Feetalk: Airfield on NPR

He can still talk..and talk. National Public Radio has been very, very good to Airfield, and their Morning Edition had him on the air again the other day. We talked about fees and more fees, including the proposed new surcharge on bags checked while at the airport rather than from home. And NPR's host, David Green, asked about the curiously refreshing Evolution of Security blog posted by the Transportation Security Administration. You can listen by clicking here.

Tit for MRO Tat

It's begun. The reaction was slow, perhaps, but inevitable, and as the Democratic Congress under a Democratic administration moved to enact its pro-American, pro-labor, protectionist agenda, a reaction was inevitable. Now it has come from the other side of the Atlantic. John Bruton, the European Union's ambassador to the US, said in Brussels that the FAA bill passed last week by the House has "language which would negate the Open Skies agreement," the landmark pact meant to open transatlantic skies (eventually).
The measure orders FAA inspectors to do a check of any non-US maintenance and repair shop that handles US-based and US-flagged airliners. The FAA would have to perform inspections twice a year, and some 400 MRO shops in Europe would be targeted, along with the measure's real target, shops in Central and Latin America.
Bruton said that if Europe made a strict retaliatory move, some 1,200 maintenance shops in the US would be targeted for inspection by European safety authorities. That, said Bruton, a former Irish prime minister, could cost both sides millions. Bruton said that he would work to persuade the Senate to remove this foreign inspection-station measure, but that "the protectionist platforms" on which many elections to Congress were based made this a challenging task.

Maybe this year for a flyers' rights bill

Maybe next year. That's what Kate Hanni has been saying for a long time, ever since she was stranded on an airliner stuck for about nine hours on a runway in Austin back in 2006. After that she began a push for an airline passenger bill of rights with a surprisingly well organized lobbying and grass roots group. Well, her year may have come. The House last night passed an FAA bill that contains the kind of language her Flyers Rights group has been pushing. The House, though, was always the easy part because the lower chamber has been receptive to the bill of rights, passing a version last year, although it went nowhere in the Senate. The airlines' promise of voluntary pledges of better service won the day in the upper chamber. But the Senate this year is a very different place than it was a year ago, with a Democratic majority that has a pretty much veto-proof balance of power. Not that there's a likely veto. After all, as Hanni notes, a senator named Obama supported the passenger bill of rights last year, and he's now in the White House.

Signs of a sorry summer

So what's so good about things? Not much. The US airlines head into the summer season expecting about 150,000 fewer passengers a day, or a 7% drop. They finished April with 6% fewer passengers. that helped push down revenues for the sixth month in a row. But, the airline lobby said, the decrease was not as steep as it had been in March, when revenues fell by 23% from March 2008. But don't let that cheer you up just yet: this April just past should have been stronger because Easter came in April this year; last year the holiday, which always pushes up travel for a three- or four-day period, came in March.

All quiet at the check-in counter: is anyone there?

Is this the next step toward charging flyers to talk to a human being when they check in at the airport? Not that that's such an outlandish possibility; Ireland's Ryanair has spoken about eliminating check-in personnel from the airport entirely as they drive passengers to the web for more and more functions; even South Florida-based Spirit Air has mulled the unstaffed airport.
Now the two 'U's, United and US Airways, say they want you to pay those checked-bag fees at home when you check in for your flight on-line and print out your boarding pass. If you tell the carrier from home that you'll be checking a bag - $15 for a first bag and $25 for a second bag - it will cost $5 less than if you just bring the bags to the airport and pay the fees there. Or in other words, it will cost you $5 more, $20 and $30 respectively, to do the airport thing.
When you do it on the web, the airline's people spend less time on you, goes the argument. But take the premise to its logical conclusion: the more passengers do from home, the fewer airport people are needed. And when you get people doing pretty much everything from their home PC, how many people does an airline need behind the counters? And will people eventually pay to talk to them?

Monopoly money in the Ozarks?

