When you are stuck on Tarmac with an announcement that it will be an hour or more, urge the flight attendant to request that the window shades be pulled down so people stay cool.

If you are lucky, they’ll listen.

I’ll deal with your fib later, Southwest. It was a bad one.

Filed under: Airline Service by ajax
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Various Attorneys General of states have decided to investigate the merger between US Airways and American Airlines.  These attorneys general led by the Texas attorney general have joined the US Justice Department in the probe of the merger and this couldn’t be more transparent as bullying.

These states are threatening risk to the merger in order to prevent losing hubs.  Actually, this is about making the airline guarantee jobs in their states and one should remember that every attorney general is a potential candidate for governor in a state.

It’s naked bullying and given that these airlines are involved in interstate commerce, really outside their purview.

All airlines should protest this behavior and lobby against it because while it affects US Airways and American Airlines today, it will affect another airline tomorrow.

Filed under: Mergers and Bankruptcy by ajax
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Businessweek has a story about former jetBlue CEO David Neeleman being interested in perhaps purchasing jetBlue in the near future.  Neeleman denies interest in purchasing jetBlue but it does bring up a subject that I find interesting.

jetBlue is the airline that could and did but no longer does.  After 6 years, I cannot point to this airline as entity that shows much opportunity for growth and which  certainly seems to put in rather poor results for such a young entity with nominally good partnerships. It isn’t that the airline performs at a loss.  It’s that the airline just kind of coasts on what is arguably very good times for airlines.

Growth continues to be focused on the congested cities of the north and the Caribbean and when they do add the odd midwestern city, they do so very timidly.  It’s not as if this airline is proceeding at its own pace and with deliberate design.  It’s as if it is creeping around the United States looking for the odd piece of low hanging fruit desperate not to be noticed by a Big Bad Legacy Airline.

That’s no way to run an airline and particularly not in the upper Northeast Corridor.

I think it would be great to see David Neeleman buy jetBlue and do something bold with it again.  I also think that David Neeleman could do better by starting another airline in the US and allowing jetBlue to muddle along.  Neeleman seems to correctly sense that the airline has a sickness that won’t be easy to cure.

Filed under: Airline Service by ajax
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I received a back channel question asking why all airliners are looking so alike now.

What the person was referring to was the fact that an A320 and B737 look, to the layman, almost exactly alike as do the medium and large widebody aircraft.  It’s true, the Airbus A330 is hard to distinguish from the Boeing 777/767 series aircraft too.

The only semi-distinguishable aircraft out there are the Airbus A340 (production has stopped), the Boeing 747 and the Airbus A380.

But the question is why.

The answer is aerodynamics.  As manufacturers strive to gain more and more efficiency out of their aircraft, their aircraft start to look more and more alike.

Simply put, it’s about function over form.  When you design one of these aircraft, you don’t “style” it with something that goes against the aerodynamics of the airframe because such a thing could literally cost the user millions in fuel costs over the life of the airplane.

So, today, we have the Embraer E170/190 which looks a lot like how the Bombardier CS100/CS300 will look  which looks a lot like the Airbus A320 series which in turn looks a lot like the Boeing 737 series.  Because that shape works, we have the Airbus A300 which looks a lot like the Boeing 757/767 which looks a lot like the Airbus A330/A340 which looks a lot like the Boeing 777 which looks a lot like the upcoming A350 which also looks like the Boeing 787.

They all basically look alike with some slight differences and that is completely driven by aerodynamic efficiency.

It’s notable that the “odd ball” aircraft do not really survive past a single generation and don’t show up anymore.  The 727 was out of the ordinary with Boeing and its T-tail configuration was only ever used once by them.  The DC-10/MD-11 3-engine weirdness didn’t really last that long either.  The DC-10 did but the MD-11 died a quick death.  In fact, it’s notable that the MD-11 mostly died in popularity because it didn’t meet efficiency promises.

Oddballs don’t survive very long and those that do survive are driven in their function by physics.

Filed under: Trivia by ajax
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