News and notes from around the interweb:
- “There are two types of people: those who yearn to someday fly in Emirates first class, and those who can’t wait to tell you that it’s overrated…”
- The madness of airline elite status
- Want a good laugh? The reason Air France KLM has competing power centers and duplicated functions in Paris and Amsterdam is because of digitalization, at least if you believe the CEO of the KLM side of the house.
“In the past, we were probably very much that we should centralize a lot of activities in service to these two airlines,” the KLM CEO told us. “In today’s reality, for instance, in the field of digitalization, we prefer to do it in both Amsterdam and Paris.”
- Want to laugh even harder? In 2020 Lufthansa will finally start rolling out a fully flat business class with direct aisle access on a single aircraft type. Lufthansa therefore claims “We will soon have the best business class seat in the industry.” They will start offering mattress pads and sleep shirts in long haul business next year.
- Candid pictures of ABBA flying in the 1970s
- World’s busiest airports ranked by ASMs or available seat miles (which factors distasnce not just capacity) Atlanta only comes in number 18. This isn’t the most common measure, of course. Via Airline Weekly:
In terms of what most people tend to think of with respect to how busy an airport is, why would distance matter at all? I expect that maybe for complicated revenue management or perhaps airport administration and gate management ASM would matter, but for the average traveler even with a keen interest in aviation it seems like a statistic that measures something nobody much cares about. I would think South Pacific islands, for example, would tend to have a misleadingly high ASM due to remoteness that says virtually nothing about anything that anyone cares about except that a remote airport happens to be, well, remote.
I realized this year that I wasn’t going to let the “status” madness affect me. Even for lowly “gold” status. So I flew a lot of “free” flights and won’t have any status next year. And I’ll still be flying free flights. I’ll miss the few perks of the status, but all the ones that matter I can buy or get for “free” with business class FF flights.
Gary, why are you linking to a New Yorker article from February 2016?