Alaska, Hawaiian to Join JVs

As part of its media and investor day on Tuesday, Alaska Air Group revealed its intention to join the transatlantic and transpacific joint ventures along with several of its oneworld friends. Going Down Under appears to be excluded for now, even though American and Qantas have a tie-up of their own. Regulatory approval is not a slam dunk on this one, so the process could end up being drawn out for many months…or more.

The transatlantic JV features Aer Lingus, American, British Airways, Iberia, Finnair, and most importantly, LEVEL. The pacific one is just American and Japan Airlines. Going towards Europe, the JV competes both with the United/Air Canada/Lufthansa Group Atlantic++ joint venture and the Delta/Air France-KLM/Virgin Atlantic conglomerate. Looking towards Asia, its primary competition is Delta and Korean’s tie-up along with United and ANA.

What all four of these other JVs have in common is that they only have one U.S. carrier party to the agreement. This would change that paradigm, putting both American and Alaska (and technically, Hawaiian too) all together in one big, cozy antitrust-free group for long-haul flying.

Alaska Shares New Premium Options

Alaska also announced upgrades to the pointy end of its aircraft and new lounge concepts as it looks to grow its share of the top right of the “K curve” economy that the industry is thoroughly enjoying.

The changes are vast, but the highlights include:

• B787: 34 new lie-flat suites called Aurora and 35 new premium economy seats called Premium Reserve beginning in 2028
• B737-10 MAX: 12 new Aurora seats and premium economy
• A330: Hawaiian’s fleet of 24 A330s will receive 22 new first class suites beginning in 2028 and it will also debut a premium economy option
• Seattle lounge: A new 41,000-square foot lounge in Seattle that will have seperate areas for Aurora fliers and those who pay extra to look at and mock the poors in the regular part of the lounge. This lounge will feature a cocktail that can only be ordered if you have the expensive Alaska credit card which seems like a great idea that won’t cause any issues.
• Honolulu lounge: A new 13,000-square foot lounge that will come with a POG juice fountain in HNL’s A gates in 2028. Guests will be required to affirm under the penalties of perjury that they have not ever entered any Southwest lounge in their life — or be denied access.

The A330 overhaul is particularly notable as those planes have aging interiors — which, when you really think about it…don’t we all? The updates will bring capacity down on the A330 fleet from 278 to 254.

United Expands Premium Basic Revolution

United Airlines debuted basic, unbundled tickets in Polaris earlier this year, and the airline is growing its program to include domestic first class and short-haul international flights marketed as business, but lacking a full Polaris experience.

Customers purchasing this option will receive one free checked bag included with the fare but no more. Seat assignments will cost extra, changes or refunds (whether for cash or credit) will not be available, and perhaps most tragically, customers will not be barred from enjoying flat soft drinks and borderline-expired snack mix in the opulent comfort of the United Club.

Like other basic-branded fares, these will earn less miles than their non-basic cousins. At this point, it feels inevitable that eventually the airline will only operate flights with Basic options to and from Newark as further punishment for those who choose that airport.

TSA to Require Document Checkers to Stand

The TSA, apparently disagreeing with George Costanza when it comes to staff sitting while on the clock will now require all document checkers (the folks who check our ID and match it with the name on the boarding pass) to stand at their podium while working.

The government has already begun the process of removing the chairs in most airports — so anyone who’s in the market for an uncomfortable chair that’s designed to be sat at a tall height might be able to get a good deal from your local TSA outfit. The union representing TSA agents is unhappy but doesn’t appear to have the power to stop it. TSA officials say this will make officers “more alert.” Is that a good thing?

We’re going to ask our on-the-ground-team of Cranky readers to keep an eye out this week while traveling and will create a hotline to report any TSA employees sitting while on the clock.

United Rolls Out Status Match

United Airlines revealed a status match offer to elite members of other carriers (really just American and Delta, but play along with them). The offer is to comp status for 90 days and offer a challenge to retain the status for the rest of this year and all of 2027 as well. The signups are available until October 15, and require you to submit documentation of your status at the other carrier, your sickest burn directed at Basic Economy passengers, and top three reasons to not connect through Newark.

The thresholds for buying tickets to retain status for the full year+ come in at $1,500 for Silver, $3,000 for Gold, $4,500 for Platinum, and $7,000 for 1K.

The airline is tying its marketing pitch to its Starlink Wi-Fi which will infamously not be a part of Delta’s offerings anytime soon. Delta’s gamble on Amazon’s Leo is not yet paying off, and United is seeking to take further advantage of Delta being behind its rivals in on-board connectivity. United is in the midst of updating its fleet with Starlink, and once it is complete, it’ll be free and fast for Mileage Plus members. But for now, unless you’re one of the lucky ones on a Starlink aircraft, it’s $8 and buffering for you.

• Aeromexico is expanding its revolving credit facility to $250 million.
• Air Astana began ticket sales for its 2x weekly flight to Tokyo.
• Air Transat secured a loan from the Canadian government.
• Austrian is out of the B767-300ER business.
• Cathay Pacific extended its suspension of service to the Middle East through February 1.
• Etihad is doubling its Sydney flights to 2x daily.
• Ethiopian is buying 10 cargo aircraft from Boeing with an option for eight more.
• JetBlue is beginning 1x daily Fort Lauderdale – Caracas service on February 4.
• KLM now expects to begin operating the A350 late this year.
• Pegasus closed its €142.3 million acquisition of Smartwings.
• Singapore is upgrading its premium cabin dining options.
• SriLankan Airlines named a new acting CEO.
• TAP‘s suitors continue to pursue the carrier.
• United CEO Scott Kirby isn’t done growing Chicago.
• Volotea entered court-supervised restructuring.
• Wizz Air capacity was up 25% in September.

I finally figured out why trees don’t have teeth.

Turns out they’re all bark and no bite.

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Disclosure: Alaska provided travel for attendees, including me

After breakfast at the hotel, several of us hopped in a Lyft for the half hour ride down to a non-descript building in a light industrial area east of SeaTac airport. This building, it turns out, used to be owned by Boeing, but the whole area was repurposed. Alaska took it over and built its Global Training Center there. There was a ton going on, and it is an impressively large facility filled with small rooms doing things like evacuation traning and up to a massive auditorium where our main event was held. And oh yes, there’s a company store.

The day really began with the dog and pony show where CEO Ben Minicucci and the team went over all the enhancements that had already been provided to us via press releases. (That’s what I had already written about earlier this week.) But this did allow them to better frame the initiatives with a veneer of coolness and… luxury. Premium was absolutely the theme of the day.

Once we finished, they took the influencers out of the room to go see a grand tour, and then the rest of us media hung around for a panel discussion with several execs. Once that was done, it was our turn to go take a look.

The first stop was the Atmos room where they told us about the new debit card and a few other things, but Atmos really wasn’t the star of this show.

Next was the new Hawaiian A330 experience. These seats were definitely not ready for primetime, and that was clearly explained. The new Leihōkū suites aren’t certified yet, and these seats did not have actual finishes or materials that will be used. But we could still get the idea.

Right behind was a version of the new Premium Reserve (premium economy) seat. No need to show that, because it’s actually the First Class seat on the A321neo today.

After, we shuffled off to the Aurora room where the new B787 suites were shown. It turns out that the B787-9s will just get their seats and finishes recovered/reskinned but the seat will be the same as it is today. The B787-10s will get the new seats. The differences are very minimal, I’m told, with the biggest change being that on the -9 the center seats angle toward the aisle and on the -10, they will angle toward the center.

They also had the Premium Reserve seats on the B787s, and those are very different from what Hawaiian will be using..

Once we were done there, it was off to the food area where we could stuff our faces and meet some of the chefs. There was also a lounge space, and they had samples of drinks available from the bar. This is when I learned about the Summit Sunset. Alaska has created a drink that its bartenders will only make if you have the Summit credit card. (That’s the expensive one.) I asked what they would do if I, with my lowly Ascent card, asked for it. I was told they would politely tell me I couldn’t have it but they might also pass on an application.

This, for some reason, absolutely enraged me. This credit card thing has just gone too far. But loyalty/credit cards/lounges/premium all go together, and that is where Alaska sees the opportunity now… well, Alaska and every other hub-and-spoke carrier.

We were then directed back to the media room where they had a live feed of the investor portion of the event along with their Q&A at the end. At this point, we were done with the main program, so Jon and I gathered to start mapping out the plans for our interview with Shane Tacket on the podcast that night.

There was a happy hour with the execs a bit later, and we stayed there until about 5:15pm. That’s when we went over to the Boeing Customer Experience Center (CEC). Boeing was kind enough to offer up the CEC as a venue for us to use even though it’s usually more for Boeing to woo airlines and walk through cabin layouts. This building is in a light industrial park, and it’s a flexible space.

Our long-time partner Bullpen Strategies and our producer Leo Duran had been there much of the day getting it ready to go. By the time we showed up, it looked fantastic. All we needed was for the people to show up. And show up, they did.

We were told the space would max out at 125 people, so we sold out 100 tickets and we had another 25 available to give to partners. There were very few no-shows, and we had a couple of people who showed up even though they weren’t on the list. In the end, it was a packed house to see the three of us first talk about our impressions, and then bring Shane Tackett out to answer our questions.

I could go into details, but why would I do that when you can just listen yourself?

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Even though Shane must have been exhausted, he was in a good mood and answered all of our questions. You really do not want to miss this episode.

Once the show was done, Shane really gave the audience a thrill. They should already have been feeling good thanks to Stumptown coffee, Fremont Brewing beer, Browne Family Vineyards wine, Straightaway cocktails, jcoco chocolates, a coupon for a free Evergreens meal at the airport, and more. But Shane came with gifts.

Oh sure, Alaska had swag bags for everyone, but Shane gave away 50,000 Atmos points to a winner — and no, Alaska employees were not allowed to win. He also handed out two pairs of roundtrip tickets in ANY cabin ANYWHERE Alaska flew. One winner said she was planning a trip with her dad to Rome next year, so this was a huge win. I’m guessing the other winner just wants to fly coach to Spokane.

The Alaska team also came with gifts for us, including very comfy Atmos Rewards pullovers, a fresh fruit and cheese plate which listeners of the pod know made Brian very happy. Knowing how little I care about lounges, they gave me some lounge passes to use so I could change my mind. Well-played, Alaska. At least we know they listen to the podcast.

Once we wrapped up, people started to filter out, but we had to stick around to do the hard work of cleaning the place up and putting furniture back where we found it. Sometime around 11pm, I stumbled into Sharps Roasthouse with a friend who had come to the taping for a very late meal.

I will likely have more to say on Alaska’s plans at some point, but for now, I just need to get a good night’s sleep. Listen to The Air Show and let me know what you think in the comments here.

What I’m hoping to learn at the event today is more about how it will differentiate itself from those airlines going forward as well as more details on performance, and we’ll talk about that tonight when we record The Air Show Live podcast. (And to be clear, this is live on tape, but if you aren’t one of the lucky ones in the room, you’ll have to wait until we release to the public, most likely at the usual Thursday morning time.) Realizing there is more information to come, let’s just talk about what’s in these initial announcements. Note that all images are via Alaska Air Group.

A B787 Mini-Me

American is transitioning to its XLRs, Delta has widebodies and B757s (but will eventually have A321neos), and United awaits its Coastliner. All of these have flat beds to cater to the premium demand in the transcon market. Alaska has had nothing to compete on those domestic routes. There was talk about buildling on a solid Virgin America transcon product after the merger, and then there was a thought that maybe we’d see an A330 on transcon after the Hawaiian merger, but none of that has happened. Now there is a plan to compete in this space.

There will be a subfleet of “at least” 25 of its incoming B737-10 MAX deliveries that will be configured with a transcon offering on-board. This will be a Mini-Me version of the B787, right down to the livery which will have the new “Aurora” design.

It will have 12 flat beds onboard, but instead of that herringbone layout that is now being put on the A321 family, Alaska has a reverse herringbone which means you can actually look out the window.

There will also be 12 new premium economy seats — a new cabin which Alaska is calling Premium Reserve — onboard in a 2-2 configuration.

What we don’t know from the release is… where will these airplanes fly? I would not expect to see Alaska competing on LA to JFK with this. More likely we’ll see these with a heavy focus on Seattle and Portland, some San Francisco and LAX, and San Diego if the short runway allows it. Seattle to JFK? Absolutely. But what else will show up I hope to learn more about today. With a fleet of at least 25 airplanes, it will be able to cover a fair number of transcons. And will it fly to Hawaiʻi too? We don’t know, though since these will have the Alaska name, that seems unlikely.

A Much Needed A330 Update

Hawaiian’s onboard product on the A330s desperately needs updating. The 2-2-2 cabin up front is small and the seats are worn. In the back, there just aren’t enough premium seats, and as we all know, premium is everything now. The A330 will remain a Honolulu-based airplane branded as Hawaiian, and a refit had been announced before. Now we have details of what that will look like.

Up front will be the new Leihōkū suites. (Hōkū means “star,” so it’s a lei of stars.) This airplane will go from having 18 beds in three rows to 22 reverse herringbone beds in five and a half rows.

These are flat beds with direct aisle access, and yes, a door. (I still don’t get the door thing.) I like that it retains that teal accent.

We’ll also see 28 Premium Reserve seats on this aircraft, though it is a very different look than the more private version being put on the Alaska fleet. My guess is that the feedback was that more people are traveling together on Hawaiian and want to interact.

There will be new seating in the back as well. We don’t know exactly what the total seat count on the aircraft will be, but premium seating will rise from 30 to 40 percent of the cabin. I’m going to assume that includes the Premium — not to be confused with Premium Reserve — extra legroom section.

A Surprise B787 Retrofit

We knew that the airline was working on some improvements for future B787 deliveries, but it is also going to retrofit the existing B787s with a new so-called “Aurora” suite. Yes, Aurora is now the name they’ll use across the Alaska brand for long-haul premium. It’s not entirely clear to me what will be different, and how these will be better. I assume we’ll learn more about that in media day today, but this is what they look like.

We’ll also see the airline put 35 Premium Reserve seats onboard the B787 fleet.

Love for Lounges

It looks like we’re going to learn a whole lot more about lounges today, including plans for the massive, brand new Aurora Lounge in Seattle. It’s actually 41,000 sq feet on the C concourse that’s split between a regular lounge and an Aurora Lounge for those long-haul premium passengers.

Honolulu will also get its new lounge, but that’s a mere 13,000 sq feet at the entrance to the Mauka concourse. San Diego, not to be outdone, will have a new 14,000 sq foot lounge.

Atmos Gets More Juice

There’s a whole separate release talking about changes to the Atmos program. Don’t worry, these aren’t negative changes. First, there will be a new debit card offering for those who want to earn more miles. There’s also a ton of fluff in here, including some things that have already been announced but now are going live. There really was only one thing that grabbed my attention.

You will be able to transfer points into Atmos from “eligible Bank of America card products” starting in 2027. This sounds like a whole new thing for BofA, joining the likes of Chase, Amex, Citi, and Capital One. Other than that brief window where you could transfer Amex to HawaiianMiles post-merger, this is the first time I’ve heard about an option to transfer to Atmos points from the generic credit cards.

It’s not stopping there, noting that at some nebulous point in the future, it will create the ability to transfer from “other select global financial institutions.”

There is a little more in here, including dining improvements and things like that, but you can go to the website and read about those yourself. I’m expecting there may be some surprises in store today, so stay tuned for more.

First, I have to give the obligatory map so we can set the scene.

The Metroplex is a big place, as anyone who flies into DFW can see clearly since there aren’t any hills to block your view for hundreds of miles in any direction. DFW and Love Field are the two commercial airports with scheduled flights these days, but Avelo will open up DTX — am I the only one who keeps reading that as Dirty TeXas? — in November with a pure leisure schedule to Las Vegas plus four Florida airports: Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Orlando, and Tampa.

But now, starting in December, it will use its new airplane to start some less obvious markets. Here’s what DTX gets:

• Atlanta 4x weekly from Dec 16
• Denver 4x weekly from Dec 16
• Nashville 2x weekly from Dec 17
• New Orleans 2x weekly from Dec 17

The first thing you might think is that this is not enough flying to fully utilize that third B737. In reality, there are some pretty hefty gaps in flying between four and six hours, four days a week. (It doesn’t fly on Tuesday at all.) I assume there is going to be more coming. The second thing that comes to mind is that these aren’t necessarily pure leisure markets in the same way the first ones were.

I took a look at daily passengers each way in Cirium’s DOT O&D data for the year ending June 2026, and here’s what it looks like:

Dallas Metroplex PDEW by Destination TTM Ending June 2026

^{Data via Cirium}

The four largest markets are not getting any service in this round. That’s not a surprise for New York City. After all, Avelo knows it can’t serve secondary airports in a destination market, only an origin. So New Haven is out (for now), and Avelo isn’t going to get into LaGuardia. You could argue that in LA, the issue is more that Avelo doesn’t serve the region at all anymore today. But then again, it didn’t fly to Las Vegas when it announced that McKinney flight. And it does serve both Chicago/O’Hare and Washington/Dulles, so that wouldn’t explain why those aren’t served.

Maybe it’s the competition. New York has five airlines while Chicago, LA, and Washington have four, all including Frontier. But Atlanta also has four airlines, and Frontier has more service in that airport than any of the others. On top of this, Atlanta is the one market from close-by Love Field that is served by two airlines (Delta and Southwest). So that doesn’t make much sense either.

It could just be distance, I suppose. But alas, Chicago would be closer than Las Vegas which is already filed. So… I’m running out of ideas. But for some reason, Avelo is high on the Atlanta market.

Denver is less surprising since that is the gateway to a lot of ski markets and drunken weekends. It feels more leisurely. And that is reflected in the chart you’ll remember I gave last time

Dallas Metroplex % of Nonstop Tickets Purchased > 90 days in Advance

^{DOT O&D Data via Visual Approach, markets include all DAL/DFW > 150 PDEW in Q1 2026}

Denver has a fair number of bookings coming more than 90 days out, and those are going to be the kind of leisure bookings that Avelo hopes to feast. Atlanta is not to be found on this list. Of course, New Orleans and Nashville are both on this list, and they are big markets. But Phoenix seems like more of a surprise that it’s not on the list.

Overall, Avelo seems to be following a clear path here with those leisure-heavy markets, but Atlanta doesn’t quite fit the mold in the same way. Maybe it’s just a test, and it was the best option for some reason I can’t figure out. Regardless, Avelo decided that McKinney was the best place to put that new airplane. I’m told that was always the plan, but we’ll see how growth moves forward once the first flight actually takes off.

The worst airports if you have a connecting flight – Washington Post

What’s the worst airport to connect in? It actually depends. This makes it sound like I had definitive answers, but the reality is that everyone has a different tolerance for pain, delays, waiting, and missed connections. So while some might prefer going through Newark to avoid foreign connection hassles, others — like me — would rather fly straigh to Europe and connect over there.

Why I Flew to LAX to Look at Airplanes With a Bunch of Strangers – PCMag

Rob writes for several outlets, and PCMag was interested enough in our gathering to pick up an account of his experience at Cranky Dorkfest. He also has some tips for all of you thinking about coming next year.

California In-N-Out doubles as haven for aviation nuts – New York Post

When I saw the Post wrote about this, I figured it would belittle us and rip us to shreds. But it didn’t.

This week we talk about lounges. What about them? Basically that they are the new money-makers for airlines that continue to try and maximize their credit card/loyalty revenues. Is it actually about loyalty anymore? Sometimes. But come listen for yourself and see who you agree with most.

The Air Show

A podcast about the business of the sky

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Breeze Wants Spirit Slots to Blow Away from Legacy Carriers

Breeze, along with Frontier and the Association of Value Airlines want assurances from the government that any future slot awards from the carcass of Spirit (or otherwise) go to its fellow LCCs and not to the big, bad legacy carriers.

The idea is to keep the slots within the LCC family one way or another. If Spirit can’t have them, then this group wants at least one of its brethren to keep the memory of Spirit alive by using its former assets. Frontier came in second for Spirit’s LGA slots earlier in the summer, just $1 million short of the $58.5 million offered by JetBlue. The Denver-based airline is not looking to overturn JetBlue’s auction win, but to simply ensure that American, Delta, Southwest, or United don’t end up with any other future offerings.

JetBlue currently has about 2.7% of LGA slots, and adding Spirit’s 22 will push it to 4.6%, still safely under the FAA’s 5% threshold for airlines with a limited presence at slot-controlled airports. ACI-NA, the trade group representing airports, filed its concern with the FAA that slots are considered liquid assets in a bankruptcy and sold to the highest bidder — whether or not that is or isn’t what’s best for the flying public.

Alaska Plans Growth at Seattle’s Other Airport

Alaska is not only the dominant carrier at Seattle/Tacoma International Airport, but the airline is expanding its presence across town in Everett at Seattle/Paine Field, the struggling second airport for the region.

Beginning this fall, the airline is growing seats by 50%, and adding new service to San Jose (CA). The SJC service will launch in the spring and operate 2x daily on Horizon. The carrier last operated PAE-SJC in 2020. In addition to SJC, Los Angeles will grow to 2x daily on B737s, Portland also expands to 2x daily, while San Diego and San Francisco will be upguaged to add more seats in the markets.

Frontier operated briefly at the airport last year, and United tried to make a go of it while straddling the pandemic from 2019-2021. But since Frontier left in 2025, Alaska has once again been the lone operator at the airport… unless you count Boeing which flies airplanes out after it builds them. We don’t count Boeing.

American, STARLUX Grow Partnership

American Airlines — community and marketing partner of YOUR hopefully playoff-bound Arizona Diamondbacks — is expanding its interline agreement with STARLUX, adding a codeshare agreement between the two and an expansion to include frequent flier reciprocity.

The codeshare will be available beginning Wednesday for STARLUX’s flight from Taipei to Phoenix, and it will soon expand to flights from TPE on STARLUX to and from LAX, SFO, ONT, and SEA. STARLUX codes will be added to 26 American domestic flights from LAX and PHX to places people want to go to…and Newark.

AAdvantage members will be able to earn miles and loyAAlty points when flying STARLUX on an AA codeshAAre. The two say they will work together to expand future opportunities including mileage redemption and additional travel benefits. It feels like they are coming together to make this into one world….

Avelo Grows McKinney Prior to Opening

The Dallas Metroplex’s newest commercial airport doesn’t even open until November, but it’s already gaining new service as Avelo announced four new destinations from the airport.

As it currently stands, Avelo plans to inaugurate service at the airport on November 11 (with some markets a bit later) to the initial batch of destinations: Fort Myers, Las Vegas, Orlando, Tampa, and Fort Lauderdale. But that won’t be all, as the carrier adds service from DTX to:

• Atlanta (4x weekly service begins December 16)
• Denver (4x weekly service begins December 16)
• Nashville (2x weekly service begins December 17)
• New Orleans (2x weekly service begins December 17)

As part of the expansion, Avelo will base a third B737-800 at the airport. The announcement comes after the airport earned its Airport Operating Certificate on Wednesday from the FAA. That process includes checks to ensure compliance with TSA and other federal government security standards, fuel spill procedures, guaranteeing no water bottle will be available in the airside terminal for less than $8, a turkey wrap that’s priced in tandem with the current going rate for a checked bag, and promising that one moving walkway will be out of service at all times.

Bonus points are awarded to airports if the closest restroom to your gate is closed for cleaning.

JSX Signs on for 50 ES-36s

JSX, everyone’s favorite airline that isn’t technically an airline, placed a deposit with Heart Aerospace for 50 ES-36s, with an option for another 50. The Swedish aircraft manufacturer unveiled its 36-seat hybrid electric regional aircraft this week and replaced the announced ES-30 deal with JSX for the exact same terms. The two agreed to roll over the ES-30 order to this ES-36, an aircraft that (if we ever actually see it) is expected to have 36 seats. In other news, we hear Cebu Pacific is interested in the airplane but it would require it to be renamed the ES-72, because 36 seats is just not enough on that sized airframe.

Heart currently hopes to put the planes into pre-production (although couldn’t everything until production begins be considered pre-production?) late in 2028, with the first plane entering service in 2031. So don’t hold your breath on this one.

The manufacturer expects other airlines with orders in for the ES-30 to roll over to the 36, including Air Canada and United. According to Heart, the ES-36 can fly up to 125 miles on its batteries and up to 745 miles when in hybrid mode. Operating costs are designed to be about 40% less than traditional regional aircraft and that’s before accounting for the superiority in operating a hybrid that’s currently only available to car owners.

• Air Canada‘s flight to Singapore will end in January.
• Air France reportedly has found that life a mile high does not suit the French palette, but we aren’t entirely sure about that.
• Air New Zealand is seeking a renewed partnership with Virgin Australia.
• Atlas Air‘s next investor could be coming from far away.
• BA is adding frequencies on its St. Louis flight from London/Heathrow.
• Biman Bangladesh, the airline best known for being the last to retire the DC-10 from passenger service, is adding 11 airplanes that are not DC-10s.
• Cabo Verde Airlines is rejoining IATA’s billing and settlement plan.
• Cathay Pacific is leaving Cairns.
• Condor needs to…strip itself of $230 million in costs in the next two years. It’s also adding new cities.
• Delta took delivery of its first A321-200 in a charter configuration for the NBA. It also made its grand announcement about summer 2027. Buckle up folks, it’s a wild one.
• Emirates is pondering an aircraft swap.
• JAL is reportedly adding 20 E2s.
• JOY Airlines is joyless.
• Norse is down to just one U.S. route during winter.
• PIA is adding two wet-leased B787-9s from Norse. Of course it is.
• Qantas is now offering upgrades at the airport payable in cash or Vegemite.
• Qatar is retiring its final A330s.
• Riyadh Air is adding Jakarta to its route network.
• Ryanair is cutting back on its winter schedule while it finds someone to sue.
• SAS is opening a fancy new lounge in Copenhagen next year.
• SWISS may need a new hookup for A220 wet-leases as its current supplier is in financial peril.

