draw” artists with western revolvers.  Bob Six was a “fanner” and unlike most fanners, he was particularly accurate.  One other team member was the future President and CEO of Braniff International:  Harding Lawrence.

2)  American Airlines was once owned and controlled by E. L. Cord who owned the Cord, Auburn and Dusenberg automobile brands.  It was E. L. Cord who elevated a young accountant in his late 20’s to the presidency of American Airlines.   That man was Cyrus Rowlett Smith, known universally as C.R. Smith and who lead American Airlines from 1934 to 1968 and then again from 1973 to 1974.  Mr. Smith is buried in the Arlington National Cemetery because he served in the US Army during World War II and reached the rank of Major General before leaving the service to return to American Airlines.

3) Most people, even aviation enthusiasts, believe that the second commercial jetliner to be built was the Boeing 707.  In truth, it was the Avro C102 Jetliner built in Canada.  The C102 was introduced just two weeks after the DeHaviland Comet in 1949 and years before the Boeing Model 367-80 prototype jetliner.   Resembling the DeHaviland Comet with 2 jet engines contained within each wing, it actually flew faster than the Comet and carrying about 50 passengers, it was ideally suited to short and intermediate routes in the U.S.   The plane was never built because the Canadian government ordered Avro to concentrate all their resources on the military jet interceptor, the CF-100.  No examples were ever preserved although the nose section of the prototype was saved and given to the Canada Aviation Museum in Ottawa.

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A fair fare would probably be identified by most people as an air fare that accounts for the true costs of flying from point A to point B non-stop using the right aircraft to supply the capacity.  As a matter of fact, that was what the Civil Aeronautics Board tried to adjudicate when setting fares. 

Now, such a model might sound familiar.  It sounds like what LCC carriers such as Southwest Airlines and Airtran do.  In many sense, yes it is.   Legacy carriers, focused on hubs, hurt themselves with those hubs every time they carry a connecting passenger.   The hub and spoke system demands that they carry more passengers a farther distance using more resources and economies of scale no longer allow them to make a profit doing so. 

Let’s use as an example travel from Midland / Odessa to Albuquerque.   You have 3 basic choices for travel in this scenario.  You can fly Southwest Airlines non-stop for about $260 round trip or you can choose another carrier for a non-direct, connecting route that starts at about $550 round trip.   Another carrier might be American Airlines, Continental Airlines or Delta Airlines. 

If you choose American Airlines, you’ll fly EAST to DFW and then WEST again to ABQ and it will take  . . . wait for it . . . from 4.5 to 6.5 hours to complete your travel.  Since you are connecting via DFW, you’ll be making two take-offs and two landings and one of those landings (remember, part of an airline’s cost is a landing fee) will be at a major hub airport.  Take offs are expensive too.  They are the part of the flight that consumes the most fuel so two take-offs is bad.

If you fly Continental Airlines, you’ll connect through IAH (Houston) and the economics are the same but the distance flown is even greater.   If you fly Delta, you’ll first fly to Houston and then to Dallas and then to ABQ and your price will be in excess of $1000 round trip.  By the way, your total travel time using Delta will be over 10 hours.

Now, if American Airlines or Continental Airlines (let’s just leave Delta out of this because such a scenario is absurd) want to compete for the passengers traveling from Odessa to Albuquerque, they have to offer a fare that is somewhat competitive.  If they do, they’ll come at least close to matching Southwest’s fare of about $300 and that means that their costs are higher and they make less profit or no profit.   Since Southwest has the lowest costs, they get to set the price. 

Now, some people such as Robert Crandall advocate re-regulation of fares in some form.  In a speech to the Wings Club in June 2008, Mr. Crandall offered that this might take the form of mandating a “minimum fare” that is the sum of “locals”.   What he suggests is that a fare between two cities that connects via a hub should be the sum of the fare(s) between Point A to Point B (a hub) and Point B (a hub still) to Point C (the final destination.  In the alternative, he suggests that flights that connect via a hub be required to have a “connection” charge.  His goal is to remove any incentives airlines might have at present for operating a hub.  It becomes officially un-economic to fly that route via a hub.

Quite honestly, I find that a poor solution since he proposes to disrupt the systems of the very airlines that his solution purports to help in the long term.  It disrupts a 30 year institution among legacy carriers and assumes the staff and leadership who have operated in such a manner to be able to adjust to a new model that they have no experience with.  It is, at best, a very awkward solution to the problem and only addresses revenues (once again) instead of the whole equation.  Even more important, it is hard to imagine the political will required for such a change.