When the new airport in Branson, Missouri, opened the other day, most writers raved and ranted about the fact that it is a private facility, one taking no federal money, and so free from federal red tape. Then they noted that one snippet of that red tape is the non-discrimination condition: airports that take federal funds have to treat all airlines equally and can't give one carrier special treatment that the airport denies to others. Freed from this enforced fairness, Branson can do one thing really special: it can grant exclusive rights to a given route to a given airline. So Branson was able to lure AirTran with the promise that no one else would be allowed to link the Ozark Mountain music resort with AirTran's home base at Atlanta, for instance, and it was able to guarantee that Sun Country would be the only carrier to fly to Minnesota's Twin Cities.
This non-compete clause, came the cry, was a guarantee of high fares; any monopoly would be. It's only competition between airlines that keeps fares down. But that is where the argument goes off the rails: airlines that fly to Branson are not selling just transportation between Point A and Point B (for Branson). They're selling the resort itself, and in doing so, they're selling against every other resort in the middle of the country. People will be choosing between Branson and Las Vegas or between Branson and Atlantic City. No one has to go to the Ozarks, and they know this at Sun Country and at AirTran. And they also know that if they charge a monopoly fare, Branson will lose.

Now flying: free publicity

For a dog of an idea, this one - an airline that flies only dogs and cats - has won a lion's share of the media. Pet Airways, a would-be start-up based in Florida, was winning so much coverage in its first weeks of seeking publicity that the start-up's website got overloaded and crashed. Pet Airways doesn't actually lift off until mid-July, but it's winning headlines from coast to coast, all of which seem to stumble over themselves with predictable lines about 'when the fur flies' or 'pawsengers.' The company is actually not an airline but an entity that charters a cargo carrier, which in turn provides a small plane with a specially outfitted interior; the contractor, Suburban Airways, flies a Beech 1900 with its seats replaced by shelving on which animal kennels are to be stored. (A paper in Arizona referred to the plane as a 'Beechwood'.) One is sadly reminded of other start-ups that thought they could make it flying just one niche: the guys who wanted to cater to smokers or the one that thought it would serve just nudists. (The two never talked merger before they failed, we're pleased to say.) As much as people may hate non-smoking rules or prefer a super-luxury all first-class, they're just aren't enough of these groups to keep an airline flying in the black.
Pet's founders say their inspiration stems from a traumatic experience suffered by their dog when she was shipped the old-fashioned way, in the belly of a regularly scheduled passenger flight. But even though pet won't force its flyers down into the plane's belly, the dogs and cats will still be on their own, because their people aren't allowed on board. Much like airlines for people, this carrier seems intent on making money off of extras rather than the basic airfare: Pet Airways plans to sell extra nights before and after the flight. Interestingly, only about 30 animals, mostly dogs, died on US airlines last year.

European savior for sickly, stricken Air Canada?

Air Canada has been just a thin reed away from insolvency for months, with mounting losses, falling traffic and the circling of the predatory wolves waiting for the nation's largest carrier to go back to bankruptcy court. It reports its first-quarter results on Friday, and they are expected to be bloody. So why is Air Canada stock up by a full one-third on the Toronto Exchange?
It has to do with Brussels, where European Community and Canadian officials just signed an open skies pact that allows freedom of movement and, more importantly, freedom of investment. Any European carrier can buy up to 49 percent of any Canadian carrier under the deal, and eventually own airlines in Canada.
This leads the markets to believe that a rescue is on the way. A half-stake in deficit-devastated Air Canada would not be a major cash outlay, especially for a carrier like Lufthansa, the natural candidate to be a white knight. Luftie is partnered with AC in the Star Alliance, and Star would like to keep Canada to itself. (The nation's number two, Westjet, is not a member of the alliances.) Jacques Kavafian, the noted analyst at Research Capital Corp., is sceptical, saying that big carriers like Lufthansa want to conserve their cash right now. But remember, Lufthansa already has a web of investments in carriers throughout Europe. And, as importantly, if it moves, no one else would have Air Canada.

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