My local librarian told me this week she is pregnant. “That’s incredible!,” I said, then asking “when is she due?”

“Oh no,” the librarian replied, “I get to keep her.”

Cancún has long been the center of tourism on the Yucatán Peninsula. The airport there is large with up to 350 daily flights. There are more flights from there to the US than there are domestically, but there are also flights to places as far south as Argentina and to more than 15 countries in Europe. It is a tourism powerhouse.

Tulum, meanwhile, hit its heyday a few hundred years ago. It was a major Mayan site that was effectively abandoned in the 1500s. The modern town of Tulum was basically nothing until the government built a highway through the area in the 1970s. Even then, not much happened until the 1990s when tourism grew to the Mayan ruins.

During that time, Cancún remained the tourism stronghold, but the coast was getting crowded. So developers started clearing out the mangroves along the coast and building resorts in between Cancún and Tulum (and now beyond). The so-called Riviera Maya became a playground for those wanting a quieter resort experience.

At the same time, ex-pats found the town of Tulum and started to move in droves. It’s still not big, but it is more than it has been in the last 500 years. Let me show you a map.

This makes it very clear why the government decided to build the Tulum airport. The drive from the Cancún airport to Tulum is about 1.5 hours, plus you have to get by the infamous El Guapo. That’s not an easy trip, so this more convenient airport built next to the new Mayan train (Tren Maya) seemed like an opportunity. In practice, it has not worked, at least not yet.

Let’s start by looking at the domestic market.

Tulum Domestic Departures by Airline

^{Data via Cirium}

When the airport opened in Dec 2023, it was just for domestic flights, and both Aeromexico and then-Viva Aerobus jumped right in. Aeromexico started with double daily from Mexico City/MEX and soon after moved the flights to Mexico City/AIFA instead.

Viva tried both of those plus Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Tijuana. In April 2024, state-sponsored Mexicana started AIFA flights of its own, and then in Dec 2024, Volaris joined the party with a Guadalajara flight. That is when domestic departures peaked at the airport with a little more than eight daily. It’s been downhill ever since.

Viva ended MEX and Tijuana a few months after starting while Guadalajara disappeared as soon as Volaris showed up. AIFA is planned at less than daily in winter, and Monterrey is even suspended in darkest winter while staying at 2-3x weekly otherwise.

Volaris has cut its flight from daily to 3-4x weekly. Even Mexicana, which started with 10x weekly B737-800s during peak, is down to just a daily Embraer 195-E2 now. And then there’s Aeromexico.

In Oct 2025, Aeromexico moved one of the two daily AIFA flights back to MEX. By May 2026, AIFA had dropped to 4x weekly. And now, after filing this past weekend, Aeromexico will leave entirely this month. That leaves two to four daily domestic flights through the entire winter season.

Now, remember that I said Cancún had more flights to the US than anywhere else? It’s that tourism market that really powers that airport’s engine. So if US traffic held up to Tulum, the drop in domestic flying wouldn’t be as calamitous. But it has not done that.

Tulum International Departures by Airline

^{Data via Cirium}

Tulum opened up for international service in March 2024, and the airlines raced into the market as quickly as they could. We actually handed out a Cranky Network Award that year that we split into smaller trophies to give to everyone who announced service. That even included Spirit, who never actually started flying there… which makes Spirit the smartest airline of the bunch. In this case.

American came roaring in with double daily to DFW alongside one daily each to Charlotte and Miami. United did Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and Newark. Delta was in Atlanta, of course, but it also planned winter flights from Detroit and Minneapolis/St Paul. Even JetBlue tried JFK.

And it wasn’t just about the US. Air Canada, Air Transat, Sunwing, and WestJet combined to serve as many as five cities from Tulum in peak winter while avianca tried Bogotá. Even Discover tried to make a Frankfurt flight work. During the summer, Copa started flights to Panama City.

Almost none of this worked. The airport peaked in international flying in January 2025 with about a dozen daily flights. It has been a downhill slide ever since.

Copa gave up after that first summer while avianca and Discover each only lasted that first winter. Volaris very briefly tried San José (CR), but that lasted two months. No other Mexican airline has even tried to fly internationally. JetBlue made it through one summer, then went winter-only, and then pulled out entirely in March of this year.

The Canadian carriers have remained strong in winter only, and that’s because Canadians will go ANYWHERE that’s warm. With Cuba off limits, that probably helps support the Tulum flights even more.

But it’s now down to only the big three US carriers to fly year-round. Delta does only Atlanta now, with 1x daily in winter and 1x weekly in summer. United only flies Houston with 5x weekly peaking at 1x daily during winter. Newark will still have three flights right around the holidays and no more, so that doesn’t even count.

Even American is down to only DFW year-round at 1x daily during summer and decidedly less in winter. Miami is still there on a similar pattern except it takes off a couple months in fall.

So what happened? Most likely, people just stuck with Cancún, because it had a lot more frequencies to a lot more places in the US. Fares started off at a premium from Tulum, but it didn’t take long for the airlines to realize that wasn’t working, so the fares went down.

On top of that, the airlines just couldn’t find enough people to take those flights. The American Charlotte flight topped an 80 percent load factor one month in summer. Most were in the 60 percent range. JetBlue did ok during the peak winter but even that meant barely filling 80 percent of flights. The shoulder times were much worse.

Sure, some flights did better than others, but Cancún flights from hubs never fall below 90 percent during peak months. It was a very rare occurrence for Tulum to ever exceed 90 percent.

It’s no surprise to see US airlines back off when they see these kind of results, but for Aeromexico to leave? That’s a shocker. This was one of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s pet projects, so you would just assume that the Mexican carriers would have to be there for political reasons. If Aeromexico is gone, I have to wonder just how far behind Viva and especially Volaris will be.

It’s possible that someday this airport will catch on, but for now, the only thing it can count on is having Mexicana in the market. That’s… something.

This is a big deal, but I thought a little history lesson would be useful to see just how this airport has evolved over the years, because it has changed a lot. So, let’s get going.

The name Sky Harbor has to be the best airport name around. (You had your chance, Port Columbus, but then you renamed yourself.) But while the name is great, the terminal numbering has generally confused people. For decades, there has been no Terminal 1, and that left many wondering if it ever existed. It did indeed. What would become Terminal 1 was the first modern terminal at the airport. It opened in 1952.

This little slice of terminal was accessed from the west, and it was the only terminal for a full decade until the jet-age Terminal 2 opened up. At the time, the original terminal became the West Wing while the new terminal became the East Wing. It has now been replaced with a ballroom. (Too soon?)

This remained the configuration for some time, and traffic continued to enter from the west with all terminals being south of the main roadway. Parking was to the north. But then, it was time to keep building to the east, and a realignment happened. T3 was born in 1979, and that’s when the terminal numbering went into place with the West Wing becoming T1 and the East Wing becoming T2.

T3 had concourses on both the north and south sides of the terminal building itself. There were roadways on both sides of that building, and this made for quite a mess integrating with the original roadway system. You can still see some of that mess today when coming in from the west.

T3 opened at the dawn of deregulation, and that meant it was time for pure chaos in Phoenix. Bonanza was the hometown airline once it moved its headquarters to town in 1966. That carried on through the mergers to form Air West, Hughes Air West, and eventually Republic. Phoenix was also a key stop on southern transcontinental routes for airlines like TWA and American. But those would all fall by the wayside soon enough.

Southwest came to the airport on January 31, 1982, and it grew fast. Then the new hometown airline America West started flying on August 1, 1983, and it grew even faster. By 1985, Republic had given up, and America West became the airport’s largest airline by far.

Even with Republic shrinking, the airport saw explosive growth in departures, according to SkyGo schedule data from OAG. In 1981, the airport had fewer than 70,000 departures. In 1985, that was over 120,000. Even with the brand-new Terminal 3, the airport was bursting at the seams.

Southwest had taken over Terminal 1, and it was so overcrowded that the airline was parking airplanes on every spare piece of ramp it could find. Meanwhile, America West was in Terminal 3’s south concourse. That airline grew so fast, a whole new temporary concourse had to be added on just to the west.

This wasn’t sustainable as growth was expected to continue in Phoenix, so planning for Terminal 4 kicked off. This massive new terminal sat to the east of the existing terminals, and it would have room for up to eight concourses. To start, only four would be built.

When it opened in late 1990, America West moved in to the two north concourses (called N2/3 but in practice being the low-A and low-B gates) while Southwest moved into the two southern concourses, S3/4 (the low- and high-C gates). This allowed PHX to shut down Terminal 1, and those temporary south concourse gates in Terminal 3. They would both be demolished shortly after, but the numbering didn’t change. The terminals stayed as 2, 3, and 4.

In 1994, the N4 concourse (high-B) opened as the international gates. N1 (high-A) followed in 1998, and S2 (low-D) opened in 2004, leaving the airport looking somewhat different but still having some room for growth just in time for the America West/US Airways merger.

That merger didn’t bring growth, and the airport’s terminal situation stayed the same for a long stretch. In 2013, the Sky Train opened connecting T4 with economy parking to the east and the light rail station. That was extended to T3 in 2014, but it didn’t get completed all the way to the rental car center in the west until 2022.

The train never stopped at T2, because T2 was not long for this world. In 2016, Phoenix kicked off a massive renovation of T3, which included creating a single security checkpoint and demolishing the south concourse. In its place, a new concourse would be built that was positioned east-west instead of north-south.

This project finished in January 2020, and the airlines moved out of T2 shortly after. T2 was shut and demolished the next year.

What you see above is the current state of the airport with only two terminals that are still numbered 3 and 4. The terminals are almost fully built out with no more room to grow to the east after the new concourse on the northeast side of Terminal 3 opens in 2027.

Here’s how the airlines are divvied up today with the new concourse on the map as well.

For years, Phoenix has talked about what will be built to the west of the existing Terminal 3. All of that space is wide open for redevelopment, and it will be the site of the new west terminal. In general, we’re going to see this terminal built in this area bounded by Terminal 3 on the east and a new taxiway U on the west which will connect the south and north runway complexes:

We don’t know much about this terminal except that it’s coming. And the release this week says American will be the primary carrier, which means T4 is about to have a whole lot more room.

That’s a bit forward. T4 will have a lot of room eventually, whenever this is built. Right now, the plan is to have the new facility open by 2033.

We don’t know how big it will be or how much will be built in any first phase. We don’t even know what it will look like. But we do know there are renderings which suggest when fully built out, it will be able to rival T4 in size.

^{West-facing rendering via City of Phoenix}

Don’t put much stock in that rendering. Just know that the terminal is coming, American is committed, and Phoenix is preparing to have a whole lot more terminal space in the years ahead.

Now if the city could just find some more water…

For those who weren’t able to make the trip this year, come live vicariously through me…

The Morning Ramp Visit

We had perfect weather this year with partly cloudy skies to start the day… which began for me when I arrived at the Flight Path Museum around 7:30am to find people already lining up for an 8am start.

LAX went all out this year, and we were able to expand the perimeter of the event while adding more airplanes to the static display for a total of five.

And these airplanes? Oh, they were good ones. American brought two aircraft, including the A321XLR, which people could walk through, and the AirCal heritage aircraft.

Delta may not do as many special liveries as American, but it still found a way to bring the 100th anniversary A321neo to the event which everyone could visit.

Not to be outdone, Southwest rolled up with Independence One, an airplane I hadn’t seen in person until now. This was also open to tours. The airline even created posters of the aircraft for all who wanted one, printed to say Cranky Dorkfest on the bottom.

United may not have had an airplane with an exciting livery, but the lines to get on the airline’s B787-9 were some of the longest. Obviously everyone wanted to see what was on the inside of that one.

The airport had a DJ there playing music, and it provided Randy’s Donuts, coffee, and water for all. Oh, and they handed out hats to attendees with the airport’s coordinates on the front and the LAX logo on the back. I heard a lot of love for those.

The Main Event

At 11am, it was time to start The Main Event at the park near In-N-Out. I drove over and parked my car at The Parking Spot thanks to their discounted rate. It’s a good thing I did, because it was already a madhouse over there, and street parking was filling up fast. For the first time, I reached out to In-N-Out this year to warn them about the crowd. They seemed appreciative, but based on the lines snaking outside the restaurant, I don’t know that they were truly ready.

More airlines showed up this year to hand out goodies. Southwest set up a table and passed out water. United was giving out branded socks. And even Volaris came in from México to join the party.

The crowd started spread out, but as we crept closer to noon, they started to gather around the park’s tiny hill, which a couple people suggested naming Mt Cranky, for the giveaway to begin.

As always, I couldn’t have managed this giveaway without Ian from FR24, but also a special thank you goes out to Steve who brought a sound system this year to greatly amplify my voice. That was the number one complaint from previous years, and I appreciate Steve offering to fix that problem.

This year we had so many different goodies to hand out thanks to first-time participants Air Canada, British Airways, Southern Airways Express/Mokulele, Sun Country, Volaris, and the owner of the Pan Am brand. They joined in with the regulars including JetTip, Flightradar24, The Air Current, and Seats.aero alongside Alaska/Hawaiian, American, Avelo, Breeze, Delta, JetBlue, Porter, Southwest, and United.

What were the highlights? Here are just a few:

• Alaska/Hawaiian again handed out 100,000 Atmos points to a lucky winner, but that may have been less coveted than the massive B787 model in the new Aurora livery
• American brought a model with the Medal of Honor livery plus a backpack filled with centennial branded items and my favorite, a centennial whisky decanter with glasses and a leather amenity set
• Southwest had a spectacular PacMin model of Independence One
• United gave away a behind-the-scends hub tour at the hub of the winner’s choice (I checked, and Guam doesn’t count, but a United employee in Guam was there and offered to give me a tour if I ever go out there)

With the giveaway done, there was nothing left to do but eat burgers, talk shop, and watch airplanes. And oh my did we get a treat on that last point when Lufthansa brought this bad boy in from Frankfurt.

That was quite a way to end the afternoon.

If there was one downside, it was that I didn’t get to head to The Proud Bird for a beer after, and I wasn’t able to participate in the NYCAviation SpotLAX events. My son had a cross country race down in southern Orange County, so I had to hit the road.

It was yet another successful year, and I had a bunch of people who came up to tell me it was their first time. I think the excellent write-up in the AAA Westways magazine this summer helped bring more locals into the fold. And media coverage from local outlets like ABC7 and KNX should help boost that further next year.

Remember to mark your calendars for September 18, 2027. RSVPs should open in late July/early August, but I will post here when that time comes. I look forward to seeing everyone again!

We are back from our late summer break, and this week Brian and I talk about the summer 2027 announcements from Air Canada, American, and United. Really, we’re focusing mostly on the A321XLR routes now that this airplane has enough critical mass to let us see the strategy.

Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Podcasts

Delta Continues to Grow in Los Angeles

Delta announced an expansion in Los Angeles Friday morning as the carrier continues to attempt to entrench itself as the #1 carrier at LAX. Earlier this week, the carrier announced new service from LAX to Monterey, and today it said it will launch a daily flight to Philadelphia beginning next summer. The flights to PHL will be operated by Delta’s A321neo, launching on June 7.

But it’s not stopping at those new destinations — the carrier is also beefing up frequencies on seven destinations: Boston, Cincinnati, Houston/IAH, Raleigh/Durham, San Antonio, San Diego, and Seattle. Delta is planning its largest LAX schedule in its history including previously-announced new service to Manila and Vancouver. While Delta will offer more flights than any other carrier from the airport, its transpacific offerings are less than that of rival United. But that’s ok, because you can fly 5 times a day to San Diego, and that’s really what matters here.

Delta did pick LAX as the first airport to receive a second Delta One lounge. The 75-seat lounge in T2 gives Delta’s top passengers an alternative than making the trek to T3. This comes as the airline offers more than 200 departures to almost 70 destinations next summer — including both Newark and Tucson… for now.

airBaltic Files for Bankruptcy

airBaltic did what every Latvian based company does when money gets tight — it filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on Monday.

In its filing, the airline said it secured a commitment for €350 million in debtor-in-possession financing provided it receives approval from the court. The carrier says business will continue as normal for the foreseeable future to include flights, refunds, etc. In its Q1 earnings at the end of March, the airline showed €472 million of borrowings and nearly €900 million in lease liabilities.

The Latvian government currently holds 88.4% of the voting rights at the carrier while Lufthansa holds most of the remaining bits. We won’t be surprised if Lufthansa’s interest forces the airline to shut down and then restart under a slightly different name. Get ready for airBaltic City Airlines! The airline says its current reorganization will wrap up next summer provided it receives court approval to access the DIP financing. Stay tuned. Ryanair certainly is.

Breeze Pilots Look to Federal Mediation

Negotiations between Breeze and its pilots are in their 4th year at this point, and that has led ALPA to file a request to have the government appoint a mediator to help with the negotiations.

In what could be the most predictable response ever, the airline acknowledged this is happening while not agreeing with the characterization of the negotiations. The pilots from Breeze blew into ALPA in 2022 and have been working on a CBA since the early days of 2023. This request comes after ALPA sued Breeze in January for much of the same — saying that the carrier was allegedly obstructing negotiations.

Despite four years of talks, almost nothing has been decided between the two parties except that their lead negotiators are benefitting financially from the drawn out process. According to ALPA, hardly any key contract sections have reached tentative agreement, with just two sections reaching any sort of consensus stage since January 2025. Under the Railway Labor Act, mediation can continue until the government determines that a voluntary agreement is unlikely. In that case, a 30-day cooling off period must expire before either side can take self-help action.

Lufthansa Places First MAX 10 Order

A new aircraft is joining the Lufthansa family as the carrier used an option from a 2023 order for B737-8 MAXs to purchase 20 B737-10 MAXs with a rack rate of about $3.4 billion.

If you’re pumped about seeing the MAX 10 in LH colors, you’ll want to chill your jets as deliveries aren’t expected to begin until the next decade. Nothing says German efficiency like an aircraft order who’s delivery date is “TBA…sometime next decade.” It also helps to diversify your narrowbody fleet if you’re Lufthansa and hedge your bets at the same time. Airbus can’t deliver enough airplanes, Boeing can also not deliver enough airplanes.

Lufthansa says the MAX 10 will consume 30% less fuel while reducing unit costs by 20%.

American Earns its Stripes

American Airlines and German LCC Condor announced their plans to launch an interline partnership this week. Of course this is the lowest level of cooperation available to two carriers, so this isn’t groundbreaking at face value. But American does boast in the release that it flies to more than 150 cities from Condor’s U.S. gateways (BOS, JFK, LAX, and soon ORD). And let’s be real — nothing says partnership like agreeing to move each other’s bags underground at airports around the world.

Condor is an alliance-less beach towel airline that picks its spots to take on Lufthansa. The two airlines used to have a feeder program in which LH provided feeder traffic to Condor, but that agreement was ended a year ago. Whether or not this is the first step in seeing Condor join oneworld is definitely a bit presumptuous, but it does seem like a likely landing spot for the airline…eventually. It’s already partners with newish oneworld member Alaska, and this buddying up to American can’t hurt in that regard either.

The partnership will give American customers another way to connect in Germany without having to learn the intricacies of Lufthansa Group, something we all can appreciate.

• Air Astana will resume flying to Dubai next month.
• Air Canada‘s Mark Nasr was named to Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 list, joining a maple syrup heir, a poutine industry influencer, and what we assume are 37 ice hockey players.
• BermudAir is adding an E190F.
• Cape Air will use Grand Caravans to operate its Montana operation beginning next year.
• Delta spent some time, money, and internet space to tell us about the wine it’s serving in Delta One.
• Etihad unveiled its new seats in the pointy end of the plane.
• Finnair appointed a new Chief Digital Officer.
• Frontier adds two from Detroit.
• Harbour Air is acquiring Pacific Coastal Airlines.
• ITA is considering Newark and we think it’d be a match made in heaven.
• Korean confirmed an order of 103 aircraft from Boeing.
• La Compagnie could double its fleet in the next couple years.
• Qatar plans to add 138 jets in the next five years which is an awfully specific number.
• Smartwings takeover by Pegasus was conditionally approved by the Czech government.
• Sunrise is adding 1x weekly service to both Fort Myers and West Palm Beach from Cap-Haitien.
• TAROM has a new Interim General Director who will direct things in a general manner for a finite amount of time.
• TAP received a share-swap proposal from Air France-KLM.

In the word “scent,” which is the silent letter? The “s” or the “c?”

As we know, Southwest loves its secondary airports in California. The problem with San Diego is it has none. I know you’ll want to quibble, so let me get a couple things out of the way. No, Tijuana does not count. Yes, it is a fantastic airport to serve the people of San Diego, but only if they’re heading into México or possibly beyond. It is not where you go to fly to the Bay Area or Vegas. Also, Carlsbad doesn’t count either. Sure, there is finally a little service again with American and United in the mix, but the airport has a short runway with angry neighbors and will never amount to much.

The situation is so ridiculous that some people in north San Diego County consider Orange County to be an alternate airport. If that airport was ever built on top of the old El Toro in southern Orange County, it would have been even more appealing. But after years and years of debate, the only way to really serve San Diego is through SAN, the old Lindbergh Field. This airport has one very busy runway, and until recently it was fresh out of gate space. Southwest was in an old, miserable terminal that has finally been shut down. The plan to build better facilties will continue for awhile, but late last year more gates became available. And Southwest and Alaska have been fighting for supremacy ever since.

But before we get into that, we should go back in time, just like we’ve done at other airports this week.

San Diego Departures by Airline

^{Data via Cirium}

Back in 1980, this was a PSA town. In fact, San Diego was the home of the beloved Pacific Southwest Airlines. Looking at the old-line carriers, American, United, and Western all had a sizable presence in the market as well, but that was most of the traffic outside of commuters.

It was 1982 when Southwest first started flying to San Diego, and it grew slowly up through the end of that decade while the rest of the industry went through consolidation and chaos. PSA became part of USAir and the code disappeared in 1988. United Delta took SkyWest flying under its wing, and 1987 marked the end of the WA code as Western rolled into Delta. Suddenly in 1988, Delta was the largest airline in town… for a minute.

USAir took over the crown in 1989 when PSA was digested, but as with everywhere else in California, that didn’t last. By 1991, USAir had cut a third of its 1989 flights, and it was less than half by 1993. Once again it looked like Delta would be king, and that happened for one more year in 1991. But then, Southwest turned on the gas.

Unlike around the rest of Southern California, Southwest flew to the Bay Area early on from San Diego. SFO flights started in 1983. But in 1989, Oakland, began. That was followed by Sacramento in 1991 and San Jose in 1994. Southwest realized it could backfill PSA pretty nicely, but other airlines did not back down as easily here.

In the back half of the 1990s, things began to change. Delta, which hadn’t backed off, scaled back starting in 1997. By 1999 it was less than a third of the size it was 3 years earlier. United peaked in 1998 during the height of Shuttle by United efforts to compete with Southwest, but it had dropped more than 40 percent of its flights a decade later. American hit a high note in 2001 when it had built off the Reno Air and TWA acquisitions, but it was half the size a decade later.

Throughout it all, Southwest just kept growing. In 2010, Southwest had more than 40 percent of the flights at the airport, and it looked like nobody else would give the airline a run for its money. But then the Eskimo showed up.

Alaska had flown to San Diego since 1986, but by 2012 it decided there was opportunity to really grow at the airport. It went from just shy of 6,000 departures that year to more than 16,000 by 2018.

In late 2025, the new gates opened, and Alaska and Southwest both added significant flying. Now, they each have more than three times the flying of any other airline at the airport.

If we just look at flights, it seems relatively even with Southwest at just about 41,500 flights in 2026 compared to Alaska’s nearly 36,000. But Alaska flies smaller airplanes, so it has shy of 120 seats per flight while Southwest is up above 160. This is still Southwest’s market, but is there room for two big players? Alaska thinks so.

Alaska and Southwest SLA Unit Revenue and Capacity Comparison

^{Data via Cirium, includes AirTran for Southwest and Hawaiian/Virgin America for Alaska}

Alaska has generally taken a stage length-adjusted unit revenue premium over Southwest, and that’s not a surprise. We are talking smaller airplanes that fly to smaller markets that tend to have higher fares. But you can see how the gap has grown in the past three or four years.

While this is happening, Alaska has grown much faster than Southwest. As recently as right before the pandemic, Alaska had about 40 percent of the seats Southwest had in the market. That number now lies above 60 percent.

The competition has certainly taken a toll on both airlines. Just look at this comparison to system average:

Alaska and Southwest SLA Unit Revenue vs System

^{Data via Cirium, includes AirTran for Southwest and Hawaiian/Virgin America for Alaska}

Alaska has seen San Diego struggle at various times when it has grown, but it has rebounded back. Southwest saw the impact of that right before the pandemic as well, and now since the additional flights were added since Q4 of last year, both airlines are showing significant weakness compared to their respective systems.