No doubt the adjustments have to be made and I would suggest that might need to take the form of actually allowing a large legacy carrier to go out of business (which then removes some barriers to entry for other, more efficient carriers) or you have to find a way to reasonably deregulate costs so that airlines no longer must use hubs to fight for their very existence.  Those costs are principally labor.  The latter solution is better (both in the short and long terms) because it doesn’t necessarily involve massive unemployment or relocation for employees. 

An airline needs to be able to efficiently locate staff at various “base” cities in a way in which costs are not concentrated in one particular city because it is merely a popular place to live.  You don’t want all of your high cost employees (i.e. the senior staff) to locate themselves in Miami where much of your traffic might be low yield leisure travel.   Second, an airline needs to be able to competitively bid for staff on an open market.   A seniority system as used by airline unions ties staff to one airline and forces the airline to “wait out” their term of employment (as much as 40 years) until they can hire new, lower cost staff to fill a particular position.  Further, it denies them access to qualified personnel for expansion because staff won’t leave another airline for a new job because they don’t want to start out at the bottom of the seniority list.

If we deregulated (by legislation) the seniority system in airlines as a first start, airlines could suddenly re-allocate labor and gain more productivity and reduce their costs on routes where necessary.   For a first round, you could even leave in a seniority system for earning pay and determining furloughs but just remove the seniority system as it pertains to bidding for line routes and it would allow the airline to locate their labor (by cost) where they most needed it and gain more productivity.  That change alone might well serve to offer legacy carriers a legitimate opportunity to earn a profit regularly (with all other things being operated effectively).  It would at least be a good first step in trying to solve the problem.

Filed under: Deregulation, Trivia by ajax
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Almost all airlines in the United States operate from hubs.  Going from West to East, they are (in no specific order), Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Denver, Dallas / Fort Worth, Houston, Minneapolis / St. Paul, Chicago, Detroit, Cincinatti, Memphis, Atlanta, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and NYC.  There are a few other cities that some might argue are hubs but which I think are more “focus” cities than the above cities.

One way airlines have reorganized themselves to meet the cost pressures of non-deregulation on the costs side of the airline industry is to simply start “connection” and/or “feeder” airlines or to contract with those airlines.  Some examples are American Eagle, Mesa Airlines, Comair, Compass and Express Jet.  There are others too.  These airlines fly regional aircraft (regional jets and turbo-prop aircraft) on behalf of the mainline airlines.   Unions permitted these airlines by getting “scope” clauses in the contracts that limit the size of the aircraft to be operated. 

Often those scope clauses originally limited airlines to flying regional aircraft that had 50-odd seats or less.  What they didn’t do was limit the kind of flying such aircraft might be asked to do.   As things evolved post-1978 deregulation, airlines began to establish large hubs with multiple banks of flights each day.  They did so in order to “concentrate” their operations and take advantage of economies of scale.   Over time, mainline aircraft departing from a hub either went to other hubs or to larger 1st and 2nd tier cities.  Mainline aircraft stopped serving the smaller third tier cities (for example Des Moines or Jackson, MS.)  It never occured to unions to limit both scope and distance in those contracts because originally it was assumed that regional aircraft couldn’t serve route sectors of much more than 200 to 300 nm. 

Instead, mainline airlines used their feeder airlines to pick up traffic in those cities and carry it to a hub where the passenger then transferred to a mainline aircraft or another regional flight to get to their final destination.  For instance,  a passenger might fly American Eagle from Des Moines to Chicago, transfer to an American Airlines flight using mainline aircraft and continue on to a final destination such as Los Angeles.  

Prior to 1978 deregulation, American Airlines might have flown a route from Chicago to Los Angeles with intermediate stops in Des Moines and, say, Salt Lake City.  Remember this is a hypothetical example.  While hubs were beginning to develop or had developed, those entities really resembled what we call focus cities today.  It was a concentration of traffic and opportunity to rotate aircraft through maintenance facilities but it wasn’t a fortress hub that we see in places such as DFW or MSP today.

Over time, new aircraft such as regional jets that had greater capacity and speed than original “feeder” aircraft such as the EMB Brasilias or SAAB 340 aircraft were introduced.  These regional jets were capable of mainline aircraft speeds and altitudes and were capable of flying route segments in excess of 400 nautical miles.  Since the cost structure for such aircraft was an order of magnitude less than that for mainline service, airlines began to realize that they could use these aircraft to serve routes that contained a lot of O&D traffic for more point to point flying. 

Suddenly, American Eagle wasn’t just serving cities from DFW that were in Texas and surrounding states.  With regional jets, it began serving medium haul, thin traffic routes from DFW.  One example is the one I gave yesterday:  DFW to MKE.   That route has a lot of O&D traffic (Origin and Destination) but very little connecting traffic.  What that means is that people flying from MKE to DFW were terminating their trip at DFW instead of necessarily continuing on to another destination and vice versa.  If a MKE passenger wanted to get to Denver, they would fly either to Chicago or MSP to connect or possibly direct on a United Airlines “connection airline”. 

