Airlines

Category Archives for Airlines.

Delta Flight Attendants May Unionize Even Though Unionized Crew Are Deeply Unhappy Elsewhere

by Gary Leff

Aug 03 2022

Airlines are one of the most heavily unionized industries in the country. That works out well for customers and investors at Southwest, but less well at other airlines. Delta, the other historically strong performer, is mostly non-union. Their largest unionized work group is their pilots. Delta’s dispatchers are also unionized.

The biggest flight attendants union is working hard to change that – even as they publish data that 97% of flight attendants they represent at United are deeply unhappy.

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Watch: Tug Get Stuck Underneath An American Airlines Boeing 737 At LaGuardia Airport

by Gary Leff

Aug 02 2022

The American Airlines Boeing 737-800, came in from Miami on Monday night. It was scheduled to fly as American Airlines 2036 from New York LaGuardia to Charlotte on Tuesday morning. That didn’t quite happen.

Instead, a tug got caught underneath the aircraft. It’s amazing and cringeworthy to watch at the same time. Thankfully everyone involved is ok.

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How Do We Stop Diseases From Spreading On Planes?

by Gary Leff

Aug 01 2022

About half of people said they’d fly even if they had the flu. Socially many people felt compelled to travel when sick, perhaps they’d lose out on an important meeting. I always hated this – and got very angry at people who came to work at my office sick – because they risked spreading whatever they had. Financially airlines have made it hard for people to reschedule.

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Don’t Send Your Children Flying As Unaccompanied Minors In The Current Summer Mess

by Gary Leff

Jul 31 2022

A mother complains that her 14 year old son, traveling as an unaccompanied minor on American Airlines, had his Miami to New York flight cancelled and he was forced to spend the night in the airport. This seems to me to be the parent’s fault, and not American’s. Don’t send your child as an unaccompanied minor right now, on a connecting itinerary, if you can possibly help it.

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Etihad Finally Makes Money – By Not Flying Much

by Gary Leff

people boarding from tarmac
Jul 28 2022

Etihad Airways has finally become profitable, disclosing $690 million in adjusted earnings and $296 million in operating profit during the first half of 2022 on operating revenue of $2.29 billion. The state-owned carrier did not disclose net profit.

Despite only limited information, it’s still clearly a huge swing for an airline that lost $2 billion in 2016, and $1.5 billion in 2017 pursuing a strategy of buying stakes in nearly every dumpster fire airline they could get their hands on (but still refusing to take a stake in South African Airways, which even for Etihad at the time was a step too far).

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