The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

US Airways and AMR: tying the knot this week? Yay!

The Economist's Gulliver blog thinks so:

THE merger of US Airways and AMR, the parent company of American Airlines, looks set to be concluded this week. The new company, which will be called American Airlines, would be one of the world’s largest airlines by capacity and become the third full-service carrier in America. We wrote about this a month ago, when AMR's board met to examine US Airways’ proposal. (Tom Horton, AMR’s boss, had promised a decision in “a matter of weeks”.)

The airlines are seen as a perfect fit by analysts. There is little overlap between their routes and hubs, which makes it likely that the new alliance will be approved by anti-trust regulators. The benefits for fliers, however, may not be so great...

Oh yes they will. I've said for years that getting American's management out of American would make it a much better airline. And I've said for years, right here on this blog, that US Airways is the right choice. Hell, even American's pilots, flight attendants, and mechanics agree. As an elite American flier, I expect to keep—yes, even to increase—the benefits I have of sticking with the carrier after the merger.

I've got five American flight segments between now and next Tuesday. I hope that I can congratulate the FAs on one of them for seeing this thing through.

LA-LA-LAyover

Did you know that Los Angeles is on the way from Chicago to Vancouver? I didn't either. I forgot that, when you have hubs in Chicago and Los Angeles, and no flights at all into the actual destination airport, layovers happen.

Good view from the Admirals Club though:

As much as I like flying, I'm not wild about the seven flight segments in 10 days—none of them less than 3 hours. (Next week, apparently, Dallas is on the way from Chicago to San Francisco. Same hub-and-spoke problem.) I also don't like having to scrunch my laptop between the seat to my front and my lap just to get some work done. Waah, waah, waah.

Next report from the Land Above.

Quick link round-up

I'll be a lot less busy in March, they tell me. Meanwhile, here are some things I want to read:

I will get to them...soon...

Why haven't AA and US announced a merger?

The Cranky Flier wants to know:

Now the latest “news” of the day is that American CEO Tom Horton may end up being the Chairman of the combined entities. There is some good and some bad to this kind of thing. The good is pretty simple to explain. If Horton is willing to settle for a Tilton-esque agreement where he can just sit in a fancy office and collect a huge paycheck for a couple of years, then that finally removes the last real barrier to a merger – the fight being put up by management.

On the other hand, if he insists on a more active role, then it’s a bad idea. There are very few supporters of Horton outside management ranks. Wall Street has been quite clear that Horton’s plans to date are unacceptable. In particular, the plan to grow the hubs by 20 percent is suicidal. As one analyst, Dan McKenzie, puts it, the growth plan “would be toxic for industry pricing and ruinous for shareholders….” The views throughout the financial community appear to echo that sentiment. If Horton has any kind of influence in the merged entity, then the money folks will not be happy. And that hurts the chances of the deal going through.

I'm really hoping for an announcement soon.

I miss flying

Work, work, work, and more than an hour each way to the airport, and it turns out I haven't flown in three years. Time to renew my medical certificate and get back in the air.

I miss this, this, and this.

Oh, and this.

American Airlines gets new livery for no apparent reason

...and it's pretty hideous:

Reactions have been a mixed bag of negative and scathing. Here's Patrick Smith:

Simply put, I cannot believe how awful a makeover this is. It’s so disappointing that it pains me even to write about it, and how anybody signed off on this I’ll never understand.

The body and tail manage to be boring and garish at the same time, with a cheap, downmarket lilt to the whole thing. The typeface is the strongest aspect of the whole mess, and that’s not saying much.

Those are (almost) forgivable aspects. Doing away with the AA symbol, however, was a tragic and unspeakably bad call.

And in its place… What exactly is that new, Amtrak-y logo? It looks like an eagle’s beak poking through a shower curtain. No other word will do: it’s horrible. If it’s not the worst corporate trademark I have ever seen, I don’t know what is.

Cranky Flier said only:

Personally, I hate that the eagle has been marginalized to the point that it’s unrecognizable. And the tail, well, yeah, the tail. I think I heard it put best in this excellent quote:

"Colgan had sex with CSA and Cubana on a Greyhound bus in the same weekend and got pregnant. We know Colgan is the mother but we can’t tell who the father is. Nor do we care because the baby is still ugly either way."