The feeder/connection airlines evolved into the “point to point” service provider for small to medium markets.  The reason is that airlines can only afford the flight crew labor costs for routes where the yield (profit from revenue) justified those costs.  The only way to find that yield is to concentrate flights through hubs.  One example, again, is DFW.  American Airlines “feeds” traffic from all over its network (including American Eagle’s network) into DFW where they “concentrate” that traffic and redistribute it to other routes.  This means that those routes load factors remain very high for each flight. 

On the surface, that sounds efficient.  However, there are some underlying factors that reveal it to be inefficient to operate such hubs.  First, it means that you have to schedule your traffic in banks of flights.  You want your flights to arrive at about the same time and then take off again at about the same time.  In order to manage that, your departure times at outlying stations may have to be excessively inconvenient to passengers.   Your airport service staff tends to work in concentrations with excessive idle time in between banks of flights.  You still have to pay them and they remain there because you service large banks of flights at one time.  An airline must have that staff in place over the full duty period to accomodate those peak periods.

Such hubs also tend demand fleets that are largely homogenized.  American Airlines, for instance, standardized on the MD-80 for these flights (and now is doing so on the B737-800) and therefore has to find routes that fit the aircraft instead of aircraft that fit the routes.  Because they must fill so many seats on mainline routes to make a profit, it drives them to feed more and more traffic into the hubs.

Hubs also can cause system wide service disruptions.  A bad weather day in Chicago can wreck two major legacy carriers systems (United and American Airlines) for multiple days because any disruption ripples outward through the whole system.  Since all flights go to or depart from the hub, there is no flexibility to “route around” the problem city.  

All of those issues inhibit a legacy carrier from earning long term profits and they haven’t earned reliably for over 20 years now. 

The best example of how best to operate in today’s airline market is, no surprise, Southwest Airlines.  While they do have several cities that look and feel like hubs, they really aren’t when compared to other airlines.  They are focus cities.  Those focus cities permit some concentration but they really exist to provide some operational flexibility and maintenance. 

Southwest Airlines focuses on flying point to point routes and high frequency commuter flights.  If you try to get from one city to another on Southwest’s system, you are very likely to fly there direct and in many cases non-stop.   The percentage of traffic on flights from focus cities that is “connecting” is relatively small compared to legacy airlines. 

When a flight from Southwest Airlines departs DAL (Dallas Love Field) for ABQ (Albuquerque), it isn’t coming back that day most likely.  Instead, it will continue on to, perhaps, Phoenix and then to Portland where it will turn and head to Los Angeles and then, maybe, to Denver.  The plane  goes through 3 focus cities but at all times it is carrying O&D traffic primarily. 

That point to point system with focus cities permits them to offer highly convenient flights that fly direct (in other words, a passenger doesn’t have to get off the plane and board another one) and they get a higher utilization rate out of both the aircraft and crew because they aren’t sitting at hub for 1 to 2 hours waiting for their flight to depart again.  Instead, Southwest crews do fast turnarounds at focus cities (20 to 40 minutes) and depart for still another city.  Southwest not only gets high utilization from their aircraft but they also get high utilization from their flight crews. 

Southwest Airlines’ crews are paid competively and even generously but the airline also gets far more productivity from them in a given duty period.   Ironically, Southwest crews also fly less fatiguing schedules overall and spend more nights at home than most other aircrews.   Southwest captains earn as much or more than any other Boeing 737 captain but because they negotiate not just raises but flexibility in their contracts, their standard of living is quite a bit higher than it would be at most legacy carriers.   They offer more productivity in return for working an easier duty period at a competitive salary. 

They also don’t fly small commuter aircraft and they don’t avoid flying to 3rd tier markets.  Southwest flies B737 equipment to cities such as Indianapolis, Odessa, Corpus Christi and Brimingham.  Every other airline serves those markets with primarily regional jets and Southwest manages to earn more profit flying to those same cities using mainline aircraft that is more than 100% larger.   Not because their crews are “cheaper” but because their crews (and their unions) bargain for more than just money.  It’s a competitive negotiation with real give and take and, as a result, Southwest gets high productivity without working their crews longer hours, bad morale or high turnover. 

Next we’ll look at why seemingly “fair” fares can’t earn real profits for most US carriers. 

Filed under: Deregulation, Trivia by ajax
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Deregulation in 1978 was never full deregulation.  It was, instead, deregulation of the revenue side of the equation.  Airlines were suddenly free to fly routes and set fares as they wanted.  The barriers to entry on a route were no longer regulatory but, rather, business cost.  My father phrased the start of a route as “starting a new business” and I must say that that is true.  Airlines have to invest in infrastructure, new employees and market their services when entering a new city or route.  The airline is essentially starting a new business.

