Is avoiding bankruptcy worth it?

The Dallas Morning News ran an in-depth report on American Airlines’ current woes, wondering “what if American hadn’t avoided bankruptcy?” The Ft. Worth-based airline was one of the only ones to avoid Chapter 11 in the early 2000s, and now it is being punished by Wall Street analysts for having (relatively) high labor costs and [...]

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Your humble blogger on TV

I was recently interviewed about the Essential Air Service by Medill News for a TV station in West Virginia. You can watch the video here.

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Smithsonian’s “America by Air”

I attended the media preview for the National Air and Space Museum’s new permanent exhibition today. “America by Air” opens on Saturday. It’s a great installation, and I highly recommend it. I’m writing a review or two and will post links here when they’re published.
Until then, enjoy this choice quotation from Alfred Kahn, the economist [...]

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Daily departures: Carol Gotbaum, Philly to China, dollar woes, and more

The official autopsy on Carol Gotbaum, who died in her holding cell in the Phoenix airport (see my earlier post here), concluded that she strangled herself. She was under the influence of alcohol and prescription medications. [New York Times]
US Airways threatens the Philadelphia airport with the loss of China flights over a gate dispute. [Towers [...]

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Flash: Will Congress raid the FAA trust fund?

News flash from the Wall Street Journal editorial page:
We’re told that senior Democrats are preparing a raid on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) trust fund to offset the [Alternative Minimum Tax] assault on the middle class.
This is a big deal. The FAA relies on its trust fund–$10 billion collected from excise taxes on airline tickets [...]

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It’s a broken wingtip, not a broken wing

When I saw the Daily Mail item about the passengers who refused to fly on a plane whose wing tip had been broken off, I thought it was not really worth my blogging attention. Then I got emails about it, and replied that it really wasn’t a big deal. But with the blogosphere’s attention to [...]

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Daylight savings throws airline schedules all out of whack

The Cranky Flier draws attention to a little-noticed aspect of this past weekend’s end of daylight savings time: its effects on airline schedules. Normally airlines deal with these sorts of things by making necessary adjustments (especially complicated, he says, for flights between the northern and southern hemisphere, where daylight savings is going on when it’s [...]

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Daily departures: Airbus A380 and Nashville’s supertall building

Someone crunched the numbers, and it looks like Airbus’s efficiency claims for the A380 might be as inflated as the plane is big. [Guardian Travelog]
America’s planned tallest building outside of Chicago and New York, Nashville’s Signature Tower, may be held up by the FAA. [Aero-News.Net]

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Daily departures: Brazil, horrible airports, and TSA

In the wake of a crisis of confidence in Brazil’s air travel system, the head of the aviation authority has resigned. [Aero-News.Net]
No seating, filthy terminals, collapsing buildings, flak jackets, feral cats, and Soviet nostalgia: the world’s worst airports. [Foreign Policy via Towers and Tarmacs]
The Transportation Security Administration has proposed a rule requiring airlines to submit [...]

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How long until Emirates retracts this?

I mean, I expect this from Michael O’Leary . . .
“Don’t talk to me about global warming… I just do not buy it whatsoever,” Maurice Flanagan, Emirates executive vice chairman, said at a regional aviation conference in Singapore.
“Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’ is absolute rubbish,” added Flanagan, who said he had watched the documentary three times.

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