Delta-NWA merger update, and more

A few observations from my holiday travels:

The Delta-Northwest merger is going swimmingly. My layover in Atlanta demonstrates that Delta has already adopted and integrated Northwest’s famous approach to customer service.
By the way, the Westin Hotel near the Atlanta airport (not my final destination) has very comfortable beds.
On the flight back from Memphis, we boarded from [...]

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DOT to airlines: Merry @*$&#! Christmas

I think this action — the Department of Transportation’s plan to further reduce flights at LaGuardia — can reasonably be interpreted as a final gesture from the outgoing administration: “You didn’t like our slot auction plan? Well, then chew on this, suckers!”

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Daily departures, Merry Christmas edition

Merry Christmas, folks! I’ve got some loose ends I want to tie up here before heading off to Memphis for Christmas with my family.

US Airways’ pilots have joined American’s in leaving the FAA’s voluntary Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP). The pilots union is concerned that there are not enough protections for pilots who self-report. Are [...]

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The way TSA thinks?

Why does the Transportation Security Administration seem so slow to adapt to new threats — and so fast to ramp up older responses when new threats emerge? David Henderson at EconLog offers a personnel-based supposition:
Here’s a quote from my book, co-authored with Charles Hooper, Making Great Decisions in Business and Life. You’ll wonder why [...]

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New aviation resources

In addition to his podcast series, my friend Addison Schonland has recently unveiled a couple of nifty and useful resources for those who follow the airline industry. One is AirportButler.com, which offers reports that offer targeted results from DOT consumer air travel data. Even better is AirInsight.com, which makes the useful information logged in the [...]

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What Ray LaHood has in common with Rod Blagojevich

. . . besides being an Illinoisan. From John Kass at the Chicago Tribune comes this dispiriting item about Obama’s DOT nominee Ray LaHood:
Obama selected outgoing Illinois U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Combine) for the post of secretary of transportation, putting LaHood in charge of Obama’s planned trillion-dollar public works bonanza being sold as a jobs [...]

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LaHood’s legislative record on aviation

One of the surprises about the rumored Ray LaHood nomination for secretary of transportation — set to be announced tomorrow — is that he has so little transportation experience. He is on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, and would thus be well positioned to oversee Barack Obama’s planned burst of infrastructure spending. LaHood did serve [...]

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Ray LaHood nomination would mean short shrift for DOT

I’ve got a busy morning, so more on Ray LaHood’s transportation (and especially aviation) record soon, but I’ll just say that the likely appointment of retiring Republican congressman Ray LaHood as secretary of transportation seems to indicate that Barack Obama does not plan to devote a great deal of attention to transportation issues — much [...]

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IHT: NWA still interested in merger. Right.

A Reuters item from Friday offers up a factual error that betrays a very shallow understanding of the potential for airline “merger mania 2009.” The factual error doesn’t actually appear to be in the original Reuters piece (here as it appeared on Friday; if the error originally appeared in the Reuters item, then it has [...]

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Sunday stumper: optimizing your run from one end of the terminal to the other

Here’s a air-travel problem for the mathematically inclined:
Suppose you are trying to get from one end A of a terminal to the other end B.  (For simplicity, assume the terminal is a one-dimensional line segment.)  Some portions of the terminal have moving walkways (in both directions); other portions do not.  Your walking speed is a [...]

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