What never got deregulated was the labor cost side of the equation.  Flight crews were fully unionized (with the notable exception of Delta’s Flight Attendants) and the union approach to wages and work rules was and always has been to negotiate for more each contract.  When the game changed with regulation, the airlines were still inhibited from negotiating freely for their labor on an open market because the unions had 30 years of precedent and enormous political power.  God help the airline who had pilots striking against it because it denied *any* revenue to the company and airlines are cash intensive businesses.  They go out of business very quickly if that cash stream is interrupted. 

Using pilots as example, take a look at their negotiating power in 1978.  First, the barriers to entry in a career as a pilot were (and to some degree remain so) very high.  A typical pilot spent 7 to 9 years in the military flying multi-engined aircraft and when they exited, they got their ATP license and went hunting a type certificate to fly for an airline.  Once in an airline, they entered a seniority system that made it very difficult to leave because every airline had the same system.  If you started at one airline, made captain on an aircraft type and then wanted to leave, you had to start over again.  The union(s) set a contract and work rules in place that essentially made each airline a fiefdom.

The airline union is the lord and the pilots are the serfs.  Well paid serfs in their later years but serfs nonetheless.  Not only is there no incentive to seek work elsewhere, there were strong incentives to stay and play the game no matter what.   Even when an airline is by all measures about to fail.

This situation remains true for most airline unions to some degree or another.  What the government never did was deregulate labor so that airlines could compete for qualified people to fill their staffing needs.  One interesting by-product of this is that airline pilots work terrible schedules today.  They do so because it is enormously expensive to have a pilot sitting on the ground doing nothing.  Airlines fly pilots on different schedules than their flight attendants (at least at most airlines) and they do so because they want to extract all possible value from them because the cost is so high.  Ironically, a more ratioinally paid airline pilot would work an *easier* and more rational schedule that impacted their lives (both personally and professionally) far less if their pay were more in line with a free market competition.   Mind you, they wouldn’t be underpaid, just paid more in line with the demands of their job.

My father thinks that a free market salary for a pilot would be about $70,000 / year and there would be far less range between entry level and an experienced level.  I personally believe that number would be higher.  About $100K to $120K.  I think so because the costs to become a qualified airline pilot and the skill required still make for a rather rare person today.   The pilot still has to become qualified under FAA rules by getting time first on single engine aircraft, then multi-engine aircraft and turbine engined aircraft.   Flying also takes  talent.  Being an commercial pilot also means having a great understanding of engineering (many pilots gets undergraduate degrees in engineering for just this reason.) 

What the airlines needed was an opportunity to negotiate for new labor under new rules.  It would have been impractical and politically difficult to “break” the existing unions.  It would have been better to set new rules for airline unions and airline flight crew going forward.  For instance, eliminating the seniority system but making one’s qualifications and types fully transportable between airlines for the same pay would have made it more fair to both sides.  A pilot who was “captain” qualified on a Boeing 737 would be able to take those qualifications and fly at any airline for market pay.  

Suddenly a pilot would not be married to just one airline and have to deal with fear of furloughs and bankruptcy multiple times in their career that could reset them back to “zero” in their career.  Instead, they would be able to seek positions at other airlines for a commensurate career salary.  The same could be true for any flight crew.   It would even have the benefit of further “harmonizing” best practices among various airlines. 

Over the years, some airlines have made some attempts to re-negotiate this situation.  American Airlines introduced the A/B pay scales in the 1980s.  That worked very well for many years but the advantage was lost because the “B” scale employees still worked for the original union and the “A” scale employees had a vested interest in raising all salaries for everyone.   

There is nothing wrong with unions existing in the workplace.  However, when a union’s sole focus is on raising salaries to everyone else’s detriment, it begins to lose value.  Unions can and should enforce good work rules, good working conditions and even qualification standards and salaries.  They should not, however, distort their own labor market or their airline goes down.

Another way airlines have gotten around this is by starting commuter feeder airlines.  American Airlines has American Eagle for instance.  These “new” airlines have employees who are hired at “market” rates and who remain employed by unions.  Now the airlines use these airlines to fly mainline routes at higher frequencies because it is more cost effective than flying the route with less frequency but greater capacity using mainline equipment.

A great example of this is American Airlines and how they served the DFW – MKE (Milwaukee) route a couple of years ago.  They used 50 seat ERJ-145 aircraft in their American Eagle subsidiary and flew as many as 5 cycles a day.  What’s worse, they frequently turned away people or re-routed them through Chicago because their aircraft were either capacity limited or load limited.  The aircraft had average load factors far in excess of 85%.   The better solution would have been to fly either mainline MD-80 or Boeing 737 aircraft 2 to 3 times a day.   That would have offered better service (more reliable and not load limited), more comfortable seating and slightly shorter flights.  But they couldn’t because AA MD-80/B737 pilots for such routes would cost 4 times more than American Eagle pilots. 

