Airline Fanatic

Breaking News: American Airlines announced this morning that they will divest themselves (investment speak for sell) their American Eagleregional subsidiary next year.  I think this is probably good news for them.  American Eagle has lots of old aircraft and probably runs a lot of American’s shortest and biggest money losing routes.  Cutting them out will definitely improve the financials at AMR.

Shareholders were pleased with the announcement – American Airlines stock (AMR) is currently up about 8% on the news.

[Via PlaneBuzz]

According to NBC Nightly News, British Airways is flying a good number of their transatlantic flights without any passengers whatsoever! You can see the original report, which aired a while ago here:

British Airways flying on empty

With oil prices hovering around $100 a barrel I found this new to be shocking. The TV report focuses on the environmental waste these flights produce. Since the planes were operating normally scheduled routes however BA is correct in pointing out no extra CO2 is produced because the planes fly empty.

What is surprising though is that BA would not just cancel the flights outright instead of hemorrhaging money on empty 747s. Its hard enough as it is right now to make a profit on a sold out flight, so I can’t imagine how much money is being lost every single time these planes leave empty. Why would BA do this if its so expensive you ask? Put simply, because of other political factors.

London Heathrow is one of the busiest airports in the world, and because of it is regulated by a certain number of arrival and departure slots available for the airlines to use. These slots come with a use it or lose it policy, meaning if BA doesn’t use all their allotted slots then other airlines can file for permission to use them instead. BA, famous for its anti-competitive behavior, would prefer to lose millions of dollars flying empty planes than it would see those slots going to Virgin Atlantic (or any other number of carriers now that Open Skies is in effect).

British Airways claims the reason the flights go empty is because there aren’t enough staff to comply with safety regulations, and so passengers aren’t allowed on board. The obvious question to me here is, why doesn’t BA just hire or promote enough flight crews so they can allow passengers on these planes. I’m sure there are literally tons of British Airways flight crews that would be eager to take up long-haul international routes vs. shorter domestic or EU flights. And it would work out better for BA too since long international flights across the Atlantic are so lucrative.

Overall this seems like a poor scheme from BA, and I doubt they will be able to support it much longer either due to cost or government intervention. Either they get there act in gear and start letting people on flight for which they are booked, or they should forfeit the slots to airlines than can use them.

Virgin America came out with a new destination announcement today – they will fly three daily non stops from San Francisco to San Diego starting on February 18th of next year (increasing to five flights on March 9th). [Via Jaunted] While its great to see a new airline expanding to new cities, one has to wonder about the wisdom of VA’s decision to pick some of the busiest airports in the country.

Serving primary airports in each city they serve is actually a stated priority for VA CEO Fred Reid, as he discussed in his interview with Fast Company magazine. This is both good and bad for travelers. Its good for the obvious reason that you will actually fly to the airport you want to go to, unlike Skybus Airlines which sells tickets to “New York” while it actually flies to Newburgh, NY. On the other hand, Skybus wont have to worry about any delays coming out of Newburgh, whereas JFK is one of the most delayed airports in the country. In fact, Virgin operates out of several of the most delayed airports, including its home hub of San Francisco, Washington Dulles and New York JFK (though they aren’t as bad as JetBlue, which flies to 10 of the top 14 delayed airports).

Now when you handle only a handful of flights every day, this may not be such a big deal. As Virgin America grows however they will have to think more and more about the utilization of their aircraft on more than one route per day, and in the low cost carrier world that means quick turn around times at some of these busy airports. Every time a VA plane touches one of these delayed airports, there is a 30% chance (roughly) they wont get back off the ground again in time to make their next scheduled connection. Over time, this will continue to add up. And when your entire network consists of these heavily delayed airports, as Fred Reid would have us believe, the chance of massive delays across the airline increase with every flight.

In theory it’s nice to say you fly to each city’s primary airport, but when you consider the delays and additional headaches that come along with these big boys, you may want to think twice. Virgin has plenty of time to consider their growth strategy, and avoiding delays on their network should be on their list of top priorities.