The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Only a short flight to go

"Short" in geologic times. I'm at Dallas-Fort Worth, with about half an hour to start diagnosing a production issue. Then I'll be on a plane for about 14 hours.

Here's the plane:

You know how you always forget something when you travel? This time it was my guidebook. Lonely Planet Seoul does no good back home on my bookshelf.

New route to Europe

Geography is fun. It explains how Canadian airline WestJet can manage their newest trans-Atlantic flight which gets to Dublin in a little more than 4 hours using a 737-700:

Dublin itself might not be that strange, but this isn’t coming from a big city. No, it’s actually going to be a flight from St John’s, way out in Newfoundland. The metro area, if you can call it that, has almost 200,000 people. That’s good enough to be the 20th largest metro area in Canada. Yeah… 20th.

For WestJet, there is very little at stake here. The flight is surprisingly short to those of us who don’t pay much attention to Canadian geography. Remember how I said that WestJet already flies from St John’s to Orlando? Dublin is less than 25 miles further from St John’s. Via Great Circle Mapper

You always think of Transatlantic flying requiring long flights, but St John’s is so far out there that the eastbound flight is scheduled gate-to-gate at a mere 4h15m. It’s shorter than Vancouver to Toronto. Heck, it’s shorter than Phoenix to Philly. So this will be easy for the airline’s 136-seat 737-700 to operate.

It leaves St John’s at 1115p and arrives Dublin at 7a. It turns around quickly, departing at 820a, getting back to St John’s at 955a. WestJet likely would just leave that airplane overnight in St John’s otherwise, so the amount of extra aircraft time being used here is minimal.

The 3,300 km flight is just a little farther than L.A. to Atlanta (3,150 km) and a little closer than Washington to Las Vegas (3,350 km), and those city pairs are easily served by 737s today.

US Airways and AMR cleared to merge

Saw this coming:

American Airlines and US Airways struck a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department that will allow the airlines to complete a $17 billion merger and create the world's largest carrier, the airlines announced Tuesday.

The deal, which heads off a trial planned later this month, calls for the combined airline to give up some takeoff-and-landing slots and some airport gates, including two American Airlines gates at Chicago O'Hare International Airport.

It also requires the combined airline to maintain Chicago and other airports as hubs for at least three years, something executives said they intended to do anyway and will keep long past three years.

Under terms of Tuesday's settlement, the airlines will give up 52 slot pairs at Washington Reagan National Airport and 17 slot pairs at New York LaGuardia Airport, as well as certain gates and related facilities to support service at those airports, the airline said. A slot pair entitles the holder to one departure and arrival.

Patrick Smith does not like Virgin's new safety video

Not one bit:

They took a somewhat entertaining idea and made a monster out of it. The video runs for an excruciating five minutes. Imagine being a Virgin America frequent flyer — or employee — and having to listen to that thing over and over and over and over. The cabin crew are going to need counseling.

Airline safety briefings are a kind of legal fine print come to life. They do contain some important and useful info, but it’s so layered in babble that people tune out and ignore the entire thing. “Federal law prohibits tampering with, disabling, or destroying a lavatory smoke detector.” What’s wrong with,”Tampering with a lavatory smoke detector is prohibited.” And do we really need a full dissertation on the finer points of attaching and inflating a life-vest — overly detailed instructions that nobody is going to remember if the vests are actually needed? Merely setting all of this ornamental gibberish to music does not make it more compelling or palatable. It also undermines the briefing’s potential value. It also undermines the whole purpose of the briefing. If safety is really the point, the briefing should be taken seriously. Here, you’re watching it for fun, not to actually learn anything that might save your life.

I posted the video last weekend.

Singapore Airlines ends Flights 21 and 22

The flights, between Newark, N.J., and Singapore, is the longest in the world:

The two all-business-class flights, which operate between Singapore and Newark, New Jersey, take around 19 hours and cover 15,300 km. But late last month, Singapore airlines announced that it would be cancelling the services, along with another between Singapore and Los Angeles that is almost as long.

The title for the world's longest flight...will now shift to Qantas, which operates a 13,800 km service between Sydney and Dallas.

Hey, wait a minute: Qantas is a oneworld carrier. How many frequent-flier miles does that cost again? Here it is: 37,500 for coach, 62,500 for business, and 72,500 for first. Each way.

I'll keep saving them.

Virgin's new safety video

Gulliver harrumphs:

For this observer, it's too long (around 90 seconds longer than Air New Zealand's "Bare essentials", for example) and actually quite annoying. Also, I don't think it does a particularly good job of fulfilling its primary purpose, which is to explain the safety-related features of the plane. With all the pizzazz and robot rappers, passengers will end up watching the dancing and admiring the production values, without actually digesting the message. It tries so hard to entertain the many flyers who are over-familiar with safety videos that it fails to explain clearly and simply to new flyers what they can expect. To top it all, Virgin America will have to change various scenes in the next few months now that the Federal Aviation Administration has decided to allow the operation of electronic devices on planes from departure gate to landing gate.

Well, fine, but you have to admire their spunk.

Lunchtime link list

Once again, here's a list of things I'm sending straight to Kindle (on my Android tablet) to read after work:

Back to work. All of you.

American's Dallas to Asia strategy

Cranky Flier explains:

Dallas is an increasingly large hub of business, and it sees no flights to Hong Kong today. It can also provide connections to a lot of places around the Midwest and South that don’t have single stop connections today. Look no further than joint venture-partner Qantas to see how that works. Qantas abandoned San Francisco and decided to run a flight to Dallas instead. It’s such a long flight that a stop in Brisbane is required on the westbound trip, but it’s apparently worth it.

That all sounds good, but there’s an even bigger benefit when it comes to Asia flying… Latin America.

Flying from Asia to Latin America is really far and requires stopping somewhere. To give you an idea, connecting the two financial capitals of Hong Kong and Sao Paulo would require flying more than 9,700 nautical miles. You know the longest route in the world today, Newark to Singapore? That’s 1,500 nm shorter. So you need to stop somewhere. And today, the options aren’t great. But Dallas provides a real opportunity to make for simple connections between Hong Kong and Latin America.

I'll be a beneficiary of this new strategy this autumn. More on that later.

AMR bankruptcy plan approved, except for one bit

US bankruptcy judge Sean Lane has approved American Airlines' bankruptcy plan—mostly:

Judge Sean Lane approved the plan at a hearing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York, but denied a clause that would pay Tom Horton, AMR's outgoing chief executive, $19.9 million in severance.

But on Thursday, after nearly two weeks of consideration, Lane concluded his job was to determine whether the plan meets standards of feasibility under bankruptcy law, independent of the lawsuit.

"The question is whether it will succeed once consummated, not whether it will be consummated," Lane said. "Here, there can be no dispute that the plan is feasible, if allowed to proceed."

For AMR, the focus now shifts to resolving the Justice Department's lawsuit, filed on August 13. The department argues the merger will create too much consolidation and hurt consumers.

While Lane's ruling gives his blessing to AMR's restructuring efforts, any divestitures or other material changes to the plan that result from settlement talks with the Justice Department would have to go back to him for approval.

Sorry, Tom. You crashed your airline; you don't get your $20 million. And while I can't speak for all the employees of American Airlines, I'll bet money that they're all glad of this result, and ready to see the back of you.