That’s what happens when you add a lot of flights, but this is a strategic fight. There’s no world where I would expect to see Southwest lose this battle, but the question is whether Alaska comes to a point where it finds a happy middle ground where both can coexist.

If you’ve submitted an RSVP but you can no longer come, please email cf@crankyflier.com to let us know.

The morning ramp visit at LAX filled up within 24 hours of opening RSVPs, and the waitlist is long. I wish we could do more, but LAX had us send the final list last night. Please DO NOT just show up since same day waitlist clearing isn’t happening.

The Cranky Dorkfest Main Event will be held, as always, from 11am to 1pm at the park across the street to the south of the In-N-Out Burger at 9149 S Sepulveda Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90045

• The giveaway drawing is planned for 12pm, but you must have pre-registered to be entered to win prizes that airlines and other companies have generously donated
• If you have signed up already as part of your ramp visit registration, you are entered in the raffle
• If you have not signed up, you are still welcome at Cranky Dorkfest, and the RSVPs for the giveaway have closed
• We will pick names in advance and announce the winners at the event
• You must be present to win

With so many people potentially coming, parking may be an issue. I’m very pleased to say that The Parking Spot Sepulveda has stepped up to help us all out with a flat $12 special rate (plus tax) which is a huge discount off the regular price. The garage is right across from the park. How close is it? Look:

If you want to park there, you have to reserve in advance using the promo code CrankyDorkFest26 at theparkingspot.com. More detailed information is available on the recently-updated page at crankyflier.com/dorkfest.

With this year’s event ramping up, NYCAviation and Cranky have finally achieved a goal we set long ago. See, NYCAviation holds the annual SpotLAX event the same weekend as Dorkfest as we’ve jointly designed. We wanted to have next year’s date set before everyone shows up this year. With the second Saturday falling on September 11 next year, we will again wait a week to hold the event, but the date is now firm.

Cranky Dorkfest 2027 is September 18, 2027

So, mark your calendars now, or mark them when you come out this weekend. Either way, just know that the new date has been set.

If you have any questions, leave a comment here or email cf@crankyflier.com. See you in a few short days!

To start, let’s just take a look at Southwest’s daily departures by airport.

Southwest Average Daily SoCal Departures By Quarter

^{Data via Cirium}

Up until 2022, LAX and San Diego were similarly-sized, but then they diverged. San Diego rapidly completed its post-pandemic recovery while LAX never actually got close. Sure, in San Diego Southwest has had to fend off Alaska, but at LAX, Southwest could have decided to fight everyone. It briefly started to build back LAX, but then in 2024, it retrenched.

Meanwhile, the secondary airports in the LA Basin recovered fairly quickly with Long Beach growing rapidly for Southwest after JetBlue walked away during the pandemic. But the departure numbers have sagged at all the airports versus their peaks, except for Orange County where Southwest has flown as much as it could.

Some of this may be due to increasing gauge offsetting a reduction in flights, but that has only been the case in four of the six airports:

Southwest Average Seats per Flight by Airport By Quarter

^{Data via Cirium}

Southwest’s systemwide gauge has increased as the airline has retired B737-700s and added MAX 8s. But those airplanes have been largely non-existent in Burbank and Orange County.

In Burbank, it’s a facility issue. The Burbank airport terminal is, uh, shall we say, compact. There just isn’t room to flow larger airplanes through there easily, so Southwest has kept is -700s flying. In October, the new terminal opens. I expect we will see changes.

At Orange County, it’s the very stupid noise ordinance which does nothing about noise. The system is actually an annual passenger cap, so Southwest is incentivized to fly smaller (and yes, they are louder) -700s so it can have more flights without hitting the passenger cap. This system is stupid, but it is reality.

At the other four airports, gauge has risen so perhaps it’s not a surprise to see departures fall off a bit. But is Southwest filling its airplanes? Instead of looking at this as a static number, I’m going to compare each airport to the systemwide number. I found this fascinating.

Southwest Load Factor by SoCal Airport vs System

^{T100 Data via Cirium}

The big winner here is clearly Long Beach. The Long Beach loads were much lower than system for so many years, but once Southwest found the right mix and cut back a bit on flights, load factor soared. It has now bested system average nearly every month since Nov 2025. That is a big turnaround.

Burbank has also seen good upward movement, though it’s surprising to see it less than average since it nearly exclusively has the smaller -700s. Southwest still runs a more business-friendly schedule in that market, and it gets pretty high yields. That just results in lower loads, especially on the short hops. The same story plays out in Orange County, but the loads are better since the airport’s passenger cap keeps a lid of capacity.

San Diego is an interesting one in that even with all of the big capacity increases in the Alaska fight, it has maintained higher loads than system average.

If there’s anything that looks weak here, it’s Ontario. It has been consistently below system average loads and hasn’t made gains like the other markets.

But in the end, load factor is only one piece of the broader puzzle. What really matters is stage length-adjusted unit revenue. How much are those flights generating? This I can only get quarterly with this backwards look (new data is monthly, but there’s not enough of it), and here is how it looks compared to the system.

Southwest Stage Length-Adjusted Unit Revenue by SoCal Airport vs System

^{DOT O&D Data via Cirium}

Again, Long Beach. Just look at how much worse that airport did compared to the system. It was the SoCal laggard for its entire existence. It slowly improved, but then Q1 of this year was the first time it did better than system average. It has been above LAX and San Diego on an aggregate basis, and it is gaining on Ontario. It is poised to keep up that performance.

Orange County and Burbank continue to show that the strategy of smaller planes, low loads, and high fares continues to work for the airline. It will be very interesting to see what happens when bigger planes start moving into Burbank starting November. Can it maintain this kind of performance? Everything looks rosy for now.

Ontario continues to be above average, but it has fallen off as of late. It’s not that unit revenue is declining, but it’s just not growing as fast at the others that are excelling. And that brings us to the two big airports.

LAX continues to be smaller, and it continues to underperform the system. Remember, this is only the revenue side of the equation. From a cost perspective, LAX is by far the most expensive airport to operate from in the set, so this has to be a real concern for the airline with no easy answer.

Lastly, there’s San Diego. It has been a real struggle, but there is a strategic investment going on there trying to fight off Alaska. It’s not surprising to see that, especially during the last two quarters when San Diego’s new terminal opened and capacity expanded. This is a long-term project, and in the short run, profitability is suffering. Things will settle down there.

With Cranky Dorkfest coming up this week, I decided to focus in on Southwest’s presence in Southern California. This required going back in time, of course, so I turned to SkyGo‘s OAG schedule data starting in 1980 to tell the tale of how Southwest got where it is today.

Southwest’s first foray into Southern California came on January 31, 1982 when it started flying to San Diego. That was quickly followed by LAX on September 18. Initial flights were to Phoenix and Las Vegas. This was a natural westward extension of the Southwest network with short-haul flights that originated closer to the airline’s Texas home. It expanded the airline’s reach, but this wasn’t a challenge to the dominance of California’s original low-fare airline PSA or to copycat AirCal.

The slow growth may not have been a threat to the status quo, but things began to evolve as the 1980s went on, and Southwest’s biggest asset was its low costs, low fares, and that it always stayed ready to pounce.

Ontario – 1985

The next SoCal city to join the network was Ontario which started May 15, 1985 with service only to Phoenix. It grew over time, but it wasn’t clear what this meant in the beginning. Let’s take a look at Ontario departures over time by airline.

Ontario Scheduled Departures by Airline

^{OAG Schedule Data via SkyGo}

Other than the small commuters which buzzed all around the area, AirCal was the big airline in Ontario as the 1980s dawned. Second was, oddly enough, Continental followed closely by PSA and Hughes Airwest. It didn’t stay that way for long.

Many of the commuter airlines were only around for a couple of years, and by the mid-1980s they were either gone or flying under a bigger airline’s code (as SkyWest did with United). Airwest was merged with others to form Republic, which didn’t seem interested in keeping much in Ontario. Western had started to fill that void in the mid-1980s, and that continued when Delta bought the airline in the back half of the decade, but it didn’t make it at that level another 10 years.

American bought AirCal and USAir bought PSA in the late 1980s, and while both airlines hoped to maintain a significant presence, it didn’t work. They realized that Southwest’s low costs and those ubiquitous $29 fares were nearly impossible for their high-cost companies to fight. So they didn’t. American started to pull back in 1990, and USAir followed not long after.

Southwest had started to grow significantly in Ontario in 1989 when it launched it first route from there to the Bay Area via Oakland. It was about 10 percent of total ONT departures at that point, but it more than doubled its size by 1991. By 1995, it had nearly doubled again. United launched Shuttle by United to provide a Southwest alternative into the Bay Area, but that failed. By 2000, as other airlines pulled back, Southwest had about half the departures at the airport.

Today, no airline challenges Southwest in Ontario. Frontier has added low-fare flying, but it is still much smaller than Southwest, and by 2026 it had shed about a third of the flights scheduled in 2024.

Burbank – 1990

Remember how Southwest started intra-California from Ontario in 1989? It knew that with American buying AirCal and USAir buying PSA that there would be opportunity, and it did not wait long to make the next big move. It was on April 16, 1990 that it started flying to Burbank. But note that while Las Vegas was one of the initial routes, so was Oakland. The intra-California flying showed Southwest’s focus had shifted to the bigger prize.

Burbank Scheduled Departures by Airline

^{Data via SkyGo}

In 1980, PSA was the big player in Burbank. AirCal didn’t even start serving the airport until 1982. The only other significant carrier at the airport was Hughes Airwest which continued to maintain a presence even after the formation of Republic until 1985 when it gave up. Delta had built on Western’s minor presence, but it was United that tried to make the biggest move as it brought regionals under its code.

By 1990, USAir was still the biggest at the airport, but it would exit completely in 1991. United was the second biggest, but half its departures were on 30-seat props in markets like Burbank to Sacramento. There was low-hanging fruit for Southwest to attack. By 1992, Southwest was number one at the airport and double the size of number two United.

United tried to fight back again with Shuttle by United to both San Francisco and Oakland. That didn’t work.

Nobody seriously challenged Southwest in Burbank for decades with Southwest maintaining a 60 to 70 percent departure share. That began to change before the pandemic when JSX entered. Since we are looking at departure share and not seats, JSX looks a lot bigger than it really is. It is a niche operator with very few, high-priced seats.

At the other end of the spectrum, ultra low-cost carriers (ULCC) have been largely absent. Avelo made Burbank its first base in 2021, but it had left by 2025. Allegiant, Breeze, and Frontier have all tried to carve out a niche, but they’ve been pretty unsuccessful so far.

Orange County – 1994

Southwest quickly learned in the early 1990s that it had struck gold in California, but it couldn’t find a way to get into Orange County since the airport had put its noise ordinance into place in 1985. It wasn’t until 1994 when Southwest picked up some slots. By this time, it knew the most important routes weren’t to Phoenix and Vegas. It started with Oakland and San Jose on May 26.

Orange County Scheduled Departures by Airline

^{Data via SkyGo}

In Orange County, the big airlines held on to their positions far better than elsewhere, and that’s probably due to the strong business demand and high fares alongside the barriers to entry. American actually built on AirCal’s home base, and America West had created a nice little operation of its own that went north-south and not just to its hubs in Phoenix and Las Vegas.

Southwest entered, but it couldn’t grow as fast as it normally would because of the slot restrictions. It wasn’t until 2004 that Southwest became the largest airline at the airport, just barely squeaking past United. But every time one airline would take a step back, Southwest would be there. And while it sometimes would have to give back its gains thanks to the way the slot rules worked, Southwest never did that unless forced.

During the pandemic, airlines like Allegiant and Breeze were able to scrounge up some slots, but the prospects for future growth are relatively slim for everyone. In 2026, Southwest has north of 27 percent of scheduled departures which is well beyond second place Alaska’s 15 percent.

Long Beach – 2016

The one big airport Southwest hadn’t entered in the LA Basin was Long Beach, my home airport. That’s because Long Beach was slot-restricted, and none were available for aircraft the size of Southwest’s B737s by the time Southwest was interested. Why the sudden interest? As demand increased in Orange County, Southwest had to give back slots. Long Beach was another way to serve those travelers, and it was an airport with a weak existing tenant in JetBlue.

JetBlue held the lion’s share of slots at the airport, but then something happened. Airplanes got less noisy, and Southwest found a way in on June 5, 2016.

Long Beach Scheduled Departures by Airline

^{Data via SkyGo}

Long Beach was generally the least-coveted airport in the Basin. It was the home of Jet America in the 1980s until that airline was bought by Alaska, but the brief bulge of service went away. For most of the 1990s, it was a sleepy airport with very little service. In 2001, JetBlue showed up and took all the remaining slots.

Unlike Orange County, Long Beach’s noise ordinance is actually based on noise. And as noise decreased, that created the opportunity for more slots. Southwest announced it would start flying to Oakland as part of its plan to blanket secondary markets in Southern California. JetBlue initially tried to fight back, but it gave up completely during the pandemic, at which point Southwest took over all of that airline’s slots and more.

It was a long-term plan with short term bursts of action alongside methodical growth. In the end, Southwest has created something of a fortress in these markets. We’re talking about seats, but that can get noisy because of locals versus connections. Look at the LA Basin to the San Francisco Bay Area for all of 2025. Southwest flew 49 percent of all the passengers. Number two United was under 20 percent. Or look just at LAX to the Bay Area, a hotly-contested market. Southwest flew a third of all passengers with Delta and United coming in a close second with each shy of 20 percent.

That doesn’t mean everything has been a wild success. During the pandemic, Southwest decided to go smaller, and it added Palm Springs and Santa Barbara. Those markets have not seen much growth, and Southwest remains relatively small. Perhaps that changes in the future, or maybe it’s just that the legacy airlines have become so much better at competing with the current version of Southwest that the failures of the 1980s and 1990s won’t be repeated. But for all the big secondary markets in Southern California? That ship has sailed, and Southwest is the dominant carrier.

Tomorrow, I’ll look more at how Southwest’s strategy has shifted in the region in the last decade.

Many of you reading this blog now probably weren’t alive when those terrorists crashed those four airplanes and took all those lives, but you undoubtedly know about it the way my generation knows about President Kennedy’s assassination. And that’s why as the years pass, it’s even more important to remember the littler things, so they don’t get lost.

Once again, I continue the tradition Holly Hegeman started so many years ago… honoring those on-duty crewmembers who were murdered that day by printing their names.

American 11 (Boston to Los Angeles)
Crashed into World Trade Center
Barbara Arestegui, Marstons Mills, MA, flight attendant
Jeffrey Collman, Novato, CA, flight attendant
Sara Low, Boston, MA, flight attendant
Karen Martin, Danvers, MA, flight attendant
Thomas McGuinness, Portsmouth, NH, First Officer
Kathleen Nicosia, Winthrop, MA, flight attendant
John Ogonowski, Dracut, MA, Captain
Betty Ong, Andover, MA, flight attendant
Jean Roger, Longmeadow, MA, flight attendant
Dianne Snyder, Westport, MA, flight attendant
Madeline Sweeney, Acton, MA, flight attendant

United 175 (Boston to Los Angeles)
Crashed into World Trade Center
Robert J Fangman, Claymont, DE, flight attendant
Michael Horrocks, Glen Mills, PA, First Officer
Amy Jarret, Philadelphia, PA and Rhode Island, flight attendant
Amy King, Stafford Springs, CT, flight attendant
Kathryn LaBorie, Providence, RI, flight attendant
Alfred Marchand, Alamogordo, NM, flight attendant
Victor J. Saracini, Lower Makefield Township, PA, Captain
Michael Tarrou, Stafford Springs, CT, flight attendant
Alicia Titus, San Francisco, CA, flight attendant

American 77 (Washington/Dulles to Los Angeles)
Crashed into the Pentagon
Charles Burlingame, Herndon, VA, Captain
David Charlebois, Washington, DC, First Officer
Michele Heidenberger, Chevy Chase, MD, flight attendant
Jennifer Lewis, Culpeper, VA, flight attendant
Kenneth Lewis, Culpeper, VA, flight attendant
Renee May, Baltimore, MD, flight attendant

United 93 (Newark to San Francisco)
Crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania
Lorraine Bay, Hightstown, NJ, flight attendant
Sandy Bradshaw, Greensboro, NC, flight attendant
Jason Dahl, Denver, CO, Captain
Wanda Green, Linden, NJ, flight attendant
Leroy Homer, Marlton, NJ, First Officer
CeeCee Lyles, Ft Myers, FL, flight attendant
Deborah Welsh, New York City, NY, flight attendant

After pulling up the app, I was greeted by a message saying our reservations had been canceled. Crap.

My first thought was that the agent screwed up yet again when we didn’t take the first flights after that 14-hour delay, so everything had been auto-canceled. But before I jumped to conclusions, I picked up the phone. I decided not to call Hawaiian at all and instead called Alaska to get some help this time.

A Boise-based agent answered and told me that everything looked fine on his end. That was a relief, but… what was going on with the app? After he investigated, he said it was because the original Hawaiian agent had done something she was not supposed to do. (SHOCK!) She refunded our original coupons before the trip was finished, and somehow the app interpreted this as our itinerary having been canceled.

Let’s forget about how stupid this is for the app to work this way. What really bugged me was when he said that this meant we’d have to see an agent at the airport to check in. No kiosks. An agent. Ugh. But then, I decided I didn’t trust anything, so I went on the website. Sure enough it let me check in. The app? It absolutely wouldn’t even admit these reservations existed, but the website worked. Alaska’s technology really is… something.

The next morning we were off early to get to the airport, and that’s when I discovered that traffic in Hilo can get very, very bad. Google Maps didn’t seem to know what to make of it, and our arrival time kept climbing and climbing and climbing. We had to skip the gas station visit and swallow the sky-high prices from the rental car agency. We weren’t worried about missing our flight, but we were worried that our eventual ETA of 7:39am was going to give us six minutes to get those checked bags tagged.

Fortunately, the rental car drop in Hilo is right across from the terminal. So, I pulled in, and the family jumped out to run across and get the bags tagged. I joined them shortly after, and only then could we all take a deep breath.

We walked through the empty security line which offered only TSA Precheck-light where you get the piece of paper giving you permission to go through the metal detector. On the other side, we found one of my favorite, relaxing airport terminals. It just feels so welcoming with those chairs and couches.

To get to the gates, you have to head upstairs where it is decidedly less spacious.

We found a couple spots to sit, and they called for boarding. I’m not sure why, but I was in B and everyone else in my family was in C. You’d think people in the same reservation would at least be put together, but I guess that’s not how it works. The agents said we should just board in B, so we did… until we got to the end of the jet bridge. That’s when my daughter panicked, saying she had forgotten her suitcase in the waiting area.

A quick swim upstream and one of the agents offered to go get it for her. He brought it over (along with her sweatshirt, oy vey), and then we could go back down to the airplane.

Hawaiian 1019
August 5, 2026

From Hilo
➤ Scheduled Departure: 830a
➤ Actual Departure: 832a
➤ From Gate: 6
➤ Wheels Up: 838a
➤ From Runway: 26

To Kahului
➤ Wheels Down: 902a
➤ On Runway: 2
➤ Scheduled Arrival: 910a
➤ Actual Arrival: 911a
➤ At Gate: 21

Aircraft
➤ Type: Boeing 717-22A
➤ Delivered: June 28, 2001
➤ Registered: N480HA, msn 55125
➤ Livery: Maile Lei colors, “Pueo”

Flight
➤ Cabin: Coach in Seat 7A
➤ Load: ~66% Full
➤ Flight Time: 24m

They seem to be trying to set a record for the number of stickers on the side of these airplanes.

Onboard, the flight attendants were cheerful even though we had been a bit late to start boarding. The relatively light load made it easy to finish up on time, and then we were off.

They taxi these airplanes like they work for Southwest. We headed over to the end of runway 26 for a westbound departure, which seems like it’s probably rare since it goes against the tradewinds. We made a right turn to give enough room between us and the clouds gathering around Maunakea.

Soon after, the flight attendants sprang into action. Naturally, I had a cup of POG juice which is just the right amount of that sweet beverage. Others had coffee.

We hit a cruising altitude of 12,000 feet which was remarkable since that meant we stayed a couple thousand feet lower than when we were at Maunakea’s summit the night before.

After a short crossing of the Alenuihaha Channel, we were descending into Maui. Sitting on the left side, we had a stunning view of Kahoʻolawe, the island formerly used for military ordnance testing which remains off limits. Then it was a straight shot into Kahului.

Despite the check-in hiccups, everything else went well. It would be one week of finally being able to relax before heading back home.

The day before it was time to go home, I went online to check in since the app still wasn’t going to work. I got us checked in, put the boarding passes in my Google Wallet, and then hoped for a 14-hour delay like on the way out. I’m only half-kidding, since a really lengthy delay would give me one more night before heading home. It did not materialize.

We dropped off the rental car, and then took the silly train to the terminal instead of what the airport itself says is a 3 minute walk. I find just about everything about this little train to be annoying. We waited for 3 minutes just for it to take us.

Once we crossed the curbs, we put our checked bags into the machines to make sure we weren’t sneaking anything agricultural off the island. Then we went to print out our bag tags and drop the bags off. Lines were short, so we were at security quickly.

The brand new, giant checkpoint at the south end of the terminal is well underway (and will further make the silly rental car train useless), so eventually security will be better.

But for now, it was just a long line that moved fast through the checkpoint.

Up top, we headed toward the gate. Except for a new outdoor area to sit, the entire southern end of the concourse has now been enclosed, and there is air conditioning throughout, which is very welcome. In addition, there is one brand new gate 7.

That looks nothing like the other gates.

They started to board on time, but there was some difficulty since Southwest’s boarding announcements could be heard in our gate area. There were a lot of people walking up to say, “they called groups 1 and 2, but I’m in group C, so when do I board?” The agents made more than one announcement telling everyone this was a different airline. Eventually, we all got onboard.

Hawaiian 972
August 12, 2026

From Kahului
➤ Scheduled Departure: 1211p
➤ Actual Departure: 1208p
➤ From Gate: 13
➤ Wheels Up: 1217p
➤ From Runway: 2

To Long Beach
➤ Wheels Down: 814p
➤ On Runway: 30
➤ Scheduled Arrival: 816p
➤ Actual Arrival: 818p
➤ At Gate: 11

Aircraft
➤ Type: Airbus A321-271N
➤ Delivered: May 24, 2019
➤ Registered: N220HA, msn 8872
➤ Livery: Maile Lei colors, “Milo”

Flight
➤ Cabin: Coach in Seat 18B
➤ Load: ~99% Full
➤ Flight Time: 4h57m

We found our preferred (but not Premium) seats and settled in. I still like the cloth seating. It feels much more comfortable to me.

Boarding finished up a few minutes early, and that’s when the cold war with my seatmate began. My son was in the window, so I got the middle. Next to me was an older woman who kept putting her arm on my armrest. Normally, I don’t really care that much. There was room for both of us. But the armrest was loose, and she moved a lot. So every time she would move, it would shake me. That wasn’t pleasant. (I reported the loose armrest, so they could write it up.)

This is the first time I’ve heard a pilot announce on pushback, “flight attendants, this is going to be a quick taxi so take your seats.” And indeed, it was. We climbed around some clouds and then it was mostly smooth. Despite that, the pilots kept the seatbelt sign on for more than an hour, probably to keep the aisles clear for service.

The flight attendants came through with a drink service and a bag of Maui chips for all. Then, after a few more minutes, they came through with the meals. I loved my corned beef hash from Chef Sheldon last month, but this was the moment of truth

I had ordered the vaunted Mochiko chicken. When I was on Maui, we went to Tiffany’s which is a restaurant Chef Sheldon took over, and I had an incredible crispy chicken.

But doing something like that at altitude? That’s impossible.

To solve the issue of the chicken not being crunchy when reheated, Chef Sheldon came up with the idea of putting a little spice/crunch packet in the meal which you pour on the chicken which in turn sits on a bed of noodles. There are no instructions, so be warned. (My wife put it on the mac salad.)

So how was it? It was good. It wasn’t an absolute rave like the corned beef hash, but maybe my expectations were too high. The whole family said they liked it though, and that never happens. So I’ll take that as a win.

The real test for me, however, was the mac salad. I love a Hawaiian mac so much, and this one… didn’t do it for me. It was a good consistency and all that, but the flavor just wasn’t there. It seemed really bland, which is a problem for all food at altitude. Bummer.

I had set up my phone in the device holder, so I could stream the end of the Diamondbacks game. (We lost the series to the Rockies? Come on….) It took awhile for the trash to be picked up, but once that happened, I broke out my computer.

About five minutes later, the guy in front of me reclined. This was very cramped. I had my water in the tray table cupholder, so my computer was skewed to the left. The screen was bent forward when the seat reclined, and my t-rex arms came out. Don’t forget the armrest that would shake when the woman next to me moved. It wasn’t great, but hey, that’s coach.

To make things even more annoying, the woman on the aisle asked us to close the window shade. We would do no such thing, but we did lower it a bit to get the direct sun off. She seemed satisfied.

