American Airlines flight crosses the Atlantic with five passengers aboard

by Aaron Hotfelder on

Environmental activists are outraged by a recent American Airlines flight from Chicago to London which only carried five passengers. The aircraft, a massive Boeing 777, used approximately 22,000 gallons of fuel, or 4,400 gallons per passenger. The five people on board were all upgraded to business class and waited on by two flight attendants, in what was surely the most comfortable flight of their lives.

Despite the criticism from environmental groups, American Airlines is defending its decision to go ahead with the nearly empty flight. According to a spokesperson, hundreds of people were waiting in London for the flight to land so that they could leave for the US.

“With such a small passenger load we did consider whether we could cancel the flight and re-accommodate the five remaining passengers on other flights,” said the spokesperson. “However, this would have left a plane load of west-bound passengers stranded in London Heathrow who were due to fly to the U.S. on the same aircraft.”

The airline did note that, despite the scarcity of passengers, the plane did carry a full load of cargo. No word on whether it, too, was moved to first class.

Southwest Airlines responds to ‘unsafe’ planes allegation

by Justin Glow on

Southwest Airlines PR Manager Paula Berg responded in the comment section of our original post on the “unsafe” plane report. Here’s what she has to say:

No one is more passionate about the safety of our Customers and Employees than we are, and it’s important for our Customers to know that this situation was never and is not now a safety of flight issue.

Some media reports are suggesting that the FAA plans to fine Southwest, but to date, we have not received any notification or indication from the FAA that that is what they plan to do.

The inspections in question were one of many routine, redundant, and overlapping inspections of our fleet. And, as you and the WSJ points out, we discovered the missed inspection ourselves, informed the FAA, and promptly completed the missed inspections in March 2007. The FAA approved our actions and considered the matter closed as of April 2007.

Again, the safety of our Customers, Employees, and aircraft is always our number one concern. Southwest has an excellent maintenance program, and this experience has helped improve the overall safety of the fleet.

Paula Berg
Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines allowed to fly ‘unsafe’ planes for months

by Justin Glow on

CNN is reporting today on the findings of an ongoing investigation into the safety of Southwest Airlines planes flown as recently as last March.

“Documents submitted by FAA inspectors to congressional investigators allege the airline flew at least 117 of its planes in violation of mandatory safety checks. In some cases, the documents say, the planes flew for 30 months past government inspection deadlines that should have grounded the planes until the inspections could be completed.”

The report goes on to mention that several planes were “not air worthy,” and the FAA “knew the planes were flying ‘unsafely’ and did nothing about it.” Yikes.

Southwest has declined to comment. Read a comment from Southwest Airlines PR manager Paula Berg here.

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When science meets load management: A new optimized boarding process

by Grant Martin on

Have you ever wondered why airlines board their planes in such strange order or in zones? The thought is that it’s the fastest way to get the passengers onto the plane and seated to ensure the fastest departure. But has anyone really analyzed the process? One scientist at Fermilab in Illinois decided that it was time — Jason Steffen recently ran a Monte Carlo Simulation on the boarding process and published his paper in Nature.

The model basically assumes that the most time taken while boarding is in the process of loading one’s luggage into the overhead compartment. Since you can’t do that when you’re stacked tightly into an aisle or another person from your zone is loading his or her luggage, things slow down. But by boarding groups of people who sit several rows apart from one another, the time it takes to load luggage and sit down is dramatically reduced.

This is contrary to the current belief held by many airlines that boarding by zones from back to front is the fastest. If you think about it, when you get to your row and there are five other people jockeying around their rollaboards, it kind of makes sense, right?

Interestingly, Steffen found that by boarding in a completely random order, the process wasn’t that bad and was even an improvement over boarding from back to front. In that situation the random placement of passengers in the line of people means that there is a higher probability of having space to load your bag when you get to your seat.

Perhaps that’s why Northwest Airlines abolished their method of loading zones a couple of years back and it’s now a complete free-for-all at the gate.

I won’t take up more frontpage space with the details, but if you’d like to read my favorite comment in the ensuing underground discussions, continue on. And don’t forget to read the full journal article here.”In this case, the author apparently considered people as behaving as discrete, random particles. I’m not sure if that would be the best basis of a model, since the motion of individuals in close proximity to each other are affected by the motions of their nearest neighbors. That effect is often modeled as a finite reaction time, or signal speed, among particles (people) modeled as a continuum. Cars on a highway are also modeled that way, with the net result that a the cars behave as a predominantly one-dimensional supersonic compressible fluid, exhibiting analogous behavior to a decrease in flow area (e.g. lanes ending and the flow slowing), increases in in duct area (adding an extra lane which generates in increase in speed), shocks (accidents), expansions (light turning green)… I point this out because an interesting continuum model, motivated by the interesting work by the author of the cited work, may be formulated to further refine and deal with boarding-time predictions based on different schemes.” — UAL Traveler via Flyertalk

Obviously.

Singapore Airlines to start business class only service between US and SE Asia

by Grant Martin on

As market trends have been predicting left and right, business-class-only flights are the new big thing. British Airways and Virgin Atlantic are scrambling to lock in routes between the East Coast and London, while Eos and Silverjet fight them off from Luton and Stansted.
But nobody has dared enter the transpacific market. Until now. Early Tuesday morning, Singapore Airlines announced the coronation of a new business-class-only service from New York and Los Angeles to Singapore. When they reconfigure their A340 aircraft, they will be the first of their kind, with 1-2-1 business-class seating throughout the entire cabin.

These are the same business class seats that they put on the A380, the ones that convert into a horizontal bed if you so desire. Coupled with the superior transpacific service that Singapore Airlines offers, this will definitely be a sought after flight.

Service is scheduled to start in May from New York direct to Singapore, while the Los Angeles flight will convert later in the summer. If you already had a flight during that time period, make sure you double check your schedule to make sure it hasn’t been tweaked.

All in all, it seems like a great product to me, although to be honest with you I’m a little scared to look at the price of seats. Once service gets rolling this summer I’ll try to get some good pictures and a real review for you guys.