The demand was there.  The fares actually offered great revenue opportunities (when compared to average DFW – ORD fares) but the expenses were still too great on the labor side.   So people were offered a cramped ERJ with all coach service that, by the way, eventually lost passenger traffic to Midwest Express (who flies more comfortable MD-80s and B717 aircraft) and to other mainline airlines who would service Dallas via Chicago or Minneapolis-St. Paul. 

Regional Jets were never built for serving such markets and they do so very inefficiently.  Regional aircraft should never be serving route sectors greater than 400 nautical miles and certainly should never be serving mainline city pairs such as MKE-DFW.    They should fly from Odessa to Dallas or Cedar Rapids to Milwaukee. 

Could labor be less regulated in the airline world today?  I don’t know.  It would require great political will and I frankly don’t see that on the horizon.   It would require the airline industry to be both realistic and cooperative with each other and it would require unions to recognize that not every contract means “more” but maybe it means different and more accomodating instead.  It should also offer some job security and certainty too. 

In the next part, we’ll take a look at how the lack of full deregulation has distored air travel in the United States and caused inefficiencies.

Filed under: Deregulation, Trivia by ajax
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This weekend I had a series of long and very interesting conversations about airline economics and deregulation in the airline industry with my father, a former executive vice president of Braniff.  I have been following the airline industry since the mid 1990’s and very closely since the early 2000’s and after this weekend I can only say there is still more I don’t know. 

The insight I gained on the industry this weekend isn’t easy to get anymore.  Much of what takes place today in the airline world overshadows the history of the industry.  But I thought I would share my new insight in a series of stories this week on airline economics and deregulation.  Information presented as fact comes from my father.  The opinions are mine unless otherwise attributed to someone else.

The first of these stories is quite naturally about the history and background of the airline industry.  What almost any fan knows is that the airline world as primarily fostered by air mail contracts originally.  It wasn’t until the DC-3 (and similar aircraft) that an airline could really earn profits from passengers and even then air mail was an essential part of earning a profit as an airline.   In other words, passengers reduced the importance of air mail but it was a long time before it diminished the importance of air mail revenue to a point at which it could be considered relatively unimportant.

Prior to air mail, the fastest way to move mail around was by train.  Trains had reliable schedules and a robust network of lines that made it easy, for the first time in history, to move mail in a timely manner.  Since many infant industries are heavily influenced by more mature industries, it comes as no surprise that many of the “best practices” used by railroads were “inherited” by airlines as they began to operate. 

One good example of this is how engineers on trains were (and still are) paid.  It was based on time, distance and weight.  An engineer who operated a long, heavy train on a transcontinental route quite obviously was going to A) Be away from home. B) Need skills and experience to operate that train over different terrain. C) Be able to know how to stop such a leviathan in an emergency without completely destroying the train itself. 

The engineers were paid a scale of wages that took into account their skill and experience as well as punishing time away from home and long duty hours required to push that train to its destinations.  In other words, an engineer who had to stay on duty for 12 hours a day driving a 1/2 mile long train over a mountainous area would be paid much more than an engineer who drove a feeder line over a short distance delivering boxcars to factories in an industrial area.  Quiet naturally, this kind of thinking was quickly adopted by airlines and airline pilots. 

Very early in the game, airline pilots were paid according to the size of their aircraft (a DC-3 pilot earned much more than a pilot of a Ford Tri-Motor) and the distance they traveled.  They are paid in the same manner today.  A pilot who flies a Boeing 737 on 4 or 5 flight segments for 10 hours is paid less per hour than a pilot who flies a Boeing 777 for one flight segment that takes the same time.  The argument is and always has been that the B777 pilot is responsible for a larger aircraft, more souls on board and therefore works harder for those same hours. 

The reality is really quite different.  Most of the work a pilot incurs is on takeoffs and landings, not during cruise flight.  It requires no great difference of knowledge to fly a B777 or a B737 and, in fact, it may be easier to fly the B777 with its more sophisticated flight management computers.  The number of souls on board sounds like a good argument but, as my father pointed out, is it?  After all, in almost any aircraft crash, the pilot(s) are the most certain to be casualties.  So, isn’t it in their best interest to fly that aircraft as best they can no matter how many others are on board?  Of course it is.  Practically speaking, we regard it as a tragedy if 20 or 200 people are killed or injured in a crash.