The flight attendants came through with the chocolate-covered macadamia nut “sweet treat” about 50 minutes before arrival. Unfortunately, they didn’t bring through any more water. We only had one water service in the middle of the flight.

At the top of descent, the pilots came on and again said something else I’d never heard. They asked us to get off the airplane quickly when we landed, so they could get to their hotel since they had an early morning the next day. That seemed odd since we were landing just a couple minutes late. (And yes, the flight went on time the next day.)

We had a very nice descent in as the sun set quickly behind us, the lights of Long Beach growing closer by the minute.

It was a routine landing and quick taxi to the gate. But by the time we got off the airplane, we saw this.

I had initially thought something must have gone wrong, but they do scheduled maintenance in Long Beach, so maybe they were just eager to move fast. Or maybe something was wrong and they were quick on the draw.

Either way, we grabbed our bags and then it was a 10 minute Lyft home. Remind me why I fly out of LAX again?

Alaska Airlines is holding a big media and investor day on September 29, and that means it’s a rare time when I will be in person with my two co-hosts of The Air Show — Brian Sumers and Jon Ostrower. Instead of just taking a photo to commemorate this momentous occasion, we’ve decided to do our first ever LIVE show that evening at 7:30pm where we talk about all the news that Alaska and Hawaiian released that day.

We quietly announced we were doing this late last week, and half the tickets have already been sold. Is it because of our charming personalities? Obviously. Well, it’s that and the fact that I sing airline jingles like an angel. But it’s also because we will be interviewing Alaska President Shane Tackett on stage, and people want to hear his take on the big news of the day.

As an added bonus, Boeing has graciously offered to host the event at the Boeing Customer Experience Center (CEC) in Renton, just a few minutes away from the media day venue. This place is usually off limits to the public, but you’ll get the chance to go in and walk through a couple of mock cabins while you’re there.

Are you still not sold on how much fun this will be? It’s only $50 including fees. Still not there? Ok, fine. We will have beer! And light bites!

If you still are on the fence, I don’t think there’s anything I can do, but I’ll try one last thing…

After the recording — which you get to hear before everyone else since it won’t go live for a couple of days after editing — there will be a Q&A with us and Shane. This won’t be put into the podcast, so it’s really about getting your burning questions answered. (And I’ll save you from having to waste your most obvious question… boxer briefs is the answer.) Then there will be time to mingle with us after as well.

With half the tickets already sold, I wouldn’t wait too long to make a decision. Come and join us!

Disclosure: Alaska is providing travel for us and other members of the media who attend their media day.

We know that American’s initial plan for the XLR was to put it on the New York/JFK to LAX and San Francisco transcon routes to replace the 102-seat A321T that is dedicated to those routes today. This isn’t the highest and best use of the XLR by any stretch since it doesn’t require the range, but it’s how American decided it could avoid a dedicated fleet and use something with broader utility in the network.

If that’s an immutable requirement — which we could also debate, but I won’t for sake of brevity — then you can almost forgive the decision to put these on European routes from New York. It’s easiest to flow aircraft that way. So, JFK to Edinburgh and now Nice, well, those can come off the transcon flights. (I still think Amsterdam is a different animal that is going to face real challenges, but I get the strategy.)

Even if we accept that assumption, we have to keep in mind that these airplanes are now being run out of Philly to Porto and Vienna next summer. The transcon flights don’t touch Philly on this airplane, so this is a decision to focus on Europe and Philly as opposed to something else.

That “something else” that keeps bugging me is Latin America. Ever since American bought Eastern’s (previously Braniff’s) Latin routes in 1990, that has been American’s strongest international region. If you get a new airplane with new capability, you would think the best option would be to put that airplane to work reinforcing your strengths so nobody else can make inroads. In Latin America, that means having the ability to go deeper into the continent on thinner routes. And it’s in that region that American has seen its presence look wobbly.

Naturally, I asked American about this, and a spokesperson gave me a statement that ended with this:

We ​will continue ​to harness ​the power ​of [the XLR] ​by ​extending it ​to our Latin ​America network ​in ​the ​coming years as ​we ​take ​delivery ​of more aircraft. This will ​primarily be ​centered ​around ​Miami ​(MIA), where ​the ​aircraft can do ​much of what ​it does ​in Europe: ​add ​new routes ​and ​destinations, ​grow frequencies, and ​extend ​the ​season of operations.  There ​is ​one ​added ​benefit ​of ​this deployment, and that ​is ​many ​of ​the markets in Latin ​America ​are counter-cyclical, ​so we ​could ​deploy ​XLRs to Europe ​in ​the ​Summer months, ​and redirect them southbound in ​winter months.

Ok, and yes, I imagine you would want more in winter than in summer, but there is still robust demand year-round, especially for the Latin origins. And competition is coming for American’s already smaller network. To break this down, I pulled the data to Deep Latin America.

I defined “Deep Latin America” as being Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina. In other words this is every country that is fully below the equator plus Brazil which has no substantive population or possible destination in the sliver just north of the equator. Let’s start with a look at departure share by airline over the years, thanks to Cirium schedule data.

United States to Deep Latin America Departure Share

^{Data via Cirium}

American had historically been in the 40 percent range, even as recently as 2014. But then it started to go downhill. By 2018, it was closer to 30 percent. More recently it’s been at 30 percent in northern winter, but northern summer sits down below 25 percent. And let’s not forget that it lost LATAM as a partner in 2019 when that airline joined up with Delta instead, so the impact is greater.

Between LATAM and Delta, their combined share hasn’t changed all that much. Sure, it has climbed up in the last few years a bit to over 40 percent, but the bigger changes are at the other end of this graph.

Azul and Gol are the ones who have really grown their share. Gol in particular started out using narrowbodies, but it has grown up into widebodies this year. Still, it’s those narrowbodies that American would target with its XLR and make real inroads. But it has chosen not to do that yet.

American’s strategy in Deep Latin America has changed fairly dramatically over the years. Take a look:

American Airlines Deep Latin America Departures and Destinations

^{Data via Cirium}

Even during northern winter peak, American’s current levels of flying are below where they were 10 years ago. The off-season is below where it was 20 years ago. But what we do see is a rallying around only the biggest markets in Deep Latin. American serves only five destinations there year-round now, six if you include Montevideo which is northern winter only.

That alone might not seem like a big deal, but I think this map might change your mind.

^{Data via Cirium}

That’s a lot of red dots. At one point in the last couple decades, American has served all of these destinations with its own metal. Not all of these were major destinations, to be clear — Porto Alegre (POA) was only briefly served in Feb/Mar 2016, for example — but they were served. And many of them were served by the mighty B757 which was so capable, it could handle hot-and-high spots like La Paz and more distant destinations like Asunción.

These are the routes that Gol and Azul are currently flying. From the US, Gol serves Brasilia and Manaus while Azul serves Belo Horizonte along with Recife and Viracopos. Oh, and Boliviana serves Santa Cruz de la Sierra, but that’s nothing new. But competition is about to heat up, I’m guessing.

Let’s not forget here that LATAM has 13 XLRs of its own on order, and SKY has 10. You have to think they will both fly some of those to the US. And at some point, Delta and LATAM will actually pay more attention to their joint venture and do more with it as well.

In other words, American should not be sleeping on this.

This doesn’t even have to start as adding new dots to the map, though I agree with AA that is the best place to start. It could also be about doing a better job connecting existing dots to other hubs in the US.

American Airlines Deep Latin Departures By US Gateway

^{Data via Cirium}

Of course most of these flights go from Miami, but even Dallas/Fort Worth has lost some ground since pre-pandemic. And New York had a brief build-up post-pandemic, but now it has been reduced to its usual operation. Both JFK and LAX could hit Lima with the XLR, for example. They could also do anything in northern South America.

That not only makes it easy to flow aircraft into the transcon network, but it helps American to build its presence further both in the region and in its hubs.

To me, this is the best and highest use of an XLR to start. You undoubtedly want more capacity in Latin America in northern winter, so that does still leave opportunity for some Europe flying during northern summer, but it should start with protecting and growing Latin with everything else filling in the gaps.

Hello, Seattle! We are doing our first ever LIVE taping of The Air Show podcast, and you can join us in the audience. We’ll be interviewing Alaska President Shane Tackett on stage right after the airline’s media and investor day on September 29. There will be plenty to discuss, and as an added bonus, Boeing has given us access to the company’s Customer Experience Center for the event. Buy tickets today before they sell out.

Southwest Announces Entry Into Lounge Game

It’s being called the worst-kept secret in the industry, and that’s probably accurate — but it’s a secret no more, as Southwest announced its plan to open 11 lounges across the country — the first of which will open by the end of 2027.

The lounges will be opened in conjunction with Chase and “will combine the warmth and friendliness Customers expect from Southwest with sophisticated design, locally-inspired dining, high-quality amenities, and valuable travel benefits that are offered today in the Chase Sapphire Reserve Lounge Network,” according to Southwest. The first four locations will be Austin, Baltimore, Honolulu, and Nashville. These serve as three of the top hubs intentional connecting opportunities in Southwest’s network… plus Austin where Southwest is in a dogfight with Delta. They’re all natural first choices.

Exact access procedures to the lounges is not known at this point, other than that a Chase credit card will be a factor. Whether or not those on Business Select fares receive access also is not yet known. Our suggestion to Southwest (and this is free of charge) is to give customers a letter and number upon checking in (say, something like A25 or B11). Then they can attempt to source some sort of placard or post which allows customers to line up in order of their assigned number and can then be admitted to the lounge in that order.

Air Canada’s Summer Expansion

This week it was Air Canada’s turn to announce new global destinations for summer 2027, and the carrier is adding to Asia, Europe, and Latin America with new flights from its three main international gateways in Montréal, Toronto, and Vancouver. Five new cities will join the AC family:

• Basel
• Dubrovnik
• Guangzhou
• Oslo
• Shannon

From Toronto, AC will operate summer seasonal service to Oslo, operating 4x weekly on the A321XLR. Toronto – Shannon will also fly on the XLR, and it will operate 3x weekly during the summer. YYZ to Nice will also be summer-only, and it’ll fly 2x weekly on the A330-300. Also from Toronto, 1x weekly Guatemala City service will become year-round beginning in May, and the airline will add a 5th daily YYZ-LHR, bringing back the daytime flight east, with the XLR leaving Toronto at 8:30 a.m. and arriving in London at 9 p.m.

Vancouver to Guangzhou will fly 3x weekly and year-round beginning May 4, and will operate on the B787. The Francophone’s out there will want to try out Montréal – Basel, a 4x weekly flight operating next summer on the A321XLR in competition with Air Transat’s service while YUL to Dubrovnik will also fly during the summer only, 3x weekly on the Dreamliner.

JetBlue Receives Tentative Approval for LGA Slots

The feds are unlikely to block JetBlue’s $58.5 million purchase of Spirit’s 22 ghost slots at New York/LGA made in July.

The government published a notice in the Federal Register on Monday in which it said JetBlue’s slot purchase “ensures that scarce public airspace resources are returned to active commercial service under a proven low-fare business model.” What it didn’t say is that JetBlue’s proven low-fare business model only exists, because it can’t get people to pay more, but that isn’t the point. It matters, because the carrier needs an exemption from the FAA which currently prohibits the sale or purchase of LGA slots. Provided the deal goes through, JetBlue would be stuck with the slots and unable to move them until at least April 2028.

The slots would also remain subject to the FAA’s whims authority, including its ability to yank them from JetBlue when it determines that doing so is in the public interest. The government says interested parties have until September 21 to comment on the descision. Our only request is that you CC us on your comments sent to the FAA.

FlAAgship Suites Unveiled

American Airlines showed the world what its new premium-configured B777-300ER will look like for passengers as it transitions away from international first class and instead focuses on its premium business class offering on long-haul flights.

The updated B777-300ERs will feature a whopping 70 suites in business, along with 44 premium economy seats and another 30 extra legroom seats in Main Cabin Extra behind the curtain. The 70 suites will make this the largest business class cabin amongst U.S. carriers. This includes eight Flagship Suite Preferred seats which will be in the front row of both business class cabins. N718AN, the first retrofitted aircraft with the new cabin has now entered service and will fly on AA’s most premium routes which we assume to be DFW to El Paso, ORD to Moline, Miami to Tallahassee, and Phoenix to Tucson.

The carrier will stop selling first class on these aircraft in November as the retrofit continues. This is despite knowing it’ll take more than a year to complete the full retrofit, meaning some will receive the first class seating at Business Class pricing. The people of Tucson and Moline better get moving on this before the seats are gone.

United Increases App Functionality

United’s app is generally considered to be the best amongst U.S. carriers, and it widened its lead this week, rolling out new features to give customers more options during irregular operations. When disrupted travel plans occur, passengers now have the option to standby for as many as three earlier flights at a time increasing the odds to get where it is they’re going (or at least figure out a path to get out of Newark). The new functionality will then text you if and when a seat comes up on one of the standby flights giving the option to take the new flight or to keep confirmed seats on the original flight.

The only real loser here (assuming it works as advertised) will be non-rev travelers (and others that play the standby game) who will now have more competition for standby seats with customers who can now list themselves on up to three flights at a time. The earlier flights must be eligible United flights to the same destination. Partner flights and co-terminals will still need to be selected via a United agent either online, on the phone, or at the airport.

Other app updates include making inbound aircraft information on the main flight status page, making real-time information about where your plane is more accessible. It’ll also now provide TSA wait times at its hubs, integrate Apple’s “Find My” technology in the app to help you find the luggage the airline lost, and giving all customers who are in a premium cabin a link to the Instagram account of everyone booked in Basic Economy to allow for digital shaming in addition to in-person.

• Air China is adding flights to both Europe and North America.
• AirAsia announced its first codeshare agreement and as we predicted in this space — no, no need to double check that — it’s with Pegasus Airlines.
• airBaltic secured €257 million of interim financing.
• Alaska is adding 2x weekly flights from San Diego to Loreto. This will mark its 50th nonstop destination from SAN.
• ANA is adding eight more E190-E2s.
• Condor is teaming with Qantas.
• Delta withdrew from the opportunity to partner on a new national airline for Ghana. because it got an email from someone in Nigeria who really needed that money more.
• Emirates has a fancy new premium economy seat.
• FLY91 placed an order for 40 ATR 72-600s which is 51 less than we were expecting.
• Jazeera Airways is doing surprisingly well.
• Qantas is adding Maybach terminal transfers for a lucky few in Sydney.
• Qatar is beefing up service to Saudi Arabia.
• SAS completed Starlink installation on its entire fleet of 81 A320neo aircraft.
• Saudia is adding 3x weekly service to Muscat.
• Singapore will unveil its new suites on November 7.
• Southwest has added a LOT of new partners recently and added to that list this week.
• SpiceJet is suspending B737-8 ops for an undetermined amount of thyme.
• TAP took it on the chin in the first half of 2026.
• Virgin Australia is speeding up the elimination of the B737-800 from its fleet.

A gorilla goes into a bar and orders a martini.

This totally amazes the bartender, but he thinks, “What the heck, I guess I might as well make the drink.” So he mixes the martini. He then walks back over to the give it to the gorilla, and the animal is holding out a $50 bill. Well, now the bartender is just at a loss for words. He can’t believe that a gorilla walked into his bar, ordered a martini, and then actually had cash to pay for it.

So, in amazement, he takes the $50 and walks to the cash register to make the change. While he’s standing in front of the cash register he stops for a second and thinks to himself, “Let me try something here and see if the gorilla notices anything.”

So he walks back over to the gorilla and hands him just $1 change. The gorilla doesn’t say anything, he just sits there sipping the martini.

After a few minutes the bartender just can’t take it anymore. “You know,” he says to the gorilla, “we don’t get too many gorillas in here.”

And the gorilla says, “At $49 a drink I’m surprised you get any customers at all.”

BlueFirst will be put on the entire fleet that has no Mint service. The majority of the airplanes in that subset are A320s, so let’s start there with a trip down memory lane.

I’ve written this up multiple times over the years, and each time I have to add a new seat map on the right. It’s incredible that we are now on the sixth iteration.

Originally, JetBlue had 162 seats and good seat pitch for all except that last, non-reclining row. Upselling was not a thing in this configuration. Soon, then CEO David Neeleman pulled out that last row, and that meant legroom behind the wing got even better. Still no upsell. Then, JetBlue learned it could eliminate one more row and cut out a flight attendant. That gave a ton of room up front, and I believe even that didn’t create upsell, because why would you pay for an extra inch or two when you already had 34″?

Finally, the Even More (legroom/space/etc) era began, and that’s when regular coach standardized at 34″ with a small cabin of 38″ for the upsell. But still, if you have 34″, how much will you pay for a few more? You don’t need it.

It took JetBlue forever, but in the era of slimline seats, it could finally fix this mess more easily. Standard seating went down to 32″ while Even More space went to 35-36″. JetBlue added 12 more seats to the airplane, which was helpful, and cutting legroom in the back helped create incentive to buy up. But 32″ on slimline seats? That’s still too good for a base product.

The addition of 12 First Class seats in the front of the plane would normally require shrinking the total number of seats onboard, but that’s not happening here. The seat count stays the same. In front of the exit, we obviously see six seats go away since these three BlueFirst rows have 4 abreast instead of 6 in coach. But JetBlue makes up for that by adding an extra row in the back. To do that, seat pitch goes down again from 32 inches to an industry standard of 30 to 31 inches.

In the end, JetBlue trades 12 EvenMore seats away in favor of 12 BlueFirst seats JetBlue converts the two exit rows to EvenMore which means the seat count stays flat while then adding 12 BlueFirst seats. This will absolutely generate more money for the airline. Just a big seat in BlueFirst alone would do it for JetBlue, but this is JetBlue and it’s not going to just throw a big front seat out there. It’s going to do this in style.

We now know what the product is going to look like, and here it is:

Looks nice and fancy, huh? It apparently has “Tuft & Needle’s T&N Flex foam” which… is a good thing? But really, it’s just another First Class seat. It comes with all the usual bells and whistles you’d expect in First Class, but there are a couple of things that are fun and different.

The screens will be big at 13.3″, and of course they’ll have Bluetooth as you’d expect. But they are now adding in a fun feature to the Blueprint entertainment system. BlueFirsters, as I’m gonna call them, will be able to order food, but now they can also order drinks. They can even create their own drinks in “Mixologist Mode” by choosing the alcohol and mixers a la carte. Is this ground-breaking and world-changing? No, but it’s a nifty feature that people will find nifty. Sometimes that’s all you need to stand out.

The food… oh yeah, the food. JetBlue has done wonders in Mint, and now it’s doing that on a smaller scale.

The plan is to give travelers bento boxes called FirstFare on flights 900 miles and longer. This includes a main, a side dish, and a dessert. There will also be a ton of branded snacks, all of which can be ordered through the entertainment system. Oh, and outside of food, those on the redeye will get a little extra with a blanket and a “snooze kit.”

This looks like a very solid product that people will love. More importantly for JetBlue, it’s a product people will pay for. It probably should have been done a decade ago, but the airline was too focused on other things during the Robin Hayes era. Now, it’s doing the work it needs to do to get back on track. The only question is whether or not it can outrun its mountain of debt with all of these revenue-producing initiatives.

I didn’t want to just look at the average length of delay, because that isn’t entirely telling. It can get skewed. Instead, I decided to create bands of delays to show what percent of flights for each airline fell into each group. Just extracting the data was going to take some time, so I settled on looking at just a single month. Naturally I took the heart of the summer and used this past July.

Before we look at the numbers, keep in mind that these are all by marketing airline, so regionals are included. Now, let’s take a look.

Delay-Length Bands by Marketing Airline – July 2026

^{Data via Anuvu}

The lightest red at the bottom shows arrivals within 14 minutes of schedule (or earlier), so that is the number that most people are used to seeing as a measure of on-time performance. And the numbers aren’t all that surprising with Alaska/Hawaiian in first place thanks to their good operations and more benign weather. Then it’s Delta with United close on its heels.

JetBlue has had a miserable summer, and the weather has just been brutal for them. But they’re always at the bottom. Frontier is bad, no surprise there either. But then there’s Southwest which from this metric made American look good.

On a recent episode of The Air Show, I spoke with Southwest COO Andrew Watterson, and he talked about what the airline was doing to fix its issues. But he also noted that many of the delays were short, and that is important, because it is far less disruptive for travelers. This tells that exact story.

As you can see, Southwest by far had the most delays that fall into the 15 to 60 minute category. Remarkably, if you look at A60 — the two bottom categories combined — Southwest jumps to third place behind Alaska and Hawaiian. (Technically, that’s second place, but I broke out the Hawaiian and Alaska operations to show the differences there.) So Southwest’s delays are annoying, but they aren’t going to be as much of a fire-breathing, anger-spewing, “I hate you x airline” kind of delay, at least 91 percent of the time.

A one to two hour delay is enough to make a lot of people made, and this is where we shouldn’t be surprised to see JetBlue at the top with nearly 10 percent of its flights. Like I said, combine an already weak operation with exceptionally poor weather, and you are going to be in trouble.

Frontier and Allegiant follow, and that’s probably because when things do go wrong, they try as best they can to eventually run a flight. I say “try” since Frontier still canceled 2.8 percent of flights and was below average. But Allegiant succeeded, being the only big airline that canceled fewer than one percent of flights. Allegiant does run a better operation than Frontier pretty consistently. Of the big guys, well, American is worst to the surprise of nobody. United did pretty well for itself.

Now let’s look at the really bad stuff, delays of over two hours. This is where gate agents start to need bodyguards. And sure, JetBlue is again the worst performer followed by Frontier and Allegiant. Shocking, I know. But to be fair, American is actually tied with Allegiant.

Breeze stands out to me here. It was doing fine in the upper middle part of the pack in the one to two hour delay band, but over two hours? It has a lot of those. That’s definitely something to keep in mind.

I would see these are the main takeaways from a big picture perspective:

• JetBlue and Frontier are the biggest problem children
• Southwest has a delay problem, but you won’t be delayed that long
• Of the big three, American is the worst
• Alaska and Hawaiian are doing great, even if my flight was delayed 14 hours

A Regional Look

I did go a little bit deeper on the four airlines that have branded regional flying to see if there were any big differences there. And there were some variations, at least for three of them. Alaska wasn’t all that different whether mainline, SkyWest or Horizon.

For Delta, SkyWest was over 81 percent A14 while Endeavor was under 68 percent. Geography may have something to do with that, but Republic flies all around the northeast too, and it was at 75 percent, so Endeavor looks like a problem. Piling on, Endeavor had nearly eight percent of flights delayed more than two hours while Republic was just over five percent and SkyWest was under four percent.

At United, the script was flipped. Mesa and Commute Air were best at over 80 percent while SkyWest was worst at just over 72 percent. SkyWest and mainline were actually almost the same, actually. Looking at long delays, Mesa was by far the best. It is shocking and somewhat disorienting to be able to say that, but once you’ve retired all those ancient CRJ-900s and focused on relatively new Embraer 175s, I guess that can happen.

And then there’s American which had the biggest swings of all. You know what? Let’s just put this in a visual to look at.

American Airlines Delay Stats by Operating Airline – July 2026

^{Data via Anuvu}

Look at Envoy doing a great job, and then look at both mainline and PSA doing a terrible job. PSA, of course, flies up and down the east coast, so that’s a problem. But guess what… so does Republic.

I know geography goes into a lot of these issues, but Endeavor under Delta and PSA at American look like the regional airlines to avoid if you can.

A New York City Look

I know I keep talking about how geography impacts these results, so let’s take a look at New York City to get a better sense of what I’m talking about. To be clear, everything was bad there, but some were worse than others. For this, I looked at a combined JFK and LaGuardia for American, Delta, and JetBlue. Then for United, I looked at Newark.

NYC Delay Performance by Marketing Airline – July 2026

^{JFK/LGA for AA/DL/B6 and EWR for UA Data via Anuvu}

This tells a story of relative consistency. JetBlue is relatively bad, of course, but that is consistent…. But the big three don’t vary all that much from each other. United is a little better about getting planes in on time, and Delta is a little better at keeping delays shorter. We can pull all of these apart and find their own weak spots, but the point is that systemwide data matters. Just keep in mind that individual airports are going to give different results.

Scott has been beating a drum for years that American will be forced to de-hub Chicago, because it is losing so much money there. As of now, he believes American is losing about $1.1 billion a year in Chicago, and that’s likely to grow. Frankly, that is neither here nor there unless you’re an American shareholder looking for near-term gain.

The reality for American is that it has already lost New York, it is losing ground in Los Angeles, and it screwed up Chicago too. American used to take more local passengers and do better in Chicago than United, but after COVID, United made bold moves while American sat there. American can’t really become number one in any of these markets again, not with the way Delta and United are pouring in capacity and taking corporate share. But in Chicago, it can at least be a solid number two — well, excluding Midway, depending how you count it, at least.

These big three markets may not have mattered as much in the past, but now they not only support a lot of capacity but they also generate huge money in terms of loyalty and credit cards. American does now need to be big in these market if it wants to compete with Delta and United, but perhaps even more important is that American and every other airline in the US has a vested interest in not letting United dominate Chicago. That would give United the one thing that it wants that American and Delta alone have in Dallas/Fort Worth and Atlanta respectively… a hub capable of running 1,000 daily departures. I haven’t modeled how much worse off American would be if that happened, but I would hope they have over there at Skyview. It would be bad. And American has been thrown a lifeline to stave that off.

