News and notes from around the interweb:
- Delta flight attendant sues after being fired for posting a cartoon of Donald Trump wearing a KKK hook to social media. This is what Sara Nelson is organizing at Delta to prevent (the firing, not the cartoon posting), one imagines.
- U.S. loses half of all fighter jets, 900, to China in simulated war game
- Things plus-size travelers hate
- Watch this approach.
- Newark and LaGuardia are the worst airports for cancellations
- WARNING NSFW language, this is quite the heated altercation, but also every Spirit Airlines flight ever? Does JetBlue know what they’re buying?
Just another day at the Airline Circus.
Welcome on board JetBlue, where you’ll enjoy the “NEW SPIRIT” of travel!!
How much in the way of direct losses is the American public willing to tolerate in a conflict to defend Taiwan from China/PRC?
I think China is counting on an American unwillingness to eat major troop and equipment losses in a defense of Taiwan and on American support of Taiwan ultimately being limited to not a whole lot more than boosting Taiwan’s own defense capabilities, providing diplomatic support/pressure on behalf of Taiwan, and perhaps maintaining supply lines to Taiwan.
Unless the other major economies in the world stop doing business as usual with China (and that isn’t going to really happen), it’s not going to be more than a decade or two before China and its military is too powerful in the Asia region to be held in check by US and US-allied forces.
The Chinese and Russian governments must be loving the divided-within laughing stock that Trump has shown the US to be, a mess in the extreme making going back at least to the Gingrich + McConnel vs Bill Clinton and the Democrats games.
Re: vid
Many Texas would argue that if both individuals were armed, this would have been a polite discussion.
Since Southwest fired a unionized flight attendant that found relief via the courts, not her union, the notion that a union is going to protect free speech is laughable.
The notion that Spirit is the only airline with passenger altercations or that every NK flight is a confrontation is just plain ignorant.
The difference between Spirit and JetBlue is that Spirit runs its operation a whole lot better than JetBlue except when NK really melts down.
Spirit’s 2021 on-time was better than Southwest’s and is just below Southwest’s in the DOT’s ranking current year to date.
JetBlue is consistently at the bottom of the industry in on-time.
Spirit’s baggage mishandling ratio for the most recent month was better than Alaska, United, JetBlue and American.
JetBlue, Spirit and Frontier consistently are the worst in consumer complaints.
LaGarbage had the highest rate of cancellations? I’m in shock!
You can make the airport pretty, but it still a complete mess.
The province of Taiwan belongs to the PRC. The world doesn’t fear the us anymore. It’s so weak.
@koggerj Taiwan has not been ruled from Beijing for over 125 years. They want it, yes, but will be in for a fight if they want to conquer it. Not sure this is a travel topic though.
Could the Jet Blue stats be attributable to the fact it’s hub has some of the most fickle weather in the country? I am curious to know the reason for the abysmal performance is weather or just operational.
It’s a travel topic because if we lose Taiwan, we won’t be building or maintaining Boeing and Airbus aircraft anymore. Those aircraft depend on electronics made only in Taiwan. Even in the event of a failed invasion, the world will be in a lot of hurt for a long time, as Taiwan’s economy will be wrecked and China will be a pariah state. Sure, we can replace/rebuild after that, but it’ll take a decade at least.
Notice the end result of that conflict – China almost always fails to seize control of Taiwan. An amphibious assault is one of the most difficult things to do militarily. China has no experience doing it. And we’re talking the biggest amphibious assault in history, bigger than Normandy. China will have neither naval or air supremacy over the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan has only something like 11 beaches suitable for an invasion, so they know where they have to land. If China tries it, it has to succeed, otherwise it’s a disaster for China/World relations, with China on the short end of the stick. Even if it succeeds, it’ll likely have little military projection capability left. And a pissed off world. China depends on an export economy to survive. Who are they going to export to?
Does this mean China won’t do it? Not necessarily. But the more the outcome remains in doubt, the more likely they’ll not do it. There is a Thucydides Trap here, and time is not on China’s side. So they might roll the dice. Twenty years? China will be in a world of hurt by then, and US hypersonic weapons will make any invasion almost impossible.
FWIW, asking public opinion on this topic is one of those stupid things the press likes to do , but it’s meaningless. The general member of the public has no idea what Taiwan means to the world or it’s importance to their way of life. Any invasion of Taiwan would likely start with massive ballistic missile attacks on Japan and US bases in the western Pacific. China may decide taking out a carrier or two in a preemptive strike is better than letting the US decide to use them to stop the invasion. And modern warfare is not WWII – as evidenced in Ukraine, those weapons are going to be expended quickly, and casualties will be early, not spread out over four years. Public opinion will turn on a dime. Most people don’t realize that any realistic scenario of a Soviet invasion (non-nuclear) of Western Europe in the 1980s had an expected timeline of about 4 weeks, if not less. In that amount of time, either all the ammunition would be expended and the invasion failed, or Russian tanks would be at the Channel coast. Taiwan, same thing.
@Tim Kelly,
yes, geography and where B6 has hubs plays a part but B6 is not the largest airline in NYC – by flights historically it has been DL (and its regional partners) and then UA. There is still alot of noise because of EWR capacity limitations which is causing UA to cancel/reduce flights as well as the Northeast Alliance which allows AA to swap flights (largely give slots to B6) but B6 will very likely not surpass DL and UA in NYC for years -if ever.
DL consistently has much better on-time in the delay-prone airports it overlaps with B6 – often by 15 on-time percent per month. B6 even does worse than AA.
B6 simply does not want to invest in the backup capacity – planes and crews – to get its schedule back on track when major delays hit while AA and DL and UA all invest in redundant capacity and strategically cancel flights better when severe weather hits. Add in that they have redeye flights from the west coast and some parts of the Carribbean and S. America and they push their fleet and network hard.
B6′ costs simply would soar if they scheduled more responsibly and they did not make money in the most recent quarter while most airlines did. There is no doubt that some passengers simply will not fly B6 because of their consistent unreliability. Given that they have been the same position on the DOT’s rankings – even in congested and delay-prone airports like NYC and BOS, they are content to stay where they are which continues to make their overall brand much less attractive despite their claims to being amenity-rich
AA may invest in redundant equipment but they fail to properly man said equipment. They are short on flight attendants, pilots, ground crew, and I believe they have fired everyone who used to answer the reservations telephone.
Gary Leff’s off somewhere with his nose buried in a hollowed-out pineapple, laughing, after tossing his more voluble readers into the deep end of the pool. He is just funning you folks. As for Spirit Air, I’ve had to fly it a dozen times or so over the past decade. I still expect to have a positive report about an enjoyable trip eventually, blind hogs and pigs flying be damned.
@GUWonder
Over half the world’s chips are manufactured in Taiwan. I can hear all the whiners, “I can’t get a iPhone!”. So you better believe the whole world would step up to protect Taiwan from a Chinese invasion. I can America’s CEOs demanding it! The little peoples’ opinions don’t matter!
@Tim Dunn,
Thank you for your thorough analysis. I appreciate it. I was not aware of the lack of depth in the B6 operational profile but this makes absolute sense.
Fairly unrealistic scenario- from the Bloomberg article, “Chinese missiles … destroy “hundreds of aircraft on the ground,” and “the United States cannot conduct a systematic campaign to take down Chinese defenses before moving in close”. If you put similar assumptions in place for Desert Storm 2, the US would have also suffered massive losses. In reality, 2 planes were shot down.
I’m not asserting that a war with China would have as low losses as Iraq, but making the assumption that the US would just leave planes out on the tarmac to be destroyed, nor would suppress defenses to minimize aircraft losses is unreasonable.