So, who should be paid more?  If it is about how hard the work is, then many regional feeder pillots should be paid far more than the B757 pilot who might only fly 3 or 4 segments in a day.  That same feeder pilot might work twice as hard for the same duty time because he or she is making 5 or 6 or even 7 landings and take-offs per day.  Both pilots have to know a complicated set of systems.  Both planes have just 2 engines.  Both airplanes have to navigate the same kind of airspace and altitudes.  Who is working harder?  The regional jet pilot is.

But he or she is also the least paid.  Regional jet pilots just starting out make as little as just $20,000 to $25,000 per year.  A B757 pilot is likely making 5 to 8 times that much money for the same or less duty hours. 

All because airlines adopted the same pay models that railroads used.  It suddenly becomes more clear why airline managers often resent pilots the most.  In the mid 1970’s, a Braniff 727 captain made as much as 50% more than a senior Braniff executive.  Did the captain work more hours?  No.  In fact, if he worked 80 duty hours a month and if you allowed a 20% bump in hours for time worked but not paid, he or she still only worked 96 hours in a month.  That same airline executive was paid for 160 hours per month and probably worked about 200 hours per month.   The airline can’t run profitably or reliably without either person so who was overpaid?  The pilots, of course.

In the next part, we’ll take a look at how pilots (and other aircrew) distorted the the 1978 deregulation of the industry.

Filed under: Deregulation, Trivia by ajax
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In the early 1950’s, Juan Terry Trippe of Pan American noticed that many executives of major corporations had begun to travel by private airplanes (just as he did in a converted B-23 bomber).  He reasoned that these men (and it really was almost singularly men in that age) would not be flying on his aircraft and inside his route system.

The Business Jets Division of Pan American was formed and they wrote specifications for a new jet and contacted Dassault, a French Aviation Company, about building such a jet.  This new jet would be comfortably furnished, have dual wheel landing gear (to ensure that larger margin of safety) and be powered by new turbo-fan jets instead of turbo jets.  It was originally called the Mystere 20 and later renamed the Dassault Falcon.

Pan American marketed this new service as an alternative to flying their commercial aircraft and routes when it was inconvenient.  If you couldn’t fly their schedules, you could still fly their jets and use their airport facilities.

Variations of this aircraft exist today and, coincidentally enough, are a mainstay of today’s business jet companies such as NetJets.  The Dassault Falcon 50, 900 and 2000 are sold and operated today but all derive their heritage from that original airplane conceived of by Juan Trippe and Pan American Airways.

Filed under: Trivia by ajax
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In 1959, an almost new Braniff L-188 Electra II aircraft, Lockheed’s first jet powered turbo-prop airplane, was flying from Houston to New York via Dallas.  After its brief stop in Dallas, the Electra II approached a line of thunderstorms near Buffalo, Texas.   At about 11pm in the evening, the aircraft suddenly disintegrated in the sky. 

A Northwest Airlines L-188 crashed a few months later over Indiana and there were peculiar similarities between the two crashes.  Both airplanes were essentially brand new and both lost their wings and disintegrated in the sky and rained parts of the aircraft over a large area.  People began to speculate that the L-188 was a death ship and some even made jokes that tickets weren’t sold on Electra flights, just chances.

These events and others made people afraid to fly the aircraft and there was a movement to ground the airplanes until the cause was found.  Instead, speed limits were imposed and a crash program initiated to find the problem or problems with this aircraft.  Nonetheless, Lockheed saw its good fortunes change to bad and the L-188 never saw the kind of commercial success that was Lockheed’s custom.

It was eventually discovered that the airplane had a problem with “whirl mode” flutter.  Because of the way the engine was mounted, certain gyroscopic movements of the engine weren’t adequately damped by the engine mounts and wing structure.  When these movements “coupled” with other harmonics of the airplane, the engine tore the wing apart in just seconds.  Ironically, the problem was solved primarily by placing weights on strategic parts of the mounts which then both dampened and changed the harmonic vibrations.

Despite that, a version of this airliner flies today as the P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft.  What is more remarkable is that NOAA flies two of these aircraft as “hurricane hunter” airplanes.  These planes have the mission of flying directly into and out of hurricanes at a variety of altitudes and speeds.  When a hurricane such as the one approaching the Florida Keys right now (Hurricane Ike / 2008) come along, these aircraft fly this mission into violent winds and rapidly changing conditions several times a day and they are not specially reinforced to withstand any greater loads except on their deck and only to hold the heavier loads of their instruments.

Ultimately the Electra II survives to still fly more than 50 years after its first flight and more than 45 years after its fatal flaws were discovered. 