United had beaten American in Chicago with its moves post-pandemic. If the airport’s gate allocation plan went as expected, United would just keep taking more and more and American less and less. But then the feds stepped in. They capped operations this summer at levels that favored American and ignored United’s recent build-up. That meant that United’s whole gate allocation plan broke, and American is back in the game.

So now, Scott is out there spreading the gospel about how American will still have to abandon O’Hare, and he is doing pre-damage control by trying to convince Chicagoans that this is a good thing. He said this at a Crain’s Power Breakfast in Chicago, and it has spread like wildfire:

Network hubs require airlines to feed customers from smaller markets, what the industry refers to as “catchment” flights. But there is a limit to the total number of flights that the airspace around a large airport can accommodate.

You have twice as many catchment flights: There’s twice as many flights to Milwaukee as there would be the equivalent number of flights from, you know, at Atlanta to Charlotte um or Atlanta to Raleigh Durham. So that constrained resource of the number of flights [that can flow through the airspace around O’Hare] is being used to fly twice as many flights to those local markets that don’t really drive the local Chicago economy.

Got it? Basically, Delta and American have their massive home-base hubs that can be a gateway to the world. They can cram through more seats on fewer flights from feeder cities, and then they can support a whole lot more flights to new destinations with that increased level of feed. United and American are both over-serving every feed market from Chicago — since they are in closed systems that don’t feed each other — so there isn’t enough room to optimize and grow new markets. A lot is being wasted on competitive positioning.

In general, this is true. And we can see it in the data.

July 2026 Average Daily Departures to Destination by MSA Size at the Hub

^{Data via Cirium}

What I did is look at the average daily departures by destination within the population bands by MSA served by the airport. And what it shows is that combined, American and United do indeed have more daily flights from Chicago than the others do at their own single-hub airports. This isn’t a surprise. But individually, they are much smaller.

Scott mentions Milwaukee, and that’s a great and easy example to use. Here are all flights from Milwaukee to Chicago/O’Hare from both airlines on Monday, July 12, 2026 as an example:

Just look at all that overlap. It’s completely unnecessary except for competitive positioning. The passenger numbers aren’t there, and that’s why there are six flights on 50-seaters, five flights on 65-seaters, and three flights on 76-seaters. That’s it.

Now what Scott is saying here is that if American disappears, United wouldn’t need to replace all those flights. It could not replace them or it could upgauge if needed. But that frees up a lot of airport runway and gate capacity, so United could grow by feeding more spokes with more flights on bigger airplanes.

The people of Milwaukee wouldn’t suffer, because they aren’t flying to Chicago anyway. They’re flying through Chicago. They could still fly American, but they would just have to fly through a different hub. And the people of Chicago would be happy, because they would get some flight further afield where they actually want to go in exchange for losing a flight to Milwaukee that they would never take anyway.

With all that extra capacity, O’Hare might see about 250 fewer daily flights, but United would have 1,000 of them and it would be able to build a more formidable hub. It could bring more people into Chicago, generating more demand for outbound flights to all sorts of new and fun destinations. This is what Scott is talking about when he says the area would benefit.

The problem, of course, is not in Milwaukee. It’s in those cities where Chicagoans actually go. Would Chicagoans be better off if they could only fly United to Orlando? It would probably be more expensive. Or would some other airline just backfill? What about a smaller city like, say, Pittsburgh? There are more than 300 daily passengers each way flying between those cities as their origin and destination. Would they be better off if American was gone? It’s hard to imagine that.

As is the case with most things, this would be a trade-off. Chicago would stand to benefit by gaining new routes to new destinations with that . If you can tune the hub to run that way, it’s an impressive thing. But this all seems like a discussion that’s for naught. Yes, it may make sense financially to walk away in a vacuum, but there is a whole lot more to consider. And American leaving Chicago just seems impossible.

This is why I think Scott’s best hope is that a future management team at American will talk more about that merger he wants to push. To be clear, I don’t think that’s in any way likely, but now that the O’Hare gate plan has been blown up by the feds, it’s United’s best hope.

United Adds All the Destinations

United Airlines has made its summer route announcements into an annual thing, and the airline did not disappoint this year. At a fancy unveiling in Newark, the carrier announced ten new international destinations, which feature eight places not currently served by any U.S. airline. All 10 are in either Asia or Europe, and not surprisingly, eight will depart from EWR giving customers even more options in fleeing the greater Newark area.

From Newark (starred if summer-seasonal only):

• Luxembourg (1x daily begins March 27 on the A321XLR)
• Ljubljana (4x weekly begins May 12 on the B767-400ER)*
• Olbia (3x weekly begins May 27 on the B767-300ER)*
• Catania (4x weekly begins May 28 opn the B767-300ER)*
• Ibiza (4x weekly begins May 31 on the A321XLR)*
• Valencia (3x weekly begins June 2 on the A321XLR)*
• Marseille (1x daily begins June 4 on the A321XLR)*
• Terceira (3x weekly begins June 9 on the B737 MAX 8)*

Of these, only Olbia and Catania have service from a U.S. carrier, with both recently adding JFK on Delta as part of a “fan vote.”

From San Francisco:

• Okinawa (3x weekly begins March 27 on the B777-200ER)*

From Washington/Dulles:

• Toulouse (1x daily begins April 26 on the A321XLR)

In addition, UA is adding four new routes to existing cities on its map.

• Denver – Paris (1x daily begins May 27 on the B787-9)
• Los Angeles – Osaka (1x daily beings March 27 on the B787-9)
• San Francisco – Tel Aviv (3x weekly returns March 28 on the B787-9)
• Washington/Dulles – Milan/MXP (3x weekly begins May 28 on the B767-300ER)

For a deeper analysis of United’s big announcement, please visit Tuesday’s post on crankyflier.com.

American Had a Summer Route Announcement Too

American Airlines wasn’t going to leave the stage to just United this week, as the carrier announced seven new international routes, adding three destinations to its route map.

Porto, Reykjavik/KEF, and Vienna are the three new destinations, and the trio will be served on AA from its east coast hub in Philadelphia. When the Vienna flight launches, American will be the only U.S. carrier flying to the city, and it will mark the longest flight operated by the A321XLR (as the crow flies). Porto and Vienna are completely new destinations for American, while Reykjavik returns for the first time since 2019. The Vienna service will begin May 6, while Porto launches March 28 and Reykjavik on May 27.

Four other AAdditions include:

• Charlotte: Barcelona (begins May 27 on the B777-200ER)
• Chicago/ORD: Tokyo/NRT (begins March 19 on the B787-9)
• New York/JFK: Amsterdam (begins March 28 on the A321XLR), London/LHR (4th daily frequency begins March 28 on the B787-9), Nice (begins May 6 on the A321XLR)

For more on AA’s new international destinations, please visit Thursday’s post on crankyflier.com.

JetBlue Opens BlueHouse in Boston

JetBlue’s second lounge is open for business in Boston, and the space comes in about 33% larger than its JFK counterpart at 12,000-square feet. In addition to opening the lounge, it also expanded complimentary access — all Minty Fresh customers (excluding those who purchase Mint Base) now have lounge access. Previously one had to be on a Transatlantic Mint flight or really good at sweet-talking the agent, but now a domestic flight or one to the Caribbean grants access provided its marketed as having a Mint cabin.

Mosaic 4 and JetBlue Premier credit card holders maintain their complimentary acess including one guest. Additional guests are $39 per visit. Mosaic 3 members get the honor of purchasing access at $59 per visit, while Mosaic 1 and 2 members must pony up $79 per person per visit. If you’re not sure what Mosaic tier you are, or how the tiers work, then just forget this entire paragraph.

Regardless of the access method, passengers can not be on any basic fare. Complimentary and paid access are not available for the losers who choose Basic — regardless of the class of service.

AA Fails in FA Survey

Remember in college when you got to rate your professor on the last day of class? It was unlikely a poor review would do much, and the professor may or may not ever read it, but at least it was cathartic to get your beefs on paper and filed away somewhere. This is a lot like that.

More than 8,000 flight attendants overwhelmingly failed AA in an In-flight management survey. This feels like a bit of a troll job by the union, but it doesn’t mean the results aren’t real. Both can be true. The whole exercise comes in response to AA’s decision to start rating flight attendants based on customer experience, delays (seems like a stretch), and contributions to the operation. What were the results? You don’t normally see this much solidarity in a vote outside of presidential elections in North Korea.

The good news is that four percent of FAs say management has followed through on its promise to increase support for FAs inflight or otherwise. The bad news? Well, we think you can do the math. Eighty-four percent say inflight management doesn’t provide the level of in-person support to fix a wide range of issues including catering, contractual issues, legalities, hotels, and transportation. When asked to describe their experience with the inflight management team, 61% called them unsupported while just 10% say they were supportive. Nearly a third apparently couldn’t decide or were too busy thinking about a possible Vienna layover to be bothered.

Do you feel empowered to go above and beyond for customers without fear of criticism or discipline? Eighty-one percent said no, which is a blow for AA, the market leader of the never-ending rolling mechanical delay. It’s important to note that 8,000 FAs polled represent just 28% of AA’s flight attendant population, so maybe the other 72% is very happy with the carrier. Maybe. Also maybe not.

Volaris Plans Seven More U.S.Destinations

Mexican ULCC Volaris currently serves 22 U.S. destinations with Atlanta and Washington/Dulles to make it 24 when they begin the first week of December. But Volaris — currently the largest domestic carrier in Mexico — is planning as many as seven new U.S. destinations to make it 31 total.

The seven are:

• Austin
• Boston
• Minneapolis/St Paul
• Nashville
• Philadelphia
• Raleigh/Durham
• Tampa

All seven still require government approval, so they won’t be launching in the immediate future… or ever, depending upon how the escalating feud between the two governments goes. Volaris once flew to Austin from August 2016 through January 19. The other six would be first-time members of the Volaris family.

• Air New Zealand posted a smaller loss than predicted.
• airBaltic turns 31 today. Let’s hope it makes it to 32.
• American‘s big news this week wasn’t limited to new destinations as it decided to go fishing.
• Delta will resume JFK-TLV on Sept. 6.
• Discover discovered Glasgow.
• Emirates will begin flying an A350-900 to Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday.
• EVA will begin new nonstop service to Delhi on December 1.
• Fiji Airways received permission to grow its presence in the United States.
• Hawaiian will debut jersey patches on University of Hawai’i football jerseys this year, kicking off tomorrow night at Stanford.
• JetBlue‘s third largest shareholder — Icahn Capital – made just north of $40 million while reducing its stake in the carrier to just 3.32%.
• Jin Air will absorb its LCC cousins Air Busan and Air Seoul in March.
• Philippine Airlines will increase its Melbourne service from 5x weekly to 1x daily beginning in November.
• Qantas‘s annual earnings report revealed it plans to retire its A380 fleet four years early, beginning in 2028.
• SWISS will open new Business and Senator Lounges in Zurich early next year.
• TUI Fly Netherlands plans to replace its B737-8 MAXs with -10s beginning next year.
• Virgin Australia plans to reduce capacity by about 3%.
• WestJet FAs ratified a new CBA.

Repairman: “Good afternoon, I’m hear to fix your clock.”

Homeowner: “Thank goodness, I can’t even tell you how long I’ve been waiting for you to show up.”

Repairman: “I know.”

It’s definitely a choice for American to announce its summer 2027 plans two days after United, but it’s probably not one I would have made. United’s blockbuster adds, including 10 new cities, made a big splash. American’s 2027 plans are not going to do that, though that’s not all by choice. Despite the more modest plans, it’s what American is doing with its A321XLRs that still made this post-worthy.

American might have had bigger plans if its orderbook had behaved as expected. It originally thought it would have 13 new airplanes ready to press into service for summer 2027. In reality, it’s going to have only five thanks to delivery delays. That certainly puts a damper on this, and it means we’ll have to wait to see what the airline has up its sleeve for 2028. But we can at least get an idea today of how it is thinking directionally.

American has really tried hard to fluff this announcement by including already-announced service as well as frequency increases and seasonal extensions. That does give it some bulk, but I’m going to ignore all of that. First, however, let me list these out for you with the notable changed in bold:

• Charlotte – Barcelona 1x daily summer-only on a B777-200ER from May 27 (last flown in 2019)
• Charlotte – Paris/CDG 1x daily summer-only service starts March 4 instead of late March (already in schedules)
• Chicago/O’Hare – Tokyo/Narita 1x daily year-round on a B787-9 from March 19 (already in schedules)
• Miami – Milan/Malpensa 1x daily summer-only service starts March 4 instead of late March (already in schedules)
• New York/JFK – Amsterdam 1x daily year-round on an A321XLR from March 28
• New York/JFK – London/Heathrow adds a 4th daily flight year-round on a B787-9P starting March 28 (last flew in summer 2025)
• New York/JFK – Nice 1x daily summer-only on an A321XLR from May 6
• Philadelphia – Keflavik 1x daily summer-only on an A321neo from May 27
• Philadelphia – Porto 1x daily summer-only on an A321XLR from March 28 (intention previously announced)
• Philadelphia – Vienna 1x daily summer through the holidays on an A321XLR from May 6

On the surface, it looks like a big list, but if we eliminate everything that’s already in the schedule, routes that flew pre-pandemic, and Porto which was previously announced without detail, we’re really talking about 4 significant new routes. And three of those are the ones I want to talk about.

Vienna Stretches Those XLR Legs

^{AI-adjusted image via Gemini, and if you don’t know what this is from originally, click here}

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new clubhouse leader. At 4,333 miles, American’s Philly to Vienna flight is the longest scheduled A321XLR route in the world. Number two is on IndiGo which puts an XLR on Amsterdam to Mumbai starting in October. Believe it or not, that’s only 4,266 miles. Next is Iberia at 4,162 miles from Madrid to Santo Domingo. For comparison, United didn’t announce a single route over 4,000 miles this week with Dulles – Toulouse being the longest, clocking in at 3,957.

American has had its XLRs flying for a while now, so it has more experience with the airplane. If it can really do this 4,333 mile flight, that’s good news indeed for everyone who ordered this airplane.

Vienna has always been one of those confusing markets that you expect to have more service than it does. No US airline flies there today. The last time one tried was Delta from Atlanta way back in 2008, and that couldn’t have gone well. While Air Canada does fly from Toronto, nearly all service to North America has been handled by United and Air Canada-partner — and part of Lufthansa Group — Austrian.

Vienna just isn’t a big market. Looking at Cirium’s ARC/BSP data for the 12 months ending June 2026, Vienna from the US was smaller than Warsaw but slightly ahead of Geneva. With Austrian serving seven cities in North America, it doesn’t leave much room for others.

Of course, the A321XLR is the right airplane to try this route if you’re going to take a swing. There is some money to be found in that market, but I can’t image there’s all that much to be had outside of the Lufthansa Group/United/Air Canada joint venture. But I like the idea of trying an XLR on it. If it really does work all the way through the holidays — relying on traffic going to the Christmas markets — then it’s a really big win, but that does seem like more of a stretch.

The best use of the XLR is as a trial-and-error effort. Some will work, and some won’t. But this is one that’s worth trying.

Filling in the New York Gaps With the XLR

The other move of note is the start of JFK to both Amsterdam and Nice. This is how American is trying to thread the needle in New York. It is not competitive in any way across the Atlantic from there. How bad is it? Let’s look at this summer.

This July, American had a total of 10 daily flights across the Pond from JFK. Half of those went to partner hubs (3 to Heathrow, 1 to Madrid, and 1 to Barcelona). The others were Paris/CDG and Milan/Malpensa (year-round) along with Athens, Edinburgh, and Rome (summer-only). Edinburgh was the only A321XLR this summer. If we include joint venture partners and all NYC airports, then it rises to just over 30 daily flights to 11 destinations, but that’s a bit misleading because nearly half those flights go to Heathrow.

Delta, meanwhile, has 31 daily flights by itself to 26 destinations. Add in joint venture partners at all NYC airports and they’re up to more than 47 daily. And over at Newark, United runs nearly 42 daily flights to Europe on its own touching 35 destinations. Including partners and all NYC airports, it’s 54 daily flights.

The problem for American is figuring out how to expand its presence in light of this enormous deficiency. From a business perspective, it has Heathrow locked down, it’s the only US carrier flying to Tokyo/Haneda, and it covers São Paulo well. LAX is all set too. But then there’s the business traveler who needs to go to the next tier down. We’re talking cities like Amsterdam and Frankfurt, both competitor hubs that might make a difference to the person who wants to be AA-loyal.

There’s also the need to serve all those rich business travelers when they go on vacation to places like Nice in summer. American wants people to carry the AAdvantage credit card, so it needs to serve places where rich people want to burn their miles.

Trying to do that with a widebody as the number three or four in a market? It’s just going to bleed money badly. Trying to do that with an A321XLR? Well, it might still bleed money but a whole lot less of it. And if that helps bolster credit card revenues, then the math may work.

It certainly didn’t work for JetBlue which exited the JFK to Amsterdam market on its A321s in 2025 after only two years. And in the press release, American describes Amsterdam as a “time-tested vacation destination,” but I hope that’s not the plan for surviving winter on that route. This should be more about the business traveler.

In the end, there isn’t a lot to talk about for next summer at American thanks to those delivery delays. But you can get the sense of where the airline wants to deploy its fleet. I like Vienna, but I’m certainly more skeptical on the New York adds.

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Overall, the airline will add 10 new cities, six of which aren’t served from anywhere in the US today. It will have a total of 14 new routes that touch five of its hubs, though most of them are at Newark. This also isn’t just about Transatlantic flying, with two of them heading over the Pacific. Enough of the numbers. Let’s go through these, starting with those Pacific routes.

United Leans Into the ANA Joint Venture

• Los Angeles – Osaka/Kansai 1x daily on a B787-9 year-round starting March 27
• San Francisco – Naha (Okinawa) 3x weekly on a B777-200ER from March 27 to October 28

I start with the Pacific routes, because I like these the most. First, there’s the LA to Osaka flight, but that one is straightforward. Osaka may be enormous with nearly 20 million people in the metro area, but the only flights from the US mainland are a single daily from SFO on United and one from LAX on Japan Airlines. And even those are only daily in summer; in winter they lose one or two weekly.

JAL’s presence in that LAX market must drive ANA crazy, but it either doesn’t have the aircraft to devote to the route or it just hasn’t found it worth doing on its own. So United will do it. Alone, I don’t love this, but with ANA as a joint venture partner, this is a good flight.

Then there’s Okinawa which will get 3x weekly during the summer. Again, the ANA joint venture will help to put people on this from the Japan side. But remember, the US military still has a very important strategic position in Okinawa, not to mention that California has a sizable Okinawan diaspora which will help boost the visiting friends and relatives (VFR) market. This is a creative flight that I think should do well.

The A321XLR Expands United’s Options

• Newark – Ibiza 4x weekly from May 31 to October 7
• Newark – Luxembourg 1x daily year-round from April 2
• Newark – Marseilles 1x daily from June 4 to October 29
• Newark – Valencia 3x weekly from June 2 to October 6
• Washington/Dulles – Toulouse 1x daily year-round from April 26

We’ve been hearing promises about how the A321XLR was going to open up all these new opportunities, but we haven’t really seen much yet. (It’s actually the A321LR that has been doing some fun, new flying at other airlines.) But now this is changing with the addition of five new routes that can’t be reached reliably with a B737 MAX, are probably too much of a gamble on an expensive B757, and are too small for a widebody.

It looks like United is starting off with nothing over 3,500 nautical miles; the Toulouse route is longest at 3,438nm. But that Toulouse route is also going to connect Airbus’s North American headquarters which is right near Dulles to its global management headquarters in Toulouse. I have to imagine that Airbus will do just about whatever is needed to make sure this route sticks around.

I put that flight in the same category as the Luxembourg run. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a tiny country, but it’s a rich one. And the XLR is a premium-heavy aircraft. I expect all sorts of Dukes and Duchesses along with bankers and other executives to fill those flat beds. But uh… if you’re looking for an empty cabin in winter, look at the back of those airplanes. If the beds are full, that’s perfectly fine.

The other three are pure leisure routes for the summer, and not one of them is served from the US today. Sure, Air Transat flies to Marseilles and Valencia from Canada (on the A321LR, mostly), but there aren’t a lot of Americans doing that. This just dramatically improves connectivity from the US to places where people with money want to go.

Oh, and not mentioned yet, but if you want to try out that A321XLR, you can do it starting December 1 from Dulles to Amsterdam and Dublin. It’ll work existing routes until the big summer splash.

Blanket the Region With Leisure

• Newark – Catania 4x weekly on a premium-heavy B767-300ER from May 28 to September 20
• Newark – Ljubljana 4x weekly on a B767-400ER from May 12 to October 29
• Newark – Olbia 3x weekly on a premium-heavy B767-300ER from May 27 to September 21
• Newark – Terceira 3x weekly on a B737-8 MAX from June 9 to September 5

That photo is of a MUCH younger me in Ljubljana, Slovenia. And how did I get there? I went in and out of Venice and drove. Slovenia is a remarkable country with wine regions in the east, alpine lakes just outside the capital, beautiful glacial valleys in the west, and a small sliver touching the Adriatic Sea. It is an understatement to say it’s worth a visit, but it is a real pain to get there.

Sure, you can get through some other hubs, but even BA only flies seasonally to London. Ryanair isn’t there at all, and the flag carrier Adria failed in 2019. This is going to open up some real opportunity. Beyond that, United is starting to blanket the Adriatic with service to Dubrovnik and Split in addition to Venice, so travelers can start at one and end at the other. Ljubljana is a risk. That’s a big airplane, but it’s a risk that might just work out considering the other flights it runs in the region.

Olbia and Catania are in a similar vein. Fly into one, fly out of the other. (Just as long as you don’t fly Delta.) And Terceira complements the Ponta Delgada flight which is 100 miles away on a different island. The more presence you can have in a region, the better all the flights should do.

Connecting the Dots

• Denver – Paris/CDG 1x daily on a B787-9 year-round from May 27
• San Francisco – Tel Aviv 3x weekly on a B787-9 year-round from March 28
• Washington/Dulles – Milan/Malpensa 3x weekly on a B767-300ER year-round from May 28

And then there are these three. They aren’t nearly as exciting, so they don’t even get an image. But they do have real value in that they make it easier for United’s customers to get to these cities. SFO – Tel Aviv last flew in October 2023, abrubtly ending when Hamas kidnapped the Israelis to kick off the latest installment of a never-ending war. Now it returns. Paris and Milan have service from other hubs, but now the options grow bigger.

This is an ambitious plan for next summer. Of course it is not without risk, but that’s how it should be. If everything works, United isn’t trying hard enough. And that tells me that in the last few years… United hasn’t been trying hard enough. The only Transatlantic routes that failed in recent memory were Newark – Bergen and Tenerife, and those were from previous years. United did confirm that every route that flew last year will be back again this coming year.

With a success rate that high, I’d be pushing harder as well. Of course, the XLR opens up some new doors, but I figured we’d see more of those replacing B757s to start. That may very well happen — depending upon how many they get from Airbus before summer — but these first shells are about growth and building the network. This is all about building the network, and so far, the strategy is paying dividends.

AirBaltic has been a darling of Europe for many years. It’s based in Riga, Latvia, and it was one of the early operators of the A220. With this new fleet, it had big growth plans and thought it would get up to 100 A220s some day. This idea would have been miraculous considering the size of its home market and its past as an airline that flew a lot of different aircraft in a lot of different ways.

Let’s start off by taking a look at the aircraft changes over the years.

airBaltic Block Minutes by Aircraft Type

^{Data via Cirium}

You donʻt have to go too far back to find an airline with a jumbled mess of a fleet. The backbone was the B737 Classic with -300s and -500s, but it also had a sizable turboprop operation with Fokker 50s that eventually were replaced by Q400s. On top of that, it had a couple Boeing 757s hanging around just for fun.

But in 2017, the transition began to an all-A220 fleet. This was achieved during COVID when everything else was retired, but there was a brief backtracking when the Pratt GTF issues grounded enough airplanes that airBaltic had to bring in capacity from elsewhere. That was mostly temporary, and the airline has been a growing A220 operator ever since.

The problem for airBaltic has been that its homebase in Riga is… not large. So if airBaltic really wanted to grow, it had to expand beyond its natural borders. With a whole bunch of A220s, it figured it could slot those into a lot of airlines who wanted that type of capacity and didnʻt have it on their own. Remember, itʻs a whole lot easier for European airlines to outsource capacity than in the US, so this wasnʻt necessarily a bad plan in theory. The end result was a massive expansion across the Continent.

airBaltic Block Minutes by Base

^{Data via Cirium}

Just look at this. Twenty years ago, airBaltic was trying to be the national airline of the Baltics. It was the primary airline for its home country of Latvia and for Lithuania via Vilnius. It also had a presence in Tallin, Estonia, but it wasnʻt until Estonian Air failed in 2015 and then Nordica tanked in 2019 that airBaltic really ramped up its presence.

