Category Archives for Airlines.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
The holdings in two recent court rulings against the CDC’s eviction moratorium have caused questions about the legality of the Biden administration’s transportation mask mandate. The mask mandate goes beyond the specified example powers in the statute cited by CDC for its authority, and Congress may not have been able to delegate broader unspecified powers to the CDC even if it had wanted to.
Piedmont Airlines, an American Eagle carrier owned by American Airlines, told pilots they needed to wait to get vaccinated against Covid-19 because of increasing passenger demand for flights. Airlines argued that huge federal subsidies were necessary ‘to be ready’ for flying to return. Even at the absolute peak of flying days demand has been off at least 30% compared to before the pandemic. Yet despite subsidies, while airlines have pocketed the cash and paid employees as well, they haven’t kept those employees trained and ready to fly. So American’s subsidiary told pilots to delay vaccinations in order to work. In the memo sent last Wednesday, Piedmont Airlines Chief Pilot John Pursell told the regional carrier’s 500 pilots, “Piedmont will be unable to release any additional pilots for COVID vaccination for the weekend of March 19-21…
What Crandall intuitively understands is that passenger airlines are a low margin business (outside of areas where government limits competition). As a result it’s crucial to guard against cost disease and expense creep. He used sometimes apocryphal stories to make his point about attention to detail to keep costs low without noticeably sacrificing quality.
French long haul low cost airline French Bee plans to outfit two new Airbus A350s they’ll take delivery of this year with 488 seats, about 50% more seats than most airlines put on the plane. This plan is likely to fail. Here’s why low cost carriers work on short flights, but fail when trying to fly long haul.
Southwest Airlines has been boarding 10 passengers at a time, instead of lining up 30 people, throughout the pandemic.
The carrier, which does not pre-assign seats and lets customers pick once they’re on board – so boarding position determines the seat you get – has reverted to its traditional boarding process. Better get that vaccine jab quickly!
Most people use sites like Expedia or Kayak to compare options because they don’t start off knowing they want to fly American Airlines or United. They find the schedule and price they’re looking for, and then book what looks best.
While it can be useful for the average consumer to search flights with Expedia or the like, it’s not actually a good idea to buy travel from them unless they are able to construct complicated itineraries at a lower price than booking directly. These two tweets show why.
I used to think Avatar Airlines was a run of the mill pump and dump securities scam, but now I believe Avatar Airlines is running a job fraud scam, too.
Masks made sense on planes when, together with HEPA air filtration and downward air flow, they reduced the risk of catching Covid-19 on a plane.
Now vaccines are available. We’re going to have challenges keeping people masked up once they’ve been vaccinated. The rule needs to stay in place now, when most Americans haven’t had a chance to become vaccinated yet. It’s tough to know who has been vaccinated and who hasn’t been.
You can’t split up families. And back-to-front leads to bunching as well. And since those don’t work out as well in practice as in theory, their regular boarding process stands.
This is why airlines all tinker with their process from time to time and never stop tinkering, because they’re never been able to do much to improve – with few exceptions.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