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In the 1970’s, Japan was experiencing fantastic economic growth and both ANA (All Nippon Airlines) and Japan Airlines needed more lift for their internal domestic routes.  They approached Boeing and inquired about using the 747 for these high cycle, short duration flights.  After investigating the possibilities, Boeing discovered that relatively minor changes (landing gear for instance), they could produce an aircraft that met their needs.

By eliminating 3 classes of service, galleys and other long range accomodations, the Boeing 747SR was born and able to carry as many as 525 passengers in this new domestic configuration.  Later, those same aircraft were replaced with 747-400 Domestics capable of carrying over 560 passengers.

That was the first 500+ passenger commercial aircraft but now the new Airbus A380 may be capable of carrying as many as 800 passengers in a similar domestic configuration.  There is some debate that such an airplane would be of use since the logistics of carrying an additional 300 passengers becomes almost unsolvable for existing airport configurations.  No doubt Airbus would happily build the airplane if there is, indeed, a market for it.

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In 1966, American Airlines released a set of specifications for a new kind of an airplane, an “air bus”.  This plane was to carry 250 to 300 people in a wide body configuration using two new, more powerful fan jets and it would be able to operate short to medium trunk routes such as Denver – Los Angeles or New York – Chicago.  Many enthusiasts will recognize that both McDonnel Douglas and Lockheed responded to this with the DC-10 and L1011 aircraft and both were to become rather legendary.

But while the DC-10 experienced great commercial success and the L1011 became the pilot’s airplane (reportedly one of the easiest planes to fly ever built), it was Airbus that got it right with their A300.  Both the DC-10 and L1011 were “compromise” aircraft in that they had 3, instead of two, engines to meet a specification that United Airlines issued:  the ability to take off with a full load from Denver’s mile high airport.

Airbus was originally formed between Aerospatiale and Deutch Aerospace with Spain’s CASA and England’s BAC joining later.  Their original aircraft utilized 2 GE CF-6 engines and had a range of about 1500 nm.  The A300 would later grow in both range and payload ultimately culminating in the A300-600R which was capable of carrying more than 260 passengers and a full cargo load for more than 4000 nautical miles.

At one point in the mid 1970’s, Airbus A300 sales were so bad that they had to just keep manufacturing airplanes in order to keep the assembly line open while betting that times would change and their aircraft might be adopted by others.  One landmark change in sales for Airbus was Eastern Airlines.  Frank Borman, President and CEO of Eastern, was searching for a replacement for Eastern’s Boeing 727-200 aircraft that would carry more passengers with better operating efficiencies on Eastern’s high density, East Coast routes. 

Borman, the former NASA astronaut, was a tough negotiator and ultimately got 4 Airbus A300s to try out for terms that amounted to the cost to operate the aircraft.  Eastern discovered that the aircraft was a huge moneymaker for those routes since it consumed 30% less fuel than the competing Lockheed L1011 that they also owned.

Ultimately, Boeing responded with the 767, also a twin engined aircraft, originally designed for much the same mission as the A300.  However, in many ways the two aircraft evolved to serve different missions.  The A300 thrived as a trunk airliner that could carry a massive amount of cargo easily (because its fuselage was designed to accomodate 2 side-by-side industry standard LD3 containers) and operate on high density routes with both speed and low seat costs.  While it was certified for ETOPS(Extended Twin Engine Operations over water or “Engines Turning Or Passengers Swimming) and was even ultimately used on over-water transatlantic routes, its specialty remained its original mission.

The Boeing 767 was built with a narrower fuselage that could not accomodate those same LD3 cargo containers two abreast but it did find its own mission in the transatlantic arena as it gained both range and capacity.  To use the similarly sized 767 on the same routes as the A300 was to set oneself up for failure.  The A300 was just too good at what it did.

American Airlines owns a number of A300 aircraft and while they were always used primarily for those same routes that Eastern once flew (NYC to Miami and the Caribbean), they also used the aircraft for transatlantic routes such as NYC to London. 

To date, there is no other better aircraft for that short to medium haul, high density mission that the A300 has served so perfectly.  Since many A300s are aging now, they are being withdrawn from service but there exists no true replacement for this marvel either.  Boeing 757/767 aircraft cannot carry either the same passengers or cargo efficiently and while the A330/340 aircraft use essentially the same fuselage, they only begin to show true efficiency on 4000nm or greater missions. 

In most markets where the A300 has been withdrawn, that capability has been replaced with greater frequency with airlines using B737-800/900 aircraft and A320/321 aircraft.  The Boeing 787 derivative 300 series does, at first glance, meet that mission profile carrying a great number of passengers (280 to 310) on routes as long as 3000 nm.  However, the only airlines to order the 787 are Japanese carriers ANA and Japan Airlines.   Many speculate that the 787-300, designed to replace the 767 and A300 on regional routes, will either have to grow in range (4500nm) or face being a Japan only aircraft.  Indeed, Boeing announced last year that the 787-300 won’t be certiied for use in the US although it could be done very easily should Boeing decide that there is a market in the US for such an airplane.