Starting in 2016, you can see the beginnings of a strategy to expand elsewhere. This was clearly turbocharged post-pandemic. I probably donʻt need to show you this based on the destinations shown, but letʻs just do it anyway.

airBaltic Block Minutes by Marketing Carrier

^{Data via Cirium}

Before the pandemic, it had dipped its toes into wet leasing with some Thomas Cook/Condor work, and then right before COVID-19, it started flying for Lufthansa Group. SAS was briefly in the mix just after the pandemic, but lately itʻs been a little bit of Air Serbia and a whole lot of Lufthansa Group.

Itʻs gotten so big that this summer, airBalticʻs own flying only accounted for about 55 percent of the airlineʻs total block hours. Most of the rest were for Lufthansa Group.

But hereʻs the thing.

See those big ups and downs in all those charts? Thatʻs because Lufthansa Group wants a whole lot of help in summer, and a whole lot less in winter. For example, this May, airBaltic was scheduled to fly more than 7,300 block hours for Lufthansa. This coming November? Itʻs down to just over 1,000.

Itʻs really hard to run an airline that is supposed to be huge in summer and then tiny in winter. Weʻve seen some novel partnerships formed to try and solve this problem in the past. Smartwings in Czech Republic used to send airplanes to Canada in winter while Sunwing would send them to Europe in summer.

This works in some limited circumstances, but if youʻre airBaltic, youʻre not going to find a place to send half of your growing fleet in winter.

Of course, thatʻs not what airBaltic says is the issue. It lays the blame on both geopolitics and everybodyʻs favorite whipping boy, the enginemaker.

Demand and revenue growth have moderated, geopolitical developments in Ukraine and the Middle East have increased uncertainty and operating costs, and prolonged Pratt & Whitney engine availability constraints have affected the airline’s ability to deploy its full fleet.

I assume the focus on these issues is simply so it can blame things that have changed as ruining an otherwise perfect plan, even if it’s not the whole story. Either way, this is why the 100-airplane airline is off the table. In fact, even todayʻs 54-airplane airline isnʻt going to work. It will shrink to 36 airplanes by the end of the year and gradually climb back to 40 by 2031 which is obviously many years away to add just four airplanes.

Now, the airline is going to turn its focus to its home base of Riga. It will still have “selected point-to-point services,” but it will also scale back the work it does for other airlines. It says it will have contracts that will put capacity out there “in a more balanced way during both the summer and winter seasons supports.” And that makes a lot of sense.

But what about Riga? Letʻs take a look at how capacity share has changed there over time.

Riga Seat Capacity Share by Airline

^{Data via Cirium}

It looks like airBaltic has held surprisingly steady for the last decade with some small gains. But look at what has happened with the other airlines. Wizz came in big and then disappeared. Letʻs not forget the Russian airlines which have not flown there since the pandemic thanks to that impacts of the Ukraine war.

Ryanair is the airline that has really taken advantage of that situation. It is the clear number two with nobody really aiming at that position, even if Norwegian is in third place. But so far, Ryanair and airBaltic haven’t really been huge competitors. And Ryanair has shrunk in Riga every year since 2022, largely because it hates Latvia’s high fees and taxes.

Looking at Cirium schedules for full-year 2026, only 12.7 percent of airBaltic seats from Riga operate on routes also flown by Ryanair. That is a little deceiving, however. Once you include secondary airports as one, like Charleroi and Brussels or Torp and Oslo, that climbs to 23.3 percent. But you never want to turn your back on Ryanair for a even a minute. This is by far airBaltic’s most important market, so it makes sense that it would finally turn a focus back to it.

This change in plans shifts the airline from one that cares most about growth to one that cares most about being a financial success. It’s the right strategy, but it does mean being a smaller airline.

I was solo on the podcast again this week, but instead of a guest host, I interviewed Southwest COO Andrew Watterson. Yes, he was on the show earlier this year, but a lot has happened since then. Tune in to hear about how the airline is going to fix its on-time problem, what the plans are with the MAX 7, and a little talk about Andrew’s recent change in responsibilities.

Listen on Spotify   |   Listen on Apple Podcasts

Delta and Aeromexico Win in Court

Delta and its joint venture partner Aeromexico scored a big win in court Thursday when the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowing the two carriers to continue their JV — rather than close up shop. This ruling comes more than two years after the DOT ordered the two airlines to end collaborating on scheduling, capacity, pricing, and how many tons of Mexican avocados can be used in guacamole in the United States annually.

In its ruling, the court said the DOT “did not reasonably explain why it conducted a far more limited market analysis in this case ​than it has always done in the past or why it imposed a requirement for approval of the joint venture that it did not require of similar joint ventures it approved in Japan.” The resounding victory for Delta in federal court came in — we’ll give you one guess — Atlanta, and the carrier said that the ruling would allow for the JV to continue to “provide(d) greater choice, more seamless travel, and increased connectivity for consumers while supporting U.S. jobs and economic growth.”

The government isn’t done, however. The DOT said it will consider all legal options available at its disposal to prove illegal cooperation, including seizing the contents of Delta’s secret (though not to us) Biscoff Tunnel in the Atlanta airport which rumors suggest is also holding vats of Jarritos.

Oh Say Can You See on the Back of the Seat In Front of You?

American Airlines is bringing back seatback screens on the majority of its narrowbody fleet, which, coupled with Starlink Wi-Fi , means American is getting closer to replicating the living room setup at 30,000 feet.

The screens will have what AA calls “industry-leading screen sizes,” along with 4K technology, expanded content and partnership, USB-C charging ports, and bluetooth connectivity. So in other words, American will join Delta and United in 2022. If you’ve already booked your travel on AA, don’t hold your breath. Installation will begin in 2028 on newly delivered narrowbody aircraft. The entire fleet including a retrofit of the current aircraft in the fleet isn’t expected until next decade.

Now, AA’s 140 widebody aircraft already feature seatback screens as do its A321XLRs. The narrowbody reversal comes 12 years after the airline doubled-down on the idea that the screens aren’t worth the cost during the post-US Airways merger period. We’ll see what AA’s move is 12 years now — perhaps it’ll be to remove those screens… again.

For more on this, visit this week’s post on Cranky Flier.

Alaska Adds Athens and Paris

Alaska Airlines continues to mold its image into that of a global carrier, as it announced two new European destinations from its Seattle home. This May, Alaska will begin flying to both Athens and Paris/CDG from SEA, operating 5x weekly to Paris and 3x weekly to Athens. Both flights will be operated on Hawaiian’s Alaska’s B787-9 Dreamliners.

Prior to last year, the Hawaiian islands were as far as Alaska had strayed from North America, but that has changed in a big way. These two flights will join London/LHR, Reykjavik, and Rome/FCO as European destinations on the carrier, along with Tokyo/Narita and Seoul/Incheon in Asia. In its release, Alaska said that both Athens and Paris were among the most requested by Atmos members. Well, yeah, you could put Paris with Newark or Tucson, and all of a sudden people would want to go to all three. Paris always does the heavy lifting.

This comes as part of Alaska’s goal of having 14 long-haul destinations by 2030. Alaska will compete head-to-head with Delta on SEA-CDG, while it will not face non-stop competition on SEA-ATH as its the sole carrier flying there not only from Seattle, but from the entire west coast.

American Grows Premium Offerings

It’s not just seatbacks changing on American. The carrier is also growing its onboard premium seating options as it expands both first class and its extra legroom options on its narrowbody fleet.

At this time, American says about 25% of the seats on its narrow body fleet are premium, but after this project is complete, the figure will be closer to 40%. This includes new MAX 10s being delivered with 24 first class seats and a retrofit for its A321neos with more as well. The AAirline will also expand the number of Main Cabin Extra seats, which, when combined with the additional seats in first class will only go to bring greater shame to those still stuck in Main Cabin.

It also plans to refresh the interiors of its single-aisle aircraft, to include adding storage (to encourage more carry-ons and force the boarding process to take even longer), redesigned seats (to increase the chance you won’t find gum on the bottom of your seat), and enhanced lighting (so you can better see the passengers still relegated to Main Cabin despite the dramatic increase in premium seat counts).

Google Wins Bid for Spirit’s Data

Google won an auction with a price of $10 million giving it access to Spirit’s abandoned data, software code, and operations records. Google says it wants the bundle to improve its AI processes but we think they’re doing all this to reverse engineer the feeling of euphoria that came from cracking open a BuzzBall in seat 37C when flying from Fort Lauderdale to Latrobe, PA. The purchase does not include personal data (allegedly) including the 50 million members of Free Spirit, the 97 million who flew on the airline, or internal personal records.

Supposedly what’s included is data from marketing campaigns, HR, strategy, and project management. We understand that to be primarily a comprehensive record of Spirit’s cache of yellow paint cans.

It also includes pricing from billions of flights, pricing curve data, and billions of passenger transaction records. Lastly, it has 30 million lines of codes, metadata, software models, and algorithms along with redacted employee records. At this point, the relevant question isn’t to ask what Google will really do with all this — but to ask how it’s possible they didn’t already have all of it already?

It’s not a done deal yet, however, as Spirit’s flight attendant union is objecting to the sale.

• Air India‘s flights to and from Visakhapatnam will operate from the new Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport, at Bhogapuram. But good news, folks, the airline code isn’t changing, it’s still VTZ, so it should be simple.
• AirAsia is returning 25 aircraft to their lessors.
• Akasa Air agreed to a sale-and-leaseback for seven B737-8s.
• Azul is entering a transition year.
• Brussels Airlines is adding three destinations you’ll likely want to avoid during winter.
• Cathay Pacific says it’ll add 15 airplanes in the next 10 years.
• Fly2Galicia plans to launch operations this December with eight routes from Santiago de Compostela.
• flybondi seems to have booked its appearance in Cranky Flier’s year-end Airlines We Lost post.
• Israir has October 19 as its target date to begin flying to New York.
• Korean Air will begin 3x weekly seasonal service from Seoul to Melbourne beginning December 18.
• Lufthansa City expects its first A220 in November.
• National Airlines received DOT authority for U.S. – Venezuela service. We expect it to open a hub at DCA soon.
• Oman Air named Nasser Al Sharji as its new CEO.
• SAA‘s acting CEO is no longer acting as CEO.
• Somali Airlines is hoping to resume operations later this year.
• SpiceJet was reprimanded in an Indian court.
• Southwest is scooping up $2 billion in credit from Chase and Citi.
• STARLUX is going to grow its training complex in Taipei.
• WestJet completed the de-LCCification of its cabins.

What starts with E, ends with E, and has only 1 letter in it?

Envelope

We were booked to fly from LAX to Honolulu on the 7am departure and then connect to Hilo for a few days, exploring the windward side of the Big Island. We had the morning flight booked with a 1.5 hour connection, which seemed ideal. Then there was a schedule change a couple months before travel, and our connection was canceled. We were looking at a long 2.5 hour connection. We could leave LA on the 10am, have an hour and a quarter in Honolulu, and get into Hilo only an hour later, so we made the switch — after yet another pained conversation with a Hawaiian agent. That was a mistake.

Fast forward to the day of travel. I had woken up leisurely around 6:30am for that nice and late 10am flight when I saw a notification on my phone. Boarding had been delayed until… 5:15pm? I rubbed my eyes to make sure I wasn’t missing something, but sure enough, we had been delayed eight hours to 6pm. Great.

First thing I did was hop online to get the lay of the land. With this delay arriving into Honolulu so late, there were no connections on to Hilo. Even worse, there were no flights from Honolulu to Hilo with four seats the next day either. Naturally, I started scanning for Kona options as I called up Hawaiian, deciding a 2+ hour drive would be better than delaying yet another day.

As usual, I was sent to that awful call center in the Philippines. I don’t understand why that still exists considering it’s the same reservation system as Alaska. The person on the phone said she could look at other options for me, but every 30 seconds she kept saying she had to go ask her colleague for help.

I had found a flight at 1:30pm on American to Kona that had decent availability, so I asked her to move us to that. After talking to her “colleague,” she said they wouldn’t put me on another airline. This made no sense, because it was showing as a maintenance delay. (I actually looked it up, and the flight out the night before turned back to LAX, so they stole our airplane for the 7am flight we were originally on, and the 10am got stuck with the broken plane.)

The agent then asked if I could fly out of a co-terminal. I said yes, but there weren’t any flights that I could get to in time that had availability. (Long Beach was pushing it, but it was full anyway.) She would not stop asking about co-terminals and asked if I could fly out of Seattle or San Francisco. At one point she asked if Sacramento or Oakland would be possible.

At this point, I’ll admit that it got heated. I told her those were nowhere near us, and I needed real solutions before seats disappear. She just kept saying I could get a refund. That was all she was willing to do.

I should have hung up and tried someone else. Actually, I should have hung up and called Alaska to talk to someone in Boise, but the available seats were dwindling. I told her to just refund our outbound, and then I bought tickets on American for a little over $300 each.

It took her a long time, and we were on the phone for more than an hour before she finally got it done. Or she said she got it done, but then I looked online at the reservation and saw she had only done one. Eventually, she got it done.

With our new American flight confirmed and time to kill, I did call Alaska directly and asked them to look at the reservation to make sure our return looked ok. I did not want this mistake to screw us. The Boise-based agent said it was good. (It wasn’t, but that wasn’t apparent until the next part of our trip, so stay tuned for that.)

Just when I thought I could relax, American delayed our new flight by 3 hours. It was an aircraft swap, and our new airplane was in Philadelphia — but it hadn’t even left.

This was not great. I had quickly switched the rental car to Kona, but we still had a more than two-hour drive to where we were staying. We would arrive at 7:30pm which meant stores would be closed, and we’d be driving on a very dark saddle road that climbs above 6,000 feet across the island. If we were lucky, we’d get to our Airbnb at 11pm. On top of this, I didn’t believe the posted departure time since it would require everything to go right in Philly and still only be a 35 minute turn. Yeah, right.

So it was back to the drawing board, and that meant flying the next day. Sure enough, Southwest had a weekend-only 7am flight from LAX to Kona, and we could book basic economy for $282 each, only about $70 more per person than what we originally paid including the checked bags. We’d land at 9:30am and then be on the Hilo side for lunch. Done deal.

And I’m glad we did. That American flight? It showed the inbound arriving at 4:54pm for a long time… with a 4:45pm departure to Kona. Typical American. It was eventually pushed and didn’t leave until 6:15pm. It would have been a very late night… but not as late as if we’d stuck with Hawaiian. Our original flight ended up delaying 14 hours, leaving after midnight for a westbound redeye.

I checked us in on Southwest right away. Since it was basic economy, we were placed in 27EF and 29AB, just in front of the last row. This seemed perfectly fine to me, so I didn’t bother paying for seats further forward. After an early night, we woke up before 5am, got our stuff together, hopped in a Lyft, and made our way to LAX.

The traffic was fine, but the line to drop a checked bag? It was long.

We printed our own tags and got in line, but it took 20 minutes before we reached someone to give our bags. And when we were done? The line had gotten much longer. Yikes.

We went through security about an hour before departure, and then we headed to the gate. Our airplane was there, and they said we’d start boarding soon. I relaxed as the kids went to get snacks. Then, I tensed up. The gate agent said they were still waiting for one more flight attendant, so boarding would be a delayed a bit. But to pass the time, she said that people probably noticed she had an accent. She gave her name, and then said the first person to guess where she was from would get a $50 gift card on Southwest.

I was shocked that it didn’t take long for someone to guess Lithuania correctly. Impressive. But by the time that was done, the last crewmember had arrived, and we were boarding. Well played.

As boarding began, they called my name. Uh oh. Turns out, they said we could do priority boarding. Something smelled fishy. I had been talking to a friend at Southwest as I went through the mess the day before, and he knew I ended up booking Southwest in the end. Apparently, he said something and this got me a little bit of special treatment. You know I never want that, but after this long saga, I didn’t mind as much as I normally would.

Walking down the jet bridge, someone from the station gave me a bottle of Korbel, saying thanks for writing about the airport’s people mover saga. Ok, well… that was nice. Thanks for reading.

Southwest 2637
August 2, 2026

From Los Angeles
➤ Scheduled Departure: 7a
➤ Actual Departure: 659a
➤ From Gate: 13
➤ Wheels Up: 711a
➤ From Runway: 24L

To Kona
➤ Wheels Down: 922a
➤ On Runway: 17
➤ Scheduled Arrival: 935a
➤ Actual Arrival: 926a
➤ At Gate: 6

Aircraft
➤ Type: Boeing 737-8 MAX
➤ Delivered: June 15, 2019
➤ Registered: N8739L, msn 60231
➤ Livery: Hot Dog on a Stick colors

Flight
➤ Cabin: Coach in Seat 29A
➤ Load: ~99% Full
➤ Flight Time: 5h23m

Stepping onboard, I was greeted by a very nice and new-looking cabin with those big bins (which I didn’t need since I checked my bag). These MAXs are really like flying a different airline than those old -700s. We trudged toward the back and took our seats. Randy was working in the back, and he had help from Steve who was a flight attendant commuting back home. Randy took my champagne and said he could keep it cold for me.

This airplane had the older seats which have the fast USB charging port but don’t have the device holders.

They boarded pretty quickly, and we pushed back a minute early. Then, as always, it was a quick taxi to the runway. The captain had jokes, and told us all it would be a short 5 hour and 5 minute flight to Buffalo. But he wasn’t joking when he said we’d have a mostly nice ride to Kona after our climbout.

We had Anuvu wifi on this flight, which meant I didn’t plan on having wifi. But I logged on with my phone and it actually worked ok for limited uses. I ended up watching a movie anyway, The Devil Wears Prada 2, because, well, can’t imagine there’s any other time I’d ever watch that movie.

At altitude, the flight attendants got up and came through with drinks. They had a jumbo snack box with multiple options and told everyone to take as much as we all wanted.

I raided those snacks like I was preparing for a nuclear winter. Then I got the whole can of water, and I sat back and watched my movie.

Along the way, we passed by Hurricane Genevieve which I think was only a Tropical Storm by that point. We skirted to the north and had just enough bumps for the seatbelt sign to flip on.

I went back to use the lav, and that’s when I chatted with flight attendants Randy, Steve, and Carissa. Randy and Steve had been with Southwest for more than 30 years. Carissa was pushing four. We talked shop for a little while.

While I was back there, they did a second pass for drinks in the cabin. Carissa said she could whip up something for my kids, so she did something that she said was like a creamsicle and another that was a strawberry refresher.

My kids weren’t interested, but I was. That strawberry refresher was good.

Around an hour before landing, they came through with the third service which included drinks and a package of Oreos. I just kept writing until it was time to descend, so we could finally, properly start our vacation.

Once Mauna Kea came into view, I knew we were almost there. Flying into Kona from the north, we had great views the whole way. And the flight was apparently so pleasant for our pilots that they decided to do a go-around, which I caught on a time lapse video.

After we climbed back up and pointed north, the captain told us that approach control kept him too high for too long. I think he just liked the view. After a quick circle, we touched down and rolled out toward the end of the runway where a Boeing 777X was sitting, wings folded, apparently doing some testing.

After we blocked in, the best news for us sitting in the next to last row was that they would be using both the front and back doors. We were off quickly, and then, to cap off the special treatment, some of the local Southwest rampers met us and gave us leis and some swag bags with water bottles, a coozie, and maybe a couple other trinkets.

Again, I never like special treatment, but I haven’t been lei’d upon arrival in Hawaiʻi in so many years — and I was so exhausted after that epic 24 hours — that I was very happy to accept and kick off our trip right.

We rented a Bronco and spent a compressed 2.5 instead of 3.5 days going everywhere from the southern tip and the green sand beach of Papakōlea…

… to the top of Maunakea.

It was exhausting to cram that into three days, but we did it. Then it was off to Maui.

This is the second time Southwest helped save a Hawaiian vacation for me. The first was when my Hawaiian A321neo from Kahului to Long Beach was canceled at the last minute due to the engine fiasco in 2023, and I bought a last minute ticket to LAX. Maybe I should just be buying tickets on Southwest in the first place.

This move to put screens in each seat is symbolically very important, even if the timing is rather odd. After all, the airline is just now getting around to removing the screens from its final pre-merger A319s, the last narrowbodies that had them. US Airways had no screens, but American did, and as we all know, the new American adopted the US Airways strategy.

American had stuck to that plan to be a lower-cost, lower-frills network carrier for years. As financial results continued to sag, it finally changed its tune, suddenly deciding it wanted to be a premium network airline like Delta and United. It has already made some moves in that regard, pouring money into lounges, improving coffee and liquor, and refitting some narrowbodies with more premium seats. But nothing is going to be as visible as adding back in-seat video.

I’ve talked about this over the years, and originally, I didn’t see a need for seatback screens on domestic flights. But over time, I waffled, and to this day, I still waffle. But increasingly I see the value. It is a much more premium look and feel for travelers. Boarding an American aircraft is a stark reminder that sitting in coach on that airline feels more like flying Frontier than it does flying United, Delta, or JetBlue. Screens have become the most visible sign that you are flying on a full-service airline.

Obviously the goal is to justify the screens by gaining share, personalizing the experience, and improving revenue… all that good stuff. But there is a monetization angle as well that Delta and United have pursued. Free wifi gets the airline your data, and then there’s a screen right in front of you which the airlines can use to advertise whatever they want. This hasn’t been wildly successful yet, but we are just scratching the surface. United has set up Kinective to do that work. American will soon learn, if it hasn’t already, that adding seatback screens is now a whole lot more than just putting a screen on a seat.

But listen, I want to temper your excitement. Don’t expect to see this on your airplane tomorrow. The release says that new deliveries won’t even see seatback screens until 2028. Retrofits were somewhat less clear, but I get the feeling 2028 is the timeline on those as well. And when will it be done? “Early next decade” is what American says about the entire mainline narrowbody fleet. That is very far away. What I don’t know is how that will be phased in.

For example, the A320 fleet is down to only 48 aircraft, and 44 of those are more than 20 years old. (The newest of the other four is 16.) With such a long timeline for installation, I think it’s safe to bet this fleet won’t get the screens before it retires. So is it possible most of the fleet will be done quickly, but there will just be some quirky outliers until retirements are done in the early 2030s? Maybe, but I did not hear back from American with an answer.

Beyond adding back screens, American is also going to add more premium seats onboard. What that means isn’t entirely clear. We do know that American says about 25 percent of its narrowbody seats today are premium (meaning extra legroom coach or better), and that number will climb to 40 percent.

Some of this comes in the form of already-announced retrofits to existing aircraft like the A319s and A320s. We will also see what I expect to be an extra row of First Class added to the A321neo fleet, raising it from 20 to 24. The airline has also now confirmed that the B737-10 MAX will have 24 First Class seats when that airplane shows up.

American is also going to fix a long-standing problem by adding more Main Cabin Extra seating to its fleet. The details weren’t given at all, but the release did say the airline would be “retrofitting the majority of the narrowbody fleet to expand the number of MCE seats.”

This has been a problem for ages. Look at the A321neos. Everyone has 20 in First Class, but American has only 35 in Main Cabin Extra while United has 57 in Economy Plus and Delta puts 60 in Delta Comfort. Or look at the B737-800 where everybody has 16 in First Class. In Main Cabin Extra, American has 24 while Delta has 36 in Delta Comfort and most of United’s fleet has 54 in Economy Plus.

So yes, American is again playing catch-up to the other airlines it wants to emulate. This requires spending a fair bit of cash on putting all-new seats onboard, and there will presumably be fewer seats overall thanks to these expanding premium cabins. That is a big change in strategy.

But for now, American is still just paying the price of admission. It’s necessary and helpful, but I’m really waiting for the eventual timeframe when American starts innovating on its own instead of just copying everyone else.

Having reviewed both a letter from Chief Executive Officer Robert Isom to his officers and one from Chief Operating Officer David Seymour to his leadership, this is what I believe to be happening:

• Chief Communications Officer Ron DeFeo is out after 11 years with his fiefdom being divided into three different areas:
  • SVP Comms and Chief Marketing Officer Caroline Clayton takes over comms and now reports to Robert
  • Caroline loses marketing to the commercial group which now goes with brand, advertising, and partnership to someone who will be hired under Chief Commercial Officer Nat Pieper
  • Director Team Member Engagement Beril McManus will now report to Chief People Officer Cole Brown
• EVP American Eagle, Corporate Real Estate, and Government Affairs Nate Gatten is leaving for Apple, and his work is being divvied up three ways as well:
  • Steve Neuman, Senior Vice President, Global Head of Government Affairs, will be in charge of government affairs and will now report to Robert
  • VP Corporate Real Estate Amanda Zhang will now report to Chief Financial Officer Devon May
  • SVP Regionals and Business Transformation Brandon Kahle will now report to David in ops
• SVP Technical Operations Kevin Brickner is leaving and will be replaced by John “Bendo” Bendoraitis who was COO at Spirit until, well, you know
• SVP Airport Operations Julie Rath and SVP Operations Planning, Analytics, and Product Management Anne Moroni will now both report to SVP Flight Ops and IOC JC Gulbranson instead of directly to David
• Chief Customer Officer Heather Garboden will stop reporting to both David and Nat and will now only report to Nat… she also gains reservations, contact centers, service recovery, and catering with VP Global Contact Centers and Service Recovery Kim Cisek moving to her group from ops where she reported to Julie Rath before

That was tough to keep straight, but on the surface, it makes sense. What is being stripped out of the communications group absolutely should not have been there in the first place. And why would regionals be combined with corporate real estate and government affairs? These are all just quirks of a structure that was put in place to fit with the people who held the leadership roles at the time (or to keep them away from people who held other leadership roles where the groups belonged). So, fine. But let’s go under the surface here to analyze this further.