Maybe it will grow on me. Or maybe it won’t last very long anyway…

Why did they do this right now? They're weeks away from either merging or dying. Did US Airways want them to do this? No, according to CEO Tom Horton:

First, Horton said the two issues — merger and rebranding — were separate. Second, he said American needed to go ahead with the new look because in two weeks it is introducing a new flagship aircraft, the Boeing 777-300ER, that needs painting.

Horton also said US Airways had no input into the rebranding and didn’t get an advance look at it.

“We are competitors today, so we didn’t think it appropriate to discuss it with them,” Horton said. “I will tell you that on my drive home last night [Wednesday], I called my good friend Doug Parker and informed him of what we were doing as a courtesy. So I did do that, and we had a very nice chat.”

Well, there you have it. I'm sure Parker was thrilled. US Airways already said they want to keep the American Airlines brand, but I think they rather had in mind the brand from 1968, not this new stuff. Further, I think it's this kind of management thinking that got American into the position it's in today.

More links, but not because I'm lazy

The fun part about UAT is that 38 known issues can become 100 known issues in just a few hours. So, once again, I have a lot of stuff to read and no time to read it:

Yay, Instapaper!

Now off to lunch, followed by more debugging.

When is a one-issue organization not like another?

Like James Fallows, I'm a member of the Airplane Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), which has a rigid, give-no-ground policy against aviation user fees. Fallows draws a parallel to the NRA, and notes the key difference:

The merits of the user fee debate are not my point right now. (Summary of the AOPA side: non-airline aviation activity already "pays its way" through the quite hefty tax imposed on each gallon of airplane fuel, plus providing all kinds of ancillary benefits to the country. I agree about the benefits and that the American aviation scene is the envy of the world.) Rather it is to introduce a comparison between AOPA and the real NRA. This comes from my friend Garrett Gruener, a successful Bay Area entrepreneur and venture capitalist who is also a longtime pilot. In the 1990s he even took an around-the-world trip, with his wife and daughter, in their turboprop airplane. He writes:

The difference is the overwhelming focus on safety. I feel that AOPA is the FAA's partner in trying to reduce the number of fatalities in aviation, while the NRA never gets beyond "guns don't kill...".

What Gruener says about the AOPA rings true to my experience. The only thing the AOPA talks about more than user fees is safety, and the individual and system-wide changes that can reduce the accident level.

So far, more than 24 hours after the killings in Newtown, Conn., the NRA hasn't said a peep about it.

The Virgin Delta

Cranky Flier analyzes the surprise Delta-Virgin merger in terms of JFK–LHR:

Of course, British Airways and American have the strongest position in London by far. Delta would have been hard-pressed to grow a position itself considering the slot restrictions at the airport along with the already ample capacity on these routes. With this deal, Delta becomes more relevant in London, but more importantly, it becomes more relevant in places like New York, from where London is one of the most important business destinations. This simple chart showing daily flights each way from all New York airports should make it very clear.

Routes AA/BA Delta Delta
+ Virgin

New York-Heathrow 15 2 8

I told you it was a simple one. Today, Delta is an afterthought. If its schedule fits a loyal traveler’s needs, then people will take it. But more often than not, that probably won’t happen. Combined with Virgin Atlantic, however, there is a very respectable schedule that now also covers the other side of the Hudson in Newark. Delta becomes relevant.

Whatever happens, I just hope there are at least three airlines left standing. That's enough for real competition on popular routes, and none is more popular for trans-Atlantic travel than New York to London.

More on the US Airways-American deal

The Cranky Flier has some inside dish on the possible airline merger that I mentioned Friday:

US Airways is still trying to convince American that its plan is better. Maybe American management will get a big enough payout to go along. Or maybe AA’s management will see the writing on the wall depending upon how this offer unfolds and just decide it can’t win. Or maybe it can actually come up with something that will keep American independent, but I’d say that the chances of that are slim.

As we head toward the holidays, everything starts to slow down. We might not hear anything about a merger until the new year, but I wouldn’t expect that we’d be waiting much longer than that. The time to decide which way this airline is going is here. Now we just have to sit and wait to see what happens. I’m still expecting that a merger will happen, but I’m really curious to see how it all unfolds.

This comes on the heels of American's pilots reaching agreement with management on a labor contract, which helps fix the value of the combined airline.