Galley Gossip: Airline for sale!

by Heather Poole on

This is it, people, your chance to buy an airline, because Volare Airlines, an Italian low-cost carrier, is now up for sale – again!

What’s that? Not enough money you say? Why don’t we all pool our money together and buy…oh I don’t know…maybe just one of the airplanes. We can each buy a seat. And since we’d only own one airplane, we can call our small little airline MY PLANE. That means when someone asks, “what airline did you travel on,” you can then say, “My Plane,” and mean it, because it is your plane, as well as my plane.

We’ll take votes and fly the most popular route once a day. But the real beauty of owning My Plane is this…I would…I mean WE would get to design it from the bottom up. Just the way we want. And because we’d only want the best for My Plane, which is also your plane, I’d like to make a few suggestions..

After reading all 754 comments from my post Flight Attendant Pet Peeve #1, Answer Please! it’s apparent we should only hire flight attendants from one of the Asian carriers. Why? Passengers, at least the ones who commented on my post, seem to love them. Hey, what’s not to love about an airline that hires flight attendants who are all the same uniform size – small. That makes complete sense – one size uniform for the one and only airplane. Forget equal opportunity, we make the rules at this airline! And while we’re at it making those rules, how about we only allow one size of passenger onboard – small of course, which will help save fuel. As you know, saving on fuel is the name of the game these days. Which is why that small passenger can only bring onboard one small bag and place it under the small seat. The small flight attendant will then serve a small meal to the small passenger with the small bag under the small seat and…wait a minute…we’re not talking about us, are we? I think we are. We’re the ones traveling on My Plane, remember? So scratch that. But we can still steal a few of those Singapore Airline girls, but make them funny, like the good people at Southwest Airlines.

Of course we’d have to include Virgin’s beauty therapy services on My Plane. Trust me when I tell you that I’ll be the first one in line for a manicure and massage. Yes, I know, I am working the flight, but don’t forget, when the flight attendant is happy, the passenger is happy. Or is it the other way around? I can’t remember. I’m too numb from my massage to remember. But all you need to remember is that you’re getting all this for Jet Blue prices. Could it get any better?

As for the flight attendant uniforms, personally I’d like to go with the Air France uniform. Have you seen it? Hello – can you say LOVE IT! As in Love it – Love it! As in there aren’t enough “love’s” in a sentence to possibly describe how I feel. That’s how much I love it. Seriously, if the airline I currently work for now had to merge with another airline, can we please please please merge with Air France! Please. Not that I want to merge. No flight attendant wants to merge. Not when seniority is involved. Because seniority, at an airline, is everything. More than everything. But if I HAD to merge, well that uniform might be kind of nice to merge into. Since it’s My Plane, and my uniform, it’s all about me, on My Plane. Oh and you, too. I guess.

What kind of food would we serve? That’s easy. Cathay Pacific, I hear, has the best food in the industry. At least that’s what The Husband once wrote via email from a Cathay flight. Let me tell you that email was long, and dedicated strictly to food. Apparently the food on Cathay is THAT good, as in two pages of email good. And who doesn’t want good food on a flight? I know I do. Which is why I always bring my own from home. When I can remember to bring my own from home. Which isn’t often. Since I don’t cook, that much, from home. Not since the husband made me promise never to cook again. Anyway, you know it’s all about the food on a flight, right? I mean isn’t that what you look for in an airline when you’re booking a trip? Of course it is. Otherwise you wouldn’t be complaining so much about the bad food. Or lack of food.

We should really go with Virgin Atlantic’s cabin interior. Neon florescent red and blue lights glowing throughout the cabin are definitely a must. Especially on a red eye flight. They scream HAPPY! Why, because you’re happy, happy to be on My Plane! Which also includes Virgin’s in-flight seat to seat chat. I wonder if that chat extends between passengers and flight attendants? If so, that means you can leave home without your stealth secret sound amplifier, the one you bought from Skymall, the same one I mentioned in my last post, the top five skymall gifts for the frequent flier (that’s you!) and just text me your drink order. Wouldn’t that be nice? And perhaps we could chat a little. Really get to know each other. Oh wait, you see someone cute oboard? Me, too! Just send that person a little text and don’t forget to add your seat number – in case that person happens to be wearing a very sophisticated blue uniform and wants to slide you a drink on the house for umm…ya know…for being so nice and all.

So whadaya say…should we go for it?

Overhead bins become hot commodity once again

by Iva Skoch on

Does anyone else feel like the aviation industry is constantly looping in a vicious circle?

Take the development of “luggage rules” in the last couple of years, for example:

  1. People were able to bring everything on, including liquids
  2. The idea of not being able to pack liquids made people checks all their bags. (Oh, the days of fast boarding with no carry on luggage!)
  3. Airlines start charging for checked bags, hence you return to point 1 (with liquids in a ziplog bag, of course)

I am not looking forward to the battle for the overhead bin, as Scott McCartney, who writes The Middle Seat column at the Wall Street Journal predicts:

“To make sure they can find room, some customers already push their way through boarding queues. Passengers struggle to stuff large bags into small bins, and flight attendants often find themselves taking bags off planes and checking them to their destinations once bins fill up.”

Does that mean that you can get around paying a fee for a checked bag if you “attempt” to bring it on? Apparently, if you simply can’t find overhead bin space, but your luggage fits the carry on criteria (i.e. isn’t too big or too heavy), you will not have to pay. If it is too big, heavy or you have too many pieces of luggage, you will still have to pay.

Honestly, there is only one good thing that could come out of this. People might just start traveling light.

