Airline Fanatic

Maxjet Airways, one of the all-business transatlantic carriers trying to carve out their niche, requested that their shares stop trading on the London Stock Exchange today, pending the “clarification of its financial position.”  Yikes!  I’m no financial wizard, but when you ask for your stock to be suspended, it probably mean you are in a little bit of a financial pickle.

The numbers back this up, with Maxjet reporting major losses of $31.9 million during the first six months of this year.  For the full year 2006 Maxjet threw an amazing $79 million down the tubes, it was their first year of operation.  Most new airlines expect to make losses while they get their operations going and achieve some scale, but I doubt they expected to lose that much.

So what is their explanation for being so deep in the red?  From the Financial Times:

It has faced mounting losses in the face of surging fuel prices and lower than expected fare yields. Higher maintenance costs for its ageing fleet of Boeing 767 aircraft have also depressed financial performance.

Guess what guys, the rest of the world has had record fuel prices and aging fleets to deal with too.  It seems Maxjet may have overestimated the demand for discount business class service over the Atlantic, and are in big trouble because of it now.  If this were truly the case, you would think the rest of this category of airlines would be in trouble too.  Quite the contrary though, as Silverjet has just announced it will expand its current current fleet of 767s.

For the time being operations and reservations go on as normal while executives scramble to secure fresh financing.  I haven’t has the pleasure of trying Maxjet out myself yet, but here’s to hoping the airline will still be around when I do get that opportunity!

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that JetBlue is about to start testing their inflight wifi services with parterns Yahoo! and RIM.  For now at least the service will be completely free, and offer access to customized Yahoo Mail and instant messaging services.  People with wifi enabled Blackberries will also be able to access their corporate email and instant messages while inflight.    Best of all this service is starting almost immediately – with the first flight on December 11th.  The project, called BetaBlue, is only hooked up on one plane right now.  The first flight to get this feature will be flight 641 from JFK to SFO next Tuesday, but will shift thereafter depending on the normal schedule of the aircraft.  This is still a very limited test, so users will only be able to access the services mentioned above.

This test news puts JetBlue way ahead of other domestic carriers who are also in the market to install WiFi across their fleet.  Virgin America announced earlier this year they intend to use wifi on their entire fleet (though that is considerably easier than equipping JetBlue’s fleet).  JetBlue also said this testing will go on for months, so don’t get your hopes up too much for catching this first of a kind plane.  Either way, sooner or later JetBlue will be forced to open up BetaBlue to the entire internet.  The days of liveblogging my flights are upon us!

1-800-Flowers.com is running a killer promotion with Delta SkyMiles from now through December 15th.  1-800-Flowers.com is offering 10 Delta SkyMiles for every dollar spent, plus a flat 2500 bonus miles on every order.  So lets say you buy flowers for $30, that would be 300 miles plus the bonus 2500 miles for a total of 2800 miles.  That works out to around 93 miles per dollar spent, an astronomical rate of conversion.  Keep in mind that doesn’t include shipping fees or any other fees they may tack on.  Since its the holiday season you should have no trouble finding plenty of excuses to send flowers around, so get started collecting those miles!

To take advantage of this incredible offer you have to use promotion code DL8 when prompted, simple as that!

[Via FlyerTalk]