United Airlines Pilot: I Brought Coronavirus To The U.S. Before Health Authorities Say This Started

by Gary Leff

united plane
Apr 10 2020

On January 14 the World Health Organization parroted China that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus. The next day the U.S. had its first identified case but we wouldn’t know it for six more days. New York didn’t confirm it had a case until the end of February.

Vaughn Cordle was a United Airlines Boeing 787 pilot, flying out of Beijing several times a month. He noticed an uptick in sick passengers on his flights between China and Washington Dulles as far back as December, including a co-pilot making Beijing roundtrips. He fell ill in mid-January.

Continue Reading »

Amazon Delays Launch Of New Competitor To UPS, FedEx Because Of Coronavirus

by Gary Leff

Apr 09 2020

Amazon originally built out server capacity to handle the huge order surge for the Christmas holidays, and found that they had spare server capacity the rest of the year – and a huge capability in managing servers. So they expanded into the adjacent space of cloud computing (Amazon Web Services).

They’ve also built out a delivery and logistics shipping capacity to handle their own surges, and that gave them tons of extra capacity. Amazon delivers more of its own packages than other shipping services combined. They delivered over 3.5 billion packages last year, making their own internal shipping business two-thirds the size of UPS.

Continue Reading »

New York Times Irresponsibly Suggests COVID-19 Was Brought To New York By Qatar Airways

by Gary Leff

qatarplane
Apr 09 2020

The lede to a piece in the New York Times on the bungled initial response to the novel coronavirus appears to suggest that the virus was first brought to New York by a Qatar Airways flight. It even further appears to suggest that if only New York had done a better job containing that first case, things would be different today. These claims make little sense.

Continue Reading »

U.S. Government Might Take Frequent Flyer Programs As Collateral For Bailout

by Gary Leff

Apr 08 2020

If airlines are going to receive a bailout, taxpayers should receive some assurance of recovering the funds when times are good. And any deal should be structured to incentivize airlines to get out from under partial nationalization as quickly as possible.

The Treasury Department is asking airlines seeking bailout funds to detail the economics of their frequent flyer programs as one source of collateral.

Continue Reading »