Sadly, Airbus does not have a new replacement on deck.  Their focus has been on the giant A380 and developing their new A350 series aircraft.  Sales of their A330 aircraft have been brisk still and Airbus will likely turn its focus to an A320 replacement aircraft once they have both time and resources. 

I have no doubt that Airbus will once more “get it right”.

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During the development of the 747, the US State Department asked Boeing to meet with a group of Soviet aircraft designers in a kind of technical exchange.  Otensibly it was a technical information exchange that Boeing agreed to in order to gain some knowledge about titanium.

Boeing was working on development of the 2707 SST at the same time as the 747 and had encountered quite a few problems in working with titanium which was to be used on many of the SST skin surfaces.  The original plans called for the 2707 SST to travel at nearly Mach 3 and at that speed aluminum could not be used since it grew too hot.  The Concorde was speed limited to Mach 2.2 for this very reason.

Since this was at the height of the Cold War (the 1960’s), Boeing was understandably reluctant to share information but thought that if they got enough data on titanium, it might be worth it.  One of the people sent to this discussion was Joe Sutter, the recognized “father” of the 747.  The meeting took place on neutral territory – a restaurant in Paris, France.

The instructions from Boeing to its engineers was to not share any information until they were satisfie with what the Soviets had to share.  Once the Boeing delegation was satisfied that all their questions about this heat resistant metal were answered, they instructed the engineers, including Joe Sutter, to answer their questions and to not hold back.

Surprisingly, the Soviets wanted to know why Boeing had used a “pod” type mounting of their engines on wings (with the exception of the 727) and Joe Sutter engaged them in an hour long discussion about drag, efficiency and balance.  The Soviets took copious notes on napkins and even the tablecloth.  When the discussion was over, the Soviets rolled up the tablecloth and departed with it and the napkins. 

The next Soviet airplane to be designed for commercial (and military) use by the Soviets was the Il-76 which had podded engines, a first for the Soviets.

Source material:  747 by Joe Sutter and Jay Spenser / Legend & Legacy by Robert Serling (Rod Serling’s brother)

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I just saw THIS story on the Fort Worth Star Telegram’s Sky Talk Blog.  Now, why would *anyone* and in particular a Mexican airline (presumably populated by Spanish speaking employees) *ever* want to name an airline Nova Air? 

Because, pronounced that way, you are basically saying “No Go Air”.  No wonder they are withdrawing from Dallas.

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Go to this link.

GE is running a series of “ecomagination” commercials.  Find the one for the “Crane”.  There is something about that one that just entertains me to no end.

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A smaller, western US airline was involved in a tragic mid-air collision that resulted in their airplanes being painted yellow.  Who was that airline?

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Most probably think it was the Concorde or the Russian made Tu-144 “Concordski” was the first commercial airliner to exceed the speed of sound.  Neither was.

It was a DC-8-40 powered by Rolls Royce Conway engines.  During a test of leading edge wing improvements over Edwards Air Force Base in August of 1961, this aircraft dived from 52,000 feet and achieved Mach 1.012 (660.6 mph) at 41,088 feet.

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John Travolta owns a Boeing 707-138B.  It’s a gorgeous airplane painted in QANTAS colors, the airline that ordered and operated the very airplane he owns. 

What’s more interesting, to me, is that this airplane also was owned by Braniff International.  Braniff bought it and used it to operate US Armed Forces MAC flights to Southeast Asia.    The Boeing 707-138 was one of the many semi-custom airplanes Boeing built for special needs customers.  In QANTAS’ case, they needed range above anything else and Boeing shortened the fuselage of their standard 707 by 10 feet thereby reducing the weight and increasing the range.

Braniff also was a Boeing “special needs” customer.  They were the only airline to operate the Boeing 707-227 which basically combined the more powerful engines of a the 707-320 “Intercontinental” with the fuselage and wing of the 707-120.   Braniff operated flights to several high altitude airports in South America and used these “custom” jets to start jet service there.  They were the fastest of all the 707 jets and only 5 were ever built with only 4 being delivered (the first one crashed while on an acceptance flight.) 

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During World War II, the US Government was terrified that Boeing and its factories would be bombed. When the B-29 bomber began to be manufactured, the government could no longer stand the perceived risk and insisted that Boeing Plant Two be covered in netting. Boeing took the orders a bit farther and created an entire neighborhood on top of their plant made of canvas, netting and paint. You can see it here.

It’s actually difficult at first glance to spot the plant but then you realize there is a neighborhood with roads terminating at odd angles to other roads and it is right on top of the airport.

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