Robert’s note acts like this is a tidal wave of change at a unique time. Specifically, the note starts off with this:

American Airlines is entering a defining moment.

In our centennial year, we have a rare opportunity: to build on the progress we’ve made, address the gaps that remain and position this airline for long-term success. We reflected on the importance of this moment at Journey earlier this year – and previewed a bold strategy to carry us forward into our next 100 years.

What are we even talking about here? The defining moment was more like a defining last decade when American defined itself as an underperforming, cost-focused network carrier. Maybe this is a re-defining moment, but this move isn’t a bold one that redefines the airline.

But according to Robert’s letter, it’s not just a defining moment. This is a “rare opportunity.” How so?

American has had the same opportunity for years, but it has been slow to act, or even to re-act. Maybe it’s rare because it’s Robert’s last chance before the board actually does something more dramatic? This all just sounds like worthless fluff to me. But that’s just the tone of the letter. It doesn’t mean there isn’t any substance.

The big winner here is Heather Garboden, and that is the most promising part of these moves. She was given the hardest job in the company, having to serve two masters in both ops and commercial, while representing the customer that American didn’t really care much about before. Now, she is firmly part of the commercial team, and she is controlling more of the pieces that should fall under the customer group. On top of that, she is now joining the senior leadership team which means *gasp* the person advocating for the customer actually has a seat at the table. Finally.

While Heather’s gain is also a gain for the traveler, the three other lesser winners are wins mostly for their own benefit. JC Gulbranson (who takes over a bigger chunk of the ops world under his fiefdom), Caroline Clayton (who takes comms over but loses marketing), and Steve Neuman (who moves up the ladder) also all join the senior leadership team.

That winners list should also include Bendo who obviously gains since he went from unemployed at Spirit to being gainfully employed. He joins Matt Klein who according to his LinkedIn profile has very quietly moved down from his Chief Commercial Officer job at Spirit to VP of Pricing at Southwest. But while I am very wary about putting anyone who was in charge of Spirit’s failed commercial strategy into another important commercial role, I don’t feel the same way about Bendo who by all accounts can run an operation.

So why aren’t these ops moves also big winners in my book? It’s because the people at the top of the operation are still there. Robert and David own American’s operation and have for years. You can move people around under them, but without change at the top, well, it’s incomplete. Then again, being incomplete inexplicably appears to be by design.

American never seems done acting like it’s trying to reinvent itself, but the airline doesn’t usually telegraph the fluidity of its organization as clearly as it did in Robert’s memo:

The changes I’ve outlined here are important, but they are just the first step in a series of actions designed to strengthen our team, foster greater alignment and act with greater urgency across the enterprise.

You would think that death by a million cuts wouldn’t be ideal here, but well, that’s how I read this.

So maybe David Seymour’s time is running short, and his retirement is coming. In this move, we see him lose his partial control over the customer group which has also taken reservations away from him. Further, two of his direct reports are now under JC Gulbranson, and there’s a new former airline COO to run tech ops. It sounds like JC and Bendo will be competing to succeed David at some point.

If that happens, I’ll have to think about this differently, but for now, this group remains under David’s control, and finance remains under Devon May. Devon’s organization was barely touched in this move, but he has been one of the strongest champions of cost control which would seem to go against the direction Robert wants this airline to go. You have to spend money to improve revenue.

All of this meaty change, however, is speculation. What has been announced just feels like another reorg. A spokesperson tried to make it clear to me that all of these people leaving the company are doing so on their own. I know that’s how things work in a company when you’re at a certain level, but it makes it seem like these moves are just Robert reacting to decisions the people under him are making to flee the company.

If Robert was serious about sending a message that things are going to be different, he should have made it clear that he is driving this change, and some other heads should have rolled. Then again, that should have happened years ago. He should have made all the big changes at once, and then he should have put serious effort into calming the frayed nerves of the long-suffering employee groups. We didn’t see any of that. Instead, we’ll just have to sit and wait to see what’ the next move at the airline will be’s next.

Today, that little blog has grown into Cranky Flier LLC which not only puts out the blog but also publishes Cranky Network Weekly, produces The Air Show podcast, organizes Cranky Dorkfest, and puts on the Cranky Network Awards. This doesn’t even mention the 20+ hard-working people who do travel planning at Cranky Concierge. I could never have guessed back then that this is what it would turn into.

I can wax poetic about all this, but that’s boring. Let’s bring some data into this to spice things up.

Since I started writing this blog, I’ve personally written more than 4.3 million words here, which is apparently about the same as writing the entire Harry Potter series four times over. And I’ve loved writing every one of them…. but really… some more than others. I mean, there’s nothing better than those Alitalia posts back in the day.

Here are some more fun stats for you:

• More than 5,300 posts written
• American has been the subject of the most posts at 573, followed by Delta at 545, United at 518, and Southwest at 439
• Most importantly, Alitalia has been the subject of 72 posts, not nearly enough if you ask me
• I have written up 300 trip reports
• The Cranky Jackass has been awarded 34 times, making it truly an elite award that is not bestowed lightly

Of course, this is about more than just what I write, it’s also about the comments. There have been more than 120,000 comments published since this site started, made up for more than 9.3 million words. Sure, I’m responsible for 13,500 of those comments myself, but that means more than 100,000 have been written by you, and I’d say I probably enjoyed at least half of those.

The most frequent commenters are names you might recognize. Nick Barnard is first with more than 3,000 followed by Tim Dunn (2,700+), Bill from DC (2,400+), SEAN (2,200+), and Kilroy (2,100+).

Here’s another way to slice that. Want to guess who has written the most words in their comments? I’ll give you three guesses, but the first two don’t count. Tim Dunn has penned more than 647,000 words, presumably all of them praising Delta. That is roughly the same length as War and Peace and Moby Dick combined.

The number of weekly posts has declined since those early days when I used to write multiple times a day and then eventually once per day Monday through Friday. But the number of comments has held up well, and so far this year we have the most average comments per post ever. Keep it up. (Most of you.)

Cranky Flier Stats by Year

What were your favorite posts to comment on? Old-timers will definitely know the first one. But here are the top five.

• Family Airlines Gets Smacked by the DOT (317)
• Don’t Blame Overbooking for This United Mess (261)
• Blaming United’s Problems on Continental (or Vice Versa) is Exactly the Problem (240)
• How Southwest Determines Your Boarding Card Number, and How You Can Now Jump the Line for $40 (222)
• Feds Announce Massive, Haphazard Cuts in Air Service Starting Tomorrow, and We Should All Be Angry (189)

Of course I appreciate my family helping make this go, especially my wife Kirsten who has read countless blog posts and unwillingly sparred with me on a variety of topics. That always made the posts better. I will also always be grateful to my good friends Chris and Heather who were the ones who pushed me to start writing. This wouldn’t have happened without them, and heck, even the name is their doing.

I want to say “here’s to another 20 years,” but do I really want to still be doing this when I’m pushing 70? I might not have time for it when I’m running all those bingo games in the retirement home. I guess there’s only one way to find out. Just keep reading and participating in the comments, and we shall see where the runway takes us.

Air Canada goes Private Equity

Air Canada is selling a 25% stake in its Aeroplan loyalty program to a group of well-intentioned and customer-loving individuals from Blackstone and Canadian pension fund La Caisse for a cool $2 billion. This puts the valuation of the program(me) at $8 billion, which its awfully high when compared to what the carrier currently holds in poutine futures.

Air Canada says it will retain control of the program (for now…we assume) and it will use the funds to reduce debt and buy a new maple syrup vat for its Dreamliner fleet. The irony here, of course, is that this is part of a cycle for Air Canada and Aeroplan. The carrier spun it off in 2003, and it would then try to give it a go at its own new loyalty scheme before buying Aeroplan back in 2019. It’s expected that this will not create any waves in the near future, but rarely do these firms invest literal billions in something and just sit on the sideline and cross their fingers.

It seems this might be the result of Air Canada playing the long game brilliantly. It bought Aeroplan back from Aimia for just US$323 million and seven years later flipped 25% of it for $2 billion. That’s a return rate so high, we can’t even handle the math. So while AC takes a victory lap on the transaction, the rest of us will hold our breath to hope that Aeroplan doesn’t one day create the Canadian version of Delta SkyMiles, and charge 400,000 points for a coach redemption from Kitchener to Saskatoon.

Delta Connects Austin with the Austin of France

Delta Air Lines continues its ramp up in Austin as the airline will begin daily service next summer from its burgeoning focus city in Texas’s capital to Paris. One daily A330-900neo service begins in March and will operate for the IATA summer, wrapping up in October. The aircraft will feature 29 Delta One seats for those with Texas-sized wallets (or SkyMiles balances), and 28 in Premium Select recliners with the remaining 224 behind the curtain.

When the flight begins, it’ll be the fourth transatlantic route for Austin, and the first to be operated by a U.S. carrier. The three others are evenly spread with one per alliance: BA to London/Heathrow, KLM to Amsterdam, and Lufthansa to Frankfurt.

In addition to Paris, the carrier will also begin new nonstop service to San Diego on April 12. It will go head-to-head with both Alaska and Southwest on the route. It also plans to expand its winter-only service from AUS to Cancún to operate year-round and to add a second daily nonstop on Austin – San Jose (CA) — before the first daily nonstop begins operating this October.

Air Canada Posts C$215 Million Q2 Loss

A loss of about US$155 million doesn’t hurt so bad when you announce you sold a quarter of your loyalty program for $2 billion, so perhaps its not all pessimisme et désespoir in Saint-Laurent as Air Canada released its Q2 earnings this week. Just like its counterparts south of the border, Air Canada set records both for Q2 gross revenue and expenses, with C$6.2 billion in revenue offset by C$6.4 billion in expenses.

This does mark a major drop from Q2 last year in which the airline posted a C$418 million profit. Capacity increased by a whopping 0.3%. The carrier internally had hopes for a larger capacity increase but when no Canadian teams reached June’s Stanley Cup Final — as usual — it knew that dream was dead. Fuel costs jumped 50% to C$1.7 billion compared with last year, and it managed to recover about half that amount in fares.

AC finished the quarter with about C$7.5 billion in cash and cash equivalents, or roughly the amount of funds it takes to heat one home on the Canadian prarie through a harsh winter.

American Shifts the Deck Chairs

With American settled into a solid third place amongst the big-3 U.S. carriers, CEO Robert Isom’s current solution to challenge Delta and American is to…shake up the org chart.

Former Spirit COO John Bendoraitis will come on to run the carrier’s technical operations, Nat Pieper will see his role expand from CCO to include marketing, branding, advertising, and partnerships, while Chief Customer Officer Heather Garboden will take over reservations and service recovery (good luck) and JC Gulbranson will add airports and planning to his portfolio.

Current Chief Communications Officer Ron DeFeo communicated that he will be stepping down from his current role, along with Kevin Brickner (Senior VP for Technical Ops) who will retire and Nate Gatten (EVP for American Eagle and Governmental Affairs) will also be leAAving. Brickner had been with the carrier since joining US Airways in 1996. Caroline Clayton will take over communications and Steve Neuman will oversee Government Affairs and Sustainability. Garboden, Gulbranson, Clayton, and Neuman will join AA’s senior leadership team which means they’ll have another few hours of meetings on their already-full calendars each week.

The AAirline expects to break-even in 2026, which compares poorly to its two main rivals which are having to find new places to store all the cash that keeps rolling in. These changes will surely do the trick.

Is airBaltic on the Ropes?

Latvian flag carrier airBaltic has been hit especially hard by the closure of Russian airspace for commercial flights, and when that is added to a stew that includes sky-high fuel pricing and its precarious cash situation, the carrier is not in tip-top health as we head towards fall.

The carrier unveiled a radical new business plan to help stave off the inevitable. First off is a reduction in fleet size from 54 A220-300s to just 36 by the end of the year. While that in of itself may not seem drastic, it replaces the airline’s original plan of expanding that fleet to 100. Riga would remain the carrier’s main hub while it uses secondary bases and focus cities to provide “selected point-to-point services.”

Despite the reduction in fleet, it believes it can maintain its current capacity by reducing its extensive wet-leasing program for other carriers, including for Lufthansa Group. airBaltic CEO Erno Hildén is going hat-in-hand to acquire EUR225 million in interim financing to keep the doors open. Much of airBaltic’s A220 fleet flies wet-leases, but in the summer months only. The lack of year-round contracts dramatically reduces the profitability of those airplanes.

• Air Canada plans to begin service to Lagos next year.
• Air Montenegro added an E-195 on lease. Plan accordingly.
• Airlink‘s first long-haul destination will be Doha through a Qatar codeshare.
• Allegiant was buoyed by last night’s preseason opener at Allegiant Stadium, so it added five new routes.
• Belavia is scooping up three B737-800s.
• Cabo Verde Airlines received $4.7 million in funding to keep the doors open.
• Delta Concierge is a thing that really isn’t a thing but Delta is trying to make it a thing.
• Etihad is adding 4x weekly winter-only service to Göthenburg.
• GOL‘s new CEO is André Fehlauer. He will assume the role next month, replacing Ceslo Ferrer,
• Israir is closer to operating into the United States.
• ITA claims it turned a profit. Sorta.
• Lufthansa claims to be seeking labor peace. “Claims” is doing a lot of work here.
• Riyadh Air will begin 3x weekly service to Bangkok next month.
• Royal Brunei is finally expanding its codeshare with Turkish. Breathe easy, folks.
• Ryanair is saying goodbye to Niš, Serbia later this year. Cranky can confirm as of press time that Niš is a real place.
• S7 is struggling to stay on runways.
• Southwest added two CEOs to its board.
• t’way plans a h’ybrid model with T’rinity Airways.
• Wizz Air is opening a new base in Brasov, Romania.

I’m excited for the next Fibonacci convention…

It’s going to be as big as the last two combined

Allegiant’s Revenue and Profit Was Up

Allegiant finally announced its Q2 earnings, and the carrier posted $158 million in EBITDA in its first earnings since the close of its merger with Sun Country on May 13.

The two carriers combined for $943.5 million in operating revenue, including $776 million for Allegiant alone, a record for G4 and 16% higher than last year despite capacity being down nearly 7%. The carrier says air-related ancillary revenue stayed flat, and its increase in revenue (and profit) came from higher fares, increased bundle sales, and upsells to Allegiant Extra. It also saw credit card and other third-party-product revenue increase 32% to $44.5 million. Its average fare was $76.90, 47% higher than last year’s $52.20.

Costs rose for the airline travel company airline as they did for everyone else. CASM jumped 28% to nearly $0.14, thanks in-part to a 71% increase in fuel costs. It ended the year’s first half with $1.3B in liquidity, most it which it plans to spend at next month’s company picnic in Lodi, Colorado which is located halfway between Minneapolis/St Paul and Las Vegas. We assume this gateway to 29,000-person Morgan County will become the airline’s newest base.

737-7 MAX Finally Receives FAA Certification

Nearly 10 years after it was first delayed for safety reviews, the Federal Aviation Authority finally signed off on the airworthiness of the Boeing 737-7 MAX. Despite being smallest of the 737 MAX family, some say it’s the mightiest of the bunch. (And by some, we mean one airline….)

Southwest has been, and will be the launch customer for the type and is certainly eager to get its hands on the first deliveries. Before they can be delivered to WN, they’ll be retrofitted with the airline’s new extra legroom seats and a sprinkling of LUV. The airline is expecting to put the MAX 7 fleet into service next year. Boeing has built 30 MAX 7s and nine MAX 10s to this point, with the MAX 10s accounting for about 30% of its outstanding orders.

As part of the certification process, Boeing was required to redesign the engine’s anti-ice system, the flight control and crew alerting systems, and for WN specifically: the tap to pay in the restroom which charges customers $0.25 for the first two minutes, $0.10 for every 30 seconds thereafter, and $0.49 per toilet paper square used.

American Makes Complimentary Upgrades Tougher

American Airlines AAnounced Thursday that it would no longer permit complimentary upgrades from Main Cabin to First/Business on domestic flights sold with three cabins. Passengers with elite status seated in the back will be permitted to upgrade one class to Premium Economy but can say goodbye to the fancy seats in the front.

This means on nine AA routes, the ability to skip Premium Economy on a complimentary upgrade is no more — but those who purchase Premium to begin with will be able to upgrade to Business. Other than the obvious Boston to Rochester (NY) route, the nine domestic routes AA currently flies with three cabins are:

• Boston: Los Angeles
• Chicago/ORD: Honolulu, Kahului
• Dallas/Fort Worth: Honolulu, Kahului, Kona
• New York/JFK: Los Angeles, San Francisco
• Phoenix: Honolulu

So we’re talking about three of the most premium coast-to-coast routes and a bunch to Hawai’i.

It doesn’t matter how you get to Premium Economy — purchasing it outright, using miles to upgrade, or a systemwide upgrade certificate — you are still eligible for the bump to Business. This new policy is expected to go live on August 25 or as soon as AA’s IT team can figure out how to implement it without shutting down the entire airline on accident.

Good News/Bad News for Pilots at Allegiant

Allegiant’s 1,300 pilots ratified a new two-year collective bargaining agreement to maintain labor peace in the cockpit at the recently-merged carrier. The agreement comes after typically feisty negotiations that included picketing by pilots at nearly two dozen airports late last year.

Highlights of the deal include a 40% raise off the bat, 54% in increased wages by January, and other gains in retirement benefits and workplace policies. Ninety nine percent of eligible pilots voted, with it passing at an 80-20 clip. So all is well with Allegiant pilots, but unfortunately we can’t say the same about the other half of the Allegiant – Sun Country merger as that airline is concerned it’s losing its skygods to its MSP rival Delta.

CEO Greg Anderson said this week that elevated attrition amongst the pilot ranks of Sun Country is mostly from the MSP area. Anderson says those pilots are moving to the “largest full-service carrier in MSP” and we can assure you he’s not talking about Mesaba. Sun Country removed nearly 350 September departures from its schedule to account for the loss of so many pilots, while the Las Vegas-based carrier hopes to use the savings from cutting flights and paying less pilots to grow its deicing capacity up from its current level of “it doesn’t get cold in Vegas.”

End of the Road at Chicago/ORD

American Airlines partnership with Landline in Chicago will end later this year as the carrier elects to eliminate one route entirely, and switch the other to (gasp) being operated by an airplane.

AA will completely exit the market in Rockford (IL) at the “Chicago” Rockford International Airport. AA’s departure from the airport located about three hours west of Chicago/ORD will leave Allegiant as its lone carrier. The other Landline route for AA in Chicago was to wake up the echoes in South Bend. Despite the ending of the bus route, American will continue serving ORD-SBN, flying 3x daily beginning October 5. Both Landline routes began last October and will not survive to see a second birthday.

These reductions do not apply to AA and Landline’s relationship in Philadelphia, where it’ll continue to offer connecting “flights” to five destinations. ORD exiting the Landline family will leave it with four current hub airports for “connecting service” including: Minneapolis/St Paul, Montréal, Philadelphia, and Toronto. It operates its own shuttle services to-and-from the airports in Boston and Denver.

• Air India appointed former Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde Gebremariam to the same position.
• Aircalin is making moves.
• Azul‘s received approval from the Brazilian government for American’s $100 million investment.
• Brussels is putting a freeze on long-haul expansion fleet.
• Delta is once again expanding its service into and out of LAS for CES in January. It’ also adding 1x daily Seattle – Tokyo/Narita next year on an A330neo.
• Frontier has another GoWild! pass sale for those who have a macabre sense of humor.
• Jetstar will begin charging customers for a carry-on bag beginning in February.
• JSX intends to grow the size of its fleet.
• Korean delayed the buyback of its catering until to later this fall.
• LATAM‘s Q2 earnings were strong.
• Qantas is selling its stake in Jetstar Japan back to the carrier for $52 million.
• Southwest added a heap of flights for this fall coinciding with college football games across the country.
• Spirit sold its hangar in Detroit for $18 million.
• SWISS posted a Q2 profit of $200 million, making it the shining star amongst its Lufthansa Group brethren.
• Sun Country moved from T3 to T1 to join up with Allegiant in Las Vegas.
• United is adding both Cincinnati (1x daily) and West Palm Beach (1x weekly) from San Francisco this fall.
• Vietnam Airlines expects to have as many as 30 widebodies in its fleet by 2035.
• Volaris is adding three to the U.S. Guadalajara to both Atlanta and Washington/Dulles and Puebla to Chicago/ORD.
• Wizz Air is in the red for Q2.

A man walks into a bar carrying a large piece of asphalt.

He says to the bartender,
“A beer for me… and one for the road.”

In the meantime, if you’re looking for something to read… well, today’s book review might point you in the right direction. I’ll be back soon!

I don’t often do book reviews, but occasionally I read something that grabs me in a way that I just can’t help but share with all of you. That’s how I feel about Flying Crooked by Steve Borgess, an unbelievable read that is actually, surprisingly, based in reality.

To be clear, this is very clearly highlighted as a novel. It is a work of fiction, but Steve — who is now a retired American captain — based this on his experience trying to get on as a pilot with the majors back in the late 1970s. I reached out to Steve to learn just how much of this was real, and it’s more than you would probably guess after reading the book.

The noveled is centered around Jack, a young but skilled pilot who we meet hauling freight on DC-3s out of Philadelphia. It turns out, this closely mirrored Steve’s life flying for Summit Airlines.

In the book, Jack heads down to Florida to try to get on with a big-time cargo carrier, but he ends up getting connected with an airline that has several names that just picked up three used DC-8s to fly the Hajj, connecting Indonesian travelers to Jeddah via Colombo. What ensues is a tale that seems too wild to believe, but in a sense, Steve really just sanitized what actually happened to him while connecting some unrelated dots — like the actual accident of Loftleiðir Flight 001 — into his tale.

You’ll have to read Flying Crooked to see how this story comes together, but be warned. It can get a little technical in a way that will appeal to the pilots out there. Those of you who don’t fly and may not care about exactly how, for example, LORAN works may want to skim some parts. And don’t get too attached to the female interests in the book, because they aren’t fully developed. Other than that, this is just a fun read about what kind of absolutely insane flying happened in the late 1970s at the dawn of US deregulation.

In Steve’s case, he did actually fly the Hajj, though the situation was somewhat different than what played out in the book. He had originally gone down to fly for a friend of his dad’s, both of whom had flown for Pan Am. After three days at the Holiday Inn, there was a knock at the door, and he was told to leave. The whole thing fell apart, and there wasn’t any money left to pay the hotel. But, something else popped up from the ashes.

He ended up flying for an “airline” that had picked up three domestic United DC-8-21s — that had only domestic avionics onboard, with an HF radio thrown in so they could operate — to fly from Indonesia to Jeddah with that stop in the Colombo base each way.

I put “airline” in quotes, because the way Steve told it to me, this company was just some Indonesian guys looking to make a quick buck. The airline had a Hong Kong address, but it didn’t even have a name. They called it NaTomBi for the first names of three of the guys involved in the operation. Most were retired pilots from airlines like Pan Am and Braniff who were just looking to extend their careers after retirement age. That was mixed with young copilots trying to build hours and inexperienced flight engineers looking to become experienced.

This airline was technically flying for Merpati, an Indonesian airline that is long gone. Unlike in the book, Merpati provided the flight attendants, and they slapped a sticker on the airplane. But beyond that, Merpati had no involvement. Steve sent me a photo he took of one of the planes in Colombo.

^{Photo via Steve Borgess}

Overall, it sounds like Steve’s experience mirrored Jack’s in the book in that both operations sat in the gray area, using questionable legal rationale to operate. They both ran into significant problems along the way. The air conditioning incident in the book? That actually happened. Oh and the Syrian airspace thing? There was really an issue, though it was not nearly as dramatic as depicted.

In the end, Steve said he barely flew in the operation, because the planes kept breaking down. Around three months in, he just left and went home, eventually getting on with American and having a long, successful career until mandatory retirement age kicked in.

But this isn’t the story of some grizzled veteran. This is the story of a young, dumb kid who had no fear and would do anything to get jet time so he could keep moving forward in his career. It’s just far more real than kids coming up today in the US airline system could probably imagine. And that’s why it’s such a fun read.

You can find Flying Crooked on Amazon

If you want to see pretty pictures of what this might look like, go to any other media source that covered this. I’m not going to bother showing you any of that, because it’s never going to look like this. Just know that the plan as announced includes $22.5 billion for:

• the largest parking garage in the world with 32,000 spots (the current number one is West Edmonton Mall at 20,000)
• a massive new headhouse to sit behind the Saarinen structure which will have security, customs, and gates that will now expand above ground to a rebuilt Concourse A/B
• the old Temporary Midfield Concourse C/D will be rebuilt without any train stops, presumably as a narrow regional concourse but it’s not entirely clear
• The new Concourse E will be fully built out to go the entire width of the current terminal area
• Another new concourse will be built even further south, going the full width as well
• The AeroTrain will be finished, going in a circle all the way past the farthest concourse

I know, you might be having trouble visualizing this, so let me help.

Does this look like Atlanta’s original design? Yes, except for that first concourse being connected above ground. Oh, and the train will be twice as expensive since it goes in a circle instead of a spine. And oh yeah, Atlanta carried 105 million passengers in 2025 while Dulles had a mere 29 million.