Gadling’s airline hit list: five airlines to watch this summer

by Grant Martin on

With all of the trouble swirling around the airline industry it’s hard not to think about this summer and more problems that could occur. Summertime is traditionally a busy time of year, with travel prices and oil going up as vacationers hit the road. This year is a little different though. More Americans are staying home because they can’t afford to take that summer vacation to Disney World and the cost of operating an airplane is at an all time high. We suggest in an earlier article that this combination could spell disaster for more than one airline.

I’m not the only speculator on the obituaries — Morningstar released a financial report on the airlines earlier this month that rated the liquidity and debt coverage of some of the major carriers. What they found was that Southwest was the only airline in a decent position, a few other carriers were squabbling along in second place and there were a lot of airlines in serious financial trouble this summer.

Business Travel Commission and AirlineForecasts issued another doomsday paper last week called the Airline Crisis Report, where they look at the earnings of the top ten carriers in the United States. The only company in the black? You guessed it.

So we’ve put all of the data together and mixed in a fair amount of “gut feeling” to make Gadling’s Hitlist: 5 Airlines to Watch this Summer. Expect to hear about these airlines in the news, woeing about fuel prices and cutting about service and maybe even exploring the “B” word: bankruptcy.

  1. Frontier – Denver based Frontier Airlines declared bankruptcy earlier this year because their credit company started taking a larger cut out of their transactions. All this has potential passengers afraid of another Skybus incident where they might get trapped at their destination, so my bet is loads and profit are down even further. Today the struggling airline released a report saying they would take a $59.4M loss this year, their largest deficit ever.
  2. L’avion – Never heard of L’avion? Most people haven’t. One of the last of the business-class-only carriers around town is struggling to keep it’s head above water as OpenSkies is about to jump into the USA-Paris market this month. If we’ve learned anything from Maxjet, Eos, or Silverjet, L’avion is up to bat next.
  3. US Airways – The above data seem to indicate that US Airways is in one of the worst situations among all carriers — among the most outstanding debt, lowest liquidity and lowest earnings in the market. Earlier this year they were rumored to be in talks with United to merge. Someone needs to bail them out, because they keep hemorrhaging cash and with a rating among the lowest on the Airline Quality Report, passengers need a boost in confidence.
  4. Spirit – Low Cost Carriers are among the first victims in a downturn, as Skybus already showed us. While Spirit has been around for a while, they may not have the customer or frequent flyer base to keep things going in sustained tight times. As MSNBC’s Chris Elliott pointed out last week, they’ve almost shut down their customer service, which can’t be a great sign of things to come.
  5. Mesa/Pinnacle – As small feeder airlines for the larger carriers, both Mesa and Pinnacle face the potential of being trimmed out as the giants cut costs. Just last week, Pinnacle was dropped as a feeder by Delta Airlines. Mesa, on the other hand, was rated among the lowest in both the Morningstar and AQR reports.

Think I’m full of crap? As I admitted before, much of these predictions are a mixture of speculation and data — these notes shouldn’t influence your portfolio investments or even your decision to book tickets. Let me know what your favorite airlines and predictions are below are and hold on for a little bit of turbulence this summer.

MSNBC’s Chris Elliot judges you and your Platinum Card

by Grant Martin on

One of our favorite airline columnists over at MSNBC.com and from Elliott.org published an interesting article today on the separation between coach and first class called “Frequent Criers: Elite Fliers are Ruining Air Travel”. In it, he points to the increasingly childlike behavior among top tier passengers that has recently been giving first class passengers a bad name — and asks whether this is a function of the passengers themselves or the airlines catering to an unbalanced class of service.

As an elite member myself, I have thought about this topic several times and part of it is true — Elliott points out a variety of instances in which first class passengers have acted unruly and entitled. But I don’t think that it’s limited exclusively to first class passengers — in fact, there are idiots in all classes of service and modes of transportation.

It doesn’t take much effort to be an obnoxious jerk when you’re in cramped quarters and have been traveling all day. In the same way that the taxi cuts you off when you’re merging into traffic or the guy on the stairs walks down the left side instead of the right side, some people just don’t make common courtesy a high priority. Yeah, it sucks. But it’s okay. They’re in the minority that think differently, but we’ll get over it and we’ll continue to do the nice, right thing.

There are good frequent fliers out there. I’m sure Chris Elliott flies all over the world and like myself and many frequent travelers on Gadling is professional and courteous. Don’t lose faith, fellow passenger — first and coach passengers are all stuck in this aluminum tube together. We can’t let articles like this tear us apart.

United to offer free Ipod to inflight entertainment functionality

by Grant Martin on

I’ve seen more than a few people flying around staring at their tiny Ipod screens, chortling along to Family Guy or The Sopranos and always wondered if it was worth it. It seems like such a small screen would be difficult to pay attention too.

Lo, this week, United Airlines announced a solution. They’ll be offering free connections between their Inflight Entertainment (IFE) system and your Apple gadget of choice so that you can stream your favorite video into your seatback LCD. So rather than watching Lethal Weapon 3 (again) on your transatlantic flight you can actually pump the entire season of The Big Bang Theory through your chair.

Naturally, the feature will be only available for First and Business class passengers — you’ll still be stuck in coach paying 19$ for a stale croissant and 6 ounces of tomato juice. It’s also running only on select transatlantic flights, for now.

Does anyone else see the potential abuse for this system? I’m sure airline passengers have all of the sense and grace in the world, but it only takes one joker with a raunchy hot sex video jamming on his screen to make the entire F cabin suddenly very very uncomfortable.

And is it really worth it? What does it take to pump through your video?

  • An Ipod
  • That plays video
  • Aptitude to load and watch video
  • Preference to watch your video vs. the IFE

My feeling that the intersection of all of those sets is in the 20 – 30 year old male demographic, which, incidentally is not the same demographic in which first class passengers lie.

Hey, we’ll see what happens though. Maybe passengers will like it so much that they roll out the service to coach. I’m still not buying an Ipod.