There is this sense of grandeur that does not fit the needs of this airport, and probably never will. This is being built for enormous passenger growth beyond anything realistically needed in the forseeable future. Don’t even get me started on the absurdity of a 32,000 space garage. SeaTac, by the way, is currently the largest in the US with 13,000 spaces. This seems to follow President Trump’s belief that bigger is always better.

The problem with bigger is that it costs a lot of money to build. So airports usually put together their master plans and then phase these projects in over many, many years. In the press conference, President Trump said that the original plan was to build this over 60 years. That isn’t the plan. President Trump explained:

…we’re doing it all at one time; it’ll all be completed and it’ll be beautiful and it’ll be something very special.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said they will start construction in the spring, and they are going to “move at the speed of President Trump.” I’m going to assume they don’t mean clocking his best mile time and that he means fast.

The press release does say this will be done in phases, which I suppose fits with the proclamation that this won’t impact any flights. But there may not be any flights left anyway if they actually build this thing.

I know you’re probably thinking. Maybe he’ll just raise money from somewhere else for this, right? That is not the plan. Jack Potter, CEO of Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) that runs Dulles said:

So, this is not requiring federal dollars; this is going to be airport generated dollars, airline contributions, which is phenomenal. It means that we’re off to a fast start here.

Despite United CEO Scott Kirby trying not to look too disturbed in the background, there is no world where he wants to pay to operate at this kind of palace. I’m sure he’s using this as a way to get some of the work done that he thinks is most important, and then he figures when a new president is in place, the rest can be shelved.

Without Congress deciding to pour a bunch of money in, airports in the US have a funding problem. Passenger Facility Charges are capped at $4.50 and have been for years, so that means airports need to raise most of their funding for massive projects either through bonds or, increasingly, public-private partnerships (P3). Either way, the money has to eventually hit the airline rate base, so expensive projects can make it expensive for airlines… and that’s not good for air service.

In 2024, Dulles had a cost per enplanement (CPE) of $12.88 which is actually a couple dollars less because there is money from both Dulles and Washington/National that goes into a pot which can be used at either airport. That is its own issue, but now let’s think about how this is going to be funded.

The idea that this will only cost $22.5 billion is silly. Let’s just make it $30 billion to round up and assume massive overruns, not an unfair assumption in any way, especially for a project that will take a very long time. They will use municipal bonds, they say, which does have lower rates than private financing, but I don’t care what you use. When you’re financing $30 billion and you only have 14 million enplanements, this is going to be expensive.

Gary at View From the Wing says that an airline briefing in May put the CPE at $90.64. (Correction: That was first reported by Ned Russell in his Airport Architecture Substack that you should all check out.) That would undoubtedly be low since that has to assume we’re “only” talking about $22 billion here instead of what will inevitably be a much higher number.

They say you don’t build the church for Easter Sunday, but in this case it seems like they’re going one step further and building the church for Easter Sunday in the Vatican. As a master plan, this isn’t a problem, but trying to accelerate the plan to get built in a short period of time makes no sense and could end up hurting the airport’s ability to attract flights with sky high costs.

That being said, Dulles has a real problem, and so I decided that I would write about it. In fact, I’m going to write two posts about it. Today, I’ll start with a little history and the state of affairs as it stands today. Then tomorrow, I’ll get into why this plan is nuts.

Let’s start by setting the stage. Here is how Dulles looks today:

At the top is the iconic Saarinen-designed terminal with the swooping roof. You know what it looks like, but it’s just such a beautiful building, I’m going to give you a photo to swoon at anyway.

^{Postcard via Boston Public Library}

It was first built in 1962, and it looked like the above photo. But it wasn’t completed to the original specs until 1996 when it was doubled in size. Even that doubling in size happened before the changes to airport security after 9/11, so that process could use some help.

There are a handful of gates that are attached to the main terminal — the Z gates — but nearly all gates require going to another concourse. And that’s one of the big problems with this airport. It’s not that it has other concourse, but rather it’s how you get to them.

You can see in the photo what looks like one of the original mobile lounges. These would transport people from the terminal to the gates. Planemates would actually take travelers right to the airplane itself, jacking up the vehicle on a built-in scissor lift. I actually took one of those in 1992 to get to a Lufthansa DC-10.

These were supposed to be the wave of the future, but of course, that future never arrived. People hate waiting for a vehicle and would rather walk or take something more reliable, like a train that doesn’t have to wait for aircraft traffic to pass by.

In the mid-1980s, the C/D concourse was built as a so-called Temporary Midfield Concourse. This was for United which opened its hub at the airport at that time. It is still there 40 years later, being “temporary” and generally falling apart. Mobile lounges brought passengers between the concourse and the terminal.

It wasn’t until 1998 that Terminal B was opened, and then Terminal A followed in 1999. Terminal A was built for a different time in a different world. That was made for turboprops and 50-seaters with ground boarding and no actual notable waiting space. Terminal B is functional, and has been expanded more than once, but overall, that is about the only thing that works.

Progress has happened, but it’s been slow. For years, people had to take mobile lounges that drove across the ground to each concourse as the only way to get to them. In 2004, an underground walkway opened between the main terminal and the A/B concourse. Then in 2010, the AeroTrain opened to connect… some of the other concourses.

The designers of the AeroTrain made the same mistake everyone else made… thinking that the Temporary Midfield Concourse was actually temporary. They built the station to hit a non-existent terminal further to the south where a terminal was eventually supposed to be built. So, travelers could take the train to the this random stop and then walk back to C, which is inconvenient at best. For those going to D? Forget it, the mobile lounges still roam the airfield connecting D both to the A gates where regional flying is and the main terminal.

The only other really significant change at Dulles lately has been the extension of the DC Metro to the airport. The Silver Line station there opened in 2022.

Since then, the focus has been on building a new, actual concourse for the first time in ages. This is Concourse E, or it will be when it opens later this year:

When this is done, it’s supposed to allow United Express to relocate away from the A gates. Those can then be rebuilt down the road for a more functional purpose, though I don’t think that’s officially been announced.

Regardless, what you see is a new E, a mostly-functional B, and a whole lot of other stuff that needs to be replaced. Throw on top that half-finished AeroTrain and there is work to be done. And there was a plan, but it was going to be expensive and take a long time to complete.

But then President Trump stepped in. He loves to leave his stamp on things, and Dulles was a target ripe for the picking. Nobody loves the experience at Dulles, so he could step in and try to look like a hero.

The plan is ambitious, and that’s being modest. It’s not going to happen the way it’s being pitched, but that’s a discussion for tomorrow.

JetBlue Reports Decent Earnings

JetBlue stock (side note: people at JetBlue can’t like the fact they got beat to the ‘BLUE’ ticker symbol) soared Tuesday as it released its Q2 earnings which exceeded Wall Street estimates and saw an 11% jump in unit revenue for the airline on airfare increases of 9%.

Operating revenue of $2.69 billion was a 14.5% leap from ’25 and was just a smidge higher than the $2.68 billion which was expected. (Every buy-up counts!) Despite the grand rise in revenue, it couldn’t outrun the CASM monster (unit costs increased 17%, and were still up 2.4% ex-fuel) which led to a loss of $247 million. That comes out to a loss of $0.66 per share, but that’s better than the loss of $0.71 predicted by Wall Street.

JetBlue’s forecast expects operating margin to increase by about 3.5% for the back-half of 2026. It recaptured almost half of its higher fuel costs from Q2, far exceeding analyst expectations of 30-40%. It ended the quarter with $1.6 billion in cash with most of it allocated to the cost of fumigating the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia…

JetBlue Introduces Domestic First Class

JetBlue is ready to dive into the domestic first class game. The carrier, which has operated its minty-fresh long-haul business class for many years now (and on select domestic routes) is diving headfirst into growing its premium offerings throughout its fleet.

The name of this product will be BlueFirst — and we can only imagine how much time it took to come up with that. Rollout will begin this fall and is expected to be finished by late 2027. The cabin will eventually go on every non-mint aircraft in the fleet. For you seat sickos, JetBlue is going with the Collins Aerospace MiQ seat which is the same seat we use at Cranky World HQ. The product is expected to have most of the standard FC accoutrements including upgraded dining, priority during check-in, boarding, and baggage handling, and most of all, the explicit permission from the carrier to laugh and point as people trudge past you to the main cabin.

The first class rollout comes amidst an entire fare reset. It’s very complicated and will likely require extensive analysis from us as there are four experiences: Main, EvenMore, BlueFirst, and Mint. How will we ever sort it out? Then, there’s three fare types for each: Basic, Standard, and Flex. So you know, what everyone else has done. And we believe JetBlue is the only domestic airline that could possibly roll out a new domestic first class product this week, right? Right?

Allegiant Introduces Domestic First Class

Wrong. The hot new trend of the summer: domestic first class. Allegiant Air will be adding domestic first class next year marking a significant diversion from its previous business model. The carrier will begin introducing first class seating and amenities on select aircraft as soon as spring 2027. The new cabin will consist of two rows in 2-2 seating format, for a total of eight seats up front. The cleverly-named Allegiant First product is expected to go on sale in mid-August.

As a bonus for all Allegiant fliers, some new perks are expanding to the entire aircraft, not just first class. Beginning Saturday, the airline will no longer charge for most non-alcoholic drinks. Booze will still come with a price tag, but soft drinks, juice, and water will be complimentary, creating all sorts of arbitrage opportunities for Allegiant fliers who purchasd their ticket weeks or months ago but are flying in the near future.

As we reported earlier this week, “select aircraft” means new deliveries starting in 2027 with 23 aircraft in the current plan. These airplanes will start out in Punta Gorda. Allegiant’s route map provides no hints as to what might be a premium market for the carrier, which creates a guessing game that Delta and DraftKings couldn’t even come up with if they tried. But let’s all agree on this — if Punta Gorda to Niagara Falls doesn’t receive a first class cabin, we riot.

Delta Has a New Idea? You Can Bet on That

We learned last year that Delta was cooking something up with DraftKings that was destined to skirt laws against gambling in the sky, and as details emerged this week we learned that yes, in fact, this is a terrible idea.

Delta, along with DraftKings will introduce SkyPicks, which will allow SkyMiles members 21 and over the ability to use their personal devices to bet make predictions on games and matches 30,000 feet below. The entire contest is free, and is only an entertainment experience only, they swear. The real miss here is leaving it only to sports — imagine if you could be on things happening on your flight? Now that’s entertainment. Will the man in 38C choose Biscoffs (-200 odds), Cheez-Its (even money) or the Sun Chips (+110). Over/under on the amount of time the lady from 7C will spend in the lav: 77.5 seconds. Over/under on times the pilot puts the seatbelt sign back on during flight: 3.5. The possiblities really are endless.

To use the actual service, you must be logged into the in-flight WiFi on your personal device. It’s live now with MLB games and is expected to add the NFL in the fall. This definitely feels like some sort of gateway drug to getting actual betting on-board. It’s currently illegal regardless of where the flight begins or ends (even if its between two states or even fully within one state that permits online gambling). Just know your next Delta flight is a lock to have over 243.5 Biscoffs served. You can take it to the bank.

Spirit’s Loss Grows Frontier’s Revenue

A strong Q2 for Frontier produced record revenue for the carrier with a gross figure of $1.28 billion which it says was driven by strong travel demand and “favorable competitive capacity” which is earnings-speak for “our yellow-painted pain in the ass competitor finally bit the dust.”

Despite Spirit’s demise, Frontier still lost $90 million dollars in net income for the quarter, a 29% drop from Q2 last year. That figure looks a little better when put next to its fuel bill which jumped to $4.17 per gallon, 77% more than last year. The total fuel bill nearly doubled to $436 million. Frontier delivered 79% earnings per share and saw RASM jump 28% to $0.1. Its forward-looking guidance shows Q3 RASM growth above 20%, which would mark a third straight quarter of double-digit growth.

Frontier closes the midpoint of the year with $1.16 in liquidity and a pile of yellow seats it picked up on the cheap.

• Air Asia X delayed its service launch to both Bahrain and London to early next year.
• Air Canada joined the Basic Business revolution.
• Air France-KLM earned €484 million in Q2.
• Air Montenegro is considering picking up its first E2 from Embraer.
• Air Premia is seeking $75 million.
• ANA received permission for an interim JV with Singapore in Australia.
• beOnd is adding five destinations from Red Sea International in Saudi Arabia.
• China Southern will begin flying to Ethiopia later this year.
• Emirates will begin accepting crypto as payment for flights from UAE residents only.
• Finnair appointed Jussi Siitonen its new CFO.
• LOT will begin flying to Hanoi in the spring.
• IAG profit dropped 16% as it reduced its future capacity.
• Ryanair received a nearly $5 million refund from the Italian government.
• Singapore posted its first loss in a quarter since 2022.
• Southern Airways Express is looking at just over $300k in fines from the FAA.
• ValueJet (not the one you’re thinking of) secured its first B737-800.
• WestJet FAs are moving closer to a strike.
• Wizz Air is opening a base in Pristina later this year.

I asked the librarian if they had any books that could help me manage my paranoia.

“They’re right behind you,” she said.

There are two notable changes going into place at the airline in the form of free drinks and First Class. You might think First Class is the bigger deal, but I’m far more interested in the free drinks. Let’s talk about both.

Free Drinks For All

Allegiant has now announced that it will be adopting Sun Country’s current service program which includes free water, soda, and juices for all starting this Saturday, August 1. Previously, Allegiant used the true ultra low-cost carrier (ULCC) model that charged for everything.

Sun Country may have switched to a ULCC model back when Jude Bricker came over as CEO, but it had gone “Minnesota Nice” by keeping free drinks. Allegiant was more hard-nosed on the idea… until now. I asked the airline for comment on why this change was being made, and I was told this:

The decision to introduce complimentary beverages was based on what we have heard from passengers. While the integration process provides us with an opportunity to evaluate best practices across both airlines, this decision ultimately reflects Allegiant’s commitment to the customer experience.

This is a far cry from the Allegiant of old, but it is smart. Maybe the decision comes thanks to learnings from Sun Country, or maybe it’s an adaptation to the changing market that Allegiant is serving (read: the Twin Cities). Either way, this is why I find this more interesting, because it shows Allegiant’s willingness to change as this merger keeps going ahead.

Oddly enough, this is a decrease in benefits for Allegiant credit cardholders… which is kind of funny. See, they get one drink for free when they fly, and it can be anything that’s under $16. (Here’s the Allegiant beverage page.) That excludes the two $22 bottles of wine and the $17 Don Julio tequila, but it certainly included sodas, water, and juices. Now everyone gets those for free.

Allegiant is trying to play up the importance of the card, however, by noting that it still has all these “elevated” beverages that are only free for cardholders. That includes, “coffees, protein shakes, sports drinks or alcohol and a mixer,” excluding the expensive liquor, of course. I don’t think the beverage menu has changed, but Allegiant is really trying to play up this benefit.

A First Class Test is Coming

Allegiant is joining the revolution that… well, every other airline has joined lately. It will be offering a first class cabin called Allegiant First.

This is a small cabin with only two rows of two-by-two across recliners. It looks like this:

My initial thought was… did they just get a cheap deal on buying all of Spirit’s Big Front Seats? But no, these are different.

This is actually pretty minor, at least for now. Allegiant confirmed to me that they will only be installed on new B737 MAX deliveries that arrive from the start of 2027. Right now the plan is to put this on only 23 aircraft. It sounds more like a test to me with seats going on sale from mid-August.

The airline’s page talking about the product says that it will initially be available from Punta Gorda (PGD). Why Punta Gorda? Is it all those rich people up north that have been clamoring for a First Class product? No, it’s logistics.

Up until now, Allegiant’s B737-8 MAXs have been focused on Fort Lauderdale, Orlando/Sanford, and St Pete. Punta Gorda, however, has been almost all Airbus. According to Cirium schedule data, that starts to change significantly in December. By January, the MAX is 44 percent of Punta Gorda departures, and I assume it will keep growing when the schedule is extended.

We now know this will only go on new deliveries. Looking at Cirium fleet data, it shows three MAX 8-200s being built between mid-December and mid-March next year. But even more interesting, there are three MAX 7s that should be built for Allegiant in the first three months of next year. The certification of that airplane seems imminent, so perhaps this will starts out on the -7. Or maybe it’ll be the -8. Either way, those airplanes are heading to PGD.

First Class is not something Sun Country currently has. It got rid of that during its ULCC transition a decade ago. This is presumably more about following all the other lemmings off the cliff in adding premium, but it does also make me wonder if there is something else we just don’t know yet. Maybe the -7’s monuments (galleys, lavs, etc) and exit doors don’t lend themselves well to squeezing an extra row in at Allegiant’s seat pitch. So it’s possible that Allegiant doesn’t lose a row by putting these in but rather just loses two seats in each row, a worthy trade-off.

We may not know yet, but what we do know is that Allegiant has shown the first sign that it isn’t just turning Sun Country into the Allegiant that existed before the merger. I hope we continue to see what I can only assume are well-calculated changes as the merger moves ahead.

All these details will be posted on the main Cranky Dorkfest page.

YOU MUST RSVP by the end of the day on Thursday, September 10

Morning LAX Ramp Visit

Once again, LAX is going all out and will be inviting 500 of us to come hang out right next to Taxiway A and watch airplanes outside the Flight Path Museum. This is going to look a lot like last year with the event running from 8am to noon, but there are a couple of notable changes:

1. There won’t be remote parking this year. There is another lot that we will be able to use within walking distance of the event, but this has limited parking. So, we need to know if you’re driving and how many people will be in your car in your RSVP so we can dole out parking passes when it gets closer.
2. Instead of using buses for remote parking this year, LAX will be using them to give airfield tours. Stay tuned for more info on that.

Let’s talk details:

• What: LAX Ramp Visit
• When: Saturday, September 19, 2026 from 8am to 12pm (but the main event starts at 11am, so… use your time wisely)
• Where: The ramp outside the Flight Path Museum

I’ve had more than one airline talk about bringing in something special to look at and tour this year. Let’s see if anyone can top American’s Astrojet last year. I think they might. There will be water and restrooms available.

There are only 500 spots available, so RSVP NOW to save your spot.

The Cranky Dorkfest Main Event

As always, the main event will be held at the park right across the street from the In-N-Out just off the north end of LAX. If you’ve been before, you know how this goes. Show up, go buy a burger, watch airplanes, and talk shop with your fellow avgeeks. This year, we’ll hope LAX doesn’t decide to close 24R for maintenance like last year… not that I’m bitter. Parking can be tricky here too, but again, rideshare and transit will work as will walking from some areas if you’re willing to stretch your legs.

• What: Cranky Dorkfest Main Event
• When: Saturday, September 19, 2026 from 11am to 1pm
• Where: The park across from the In-N-Out

We will have giveaways from any airlines that participate as always, but like last year, we aren’t going to hand out raffle tickets the day of the event. You have to register in advance. It’s free, but you have to do it.

RSVP if you want to be entered in the giveaways. You can, of course, show up at the park and hang out, but if you have not RSVP‘d, you aren’t going to have a chance at the giveaways.

Get Your Official 2026 Cranky Dorkfest T-Shirt

Again, we are partnering with Plane Apparel Co to create an official 2026 shirt. Like what you see? You can buy it here.

Can’t click a link to RSVP, no problem. Here’s the embedded form below. See you there!

First, how do you even define aircraft innovation? Sure, there are new composite materials that made the B787 a marvel, and there are winglets and other aerodynamic features as well as avionics. But in the end, I think it’s really the engines that drive a step change. And because of that, I decided to break aircraft down into seven categories. I only categorized jets flown by the big US airlines, and I skipped the no-bypass early jets since none of those were still flying at the airlines I looked at once SkyGo’s 1980 OAG schedule data started.

So, here’s how I’ve categorized them:

It is unquestionably imperfect, so I’ll give you a minute to decide what bothers you the most….

Ok, we good now? I think the categorizations are pretty self-explanatory. Category 5 is a very crowded place, and I thought about splitting even further, but this is where I settled based on the aircraft being flown by the US carriers. I have some of my own quibbles, but this gets my point across.

With the categorizations set, I took the schedule data and counted departures by aircraft type. No, I did not measure to the actual tail, so while there may have been some variations in aircraft types in split fleets, again I decided it was good enough for this purpose.

Then, I had Claude create a heat map. The lighter colors are the earlier generations and the darker colors are the newer generations. This looked at the percent of fleet in each type to determine the overall adoption of more efficient aircraft.

^{Data via SkyGo and Cirium, map via Claude}

What does this tell us? So much. I want to roll through each airline, but first I want to show another chart that looks at this differently. This chart shows the percent of departures in the newest category. So when a new category rolls out, it will reset. This helps show which airlines were early adopters.

^{Data via SkyGo and Cirium, map via Claude}

So, with all that, let’s just talk through each airline, starting with the ones that went out of business earliest.

Pan Am – This is confusing to think of Pan Am as a leader in efficiency, but this is really a quirk of being a long-haul carrier. The bulk of that airline’s flying was on the B747 which sits in category 2. The domestic-focused airlines were still primarily using B727/737s or DC-9s, and those were in category 1. So this wasn’t really indicative of Pan Am being a leader. It just skewed to big airplanes for its largely international network. Of course, it failed so early that it never got out of category 4, something it had just started to fly with the A310 in 1985.

Eastern – Eastern was full of those B727s and DC-9s I mentioned. Sure it had A300s, but those were dwarfed by the massive narrowbody fleet. That didn’t start to turn until 1983 when the first B757 arrived, but of course, Eastern also failed in 1991 before it could make much of a change.

TWA – TWA was most definitely not an early adopter at all. Heck, it was flying its B707s until 1983. Then when it acquired Ozark in 1986, it took a step back even further with that flood of DC-9s. It did take on the MD-80 in the early 1980s, but that was always a ‘tweener… better than the early generation aircraft but not as efficient as the high bypass B737 classics. It had moved to the B757/767s in the 1980s, and that was gaining steam, but it was generally broke and behind the curve until it was merged into American in 2001.

Northwest – I find it fascinating that in 1980, Northwest was actually slightly ahead of the curve. After all, Northwest is an airline that I always think of flying airplanes forever and not keeping up with the times. I mean, Delta had been out of category 1 aircraft at the time of the Northwest merger for four years, but Northwest’s ancient DC-9s brought them right back in. Northwest received a similar but less pronounced benefit as Pan Am by skewing more toward international than other airlines in the 1980s. It was an early adopter of the B747-400, and then in the 1990s is started taking Airbus narrowbodies very early. This kept it ahead of some failed dinosaurs, but those DC-9s just kept flying so it was always a little behind.

Continental – At the beginning of my data, Continental was a small airline flying B727s and DC-10s and nothing else. But as airline after airline folder into Continental, that fleet shifted dramatically. First there was Texas International, then New York Air, and lastly PeoplExpress (including Frontier which that airline had bought). By 1990, the fleet was a mess. The airline was even flying around old B737-100s until 1998. But that miracle management team led by Gordon Bethune and Greg Brenneman came in and started to rebuild. The fleet was replaced mostly with B737NGs along with B767/777s. Remarkably, it had become one of the more forward-looking airlines by 2000, a not-insignificant feat.

US Airways – I realize putting US Airways in here is a challenge, because so much of its fleet was made up of small props. Even with jets, the biggest airplane it flew in 1980 was a small fleet of B727-200s. Most of the flying was on the DC-9 with a big portion on the BAC 1-11. In the 1980s it took on Piedmont and a bunch of old Boeings and even Fokker F28s along with PSA with its B727s alongside MD-80s and BAe 146s. What a jumble. But in the 1990s under Stephen Wolf, the reinvention began and USAir became US Airways. A massive order for A320 family aircraft was placed, and bankruptcy helped the airline walk away from from older airplanes. When it was taken over by America West, it had become an airline with a modern fleet, and it would carry that until the merger with American.

American – And speaking of the American merger, let’s talk about the three airlines in my chart that still exist. This won’t come as a surprise, but American was very slow to adopt new tech. Unlike its competitors which filed for bankruptcy, came out, and placed orders to refresh the fleet… American did not do any of that. It stayed out of bankruptcy and clung to those old aircraft, especially the MD-80s. It was a late adopter of everything. The re-fleeting began in the early 2010s when it filed for bankruptcy and placed a big order of its own. There was a further cleansing during the pandemic when several old types were retired.

Delta – Of the three airlines that remain, Delta was actually the slowest to adopt newer technology, not American, thanks to the Northwest merger and philosophy for opportunistic aircraft purchases. It flew those old Northwest DC-9s until 2014. The ancient B757s and B767s continue to soldier on. Even new orders were regularly for old tech, including the end-of-line order of B737-900ERs was came as a great deal since the MAXs were arriving. But it is now going big on A220s and A321neos. It will have MAXs coming as well. Meanwhile, the widebodies are still split, but those B767s will finally disappear at some point in the not-too-distant future. Delta’s decision to stick with old technology was strategic whereas American’s was more by financial necessity in the 2000s.

United – Of the three remaining carriers, United is the quickest to adopt new aircraft. It had A320s in 1993 and B777s in 1995. Then in the Continental merger, the older generation aircraft were all gone within a couple years, by 2013. Though United was late to take on the B777-300ER, it has been very quick to buy new airplanes in the last decade. Just look at the number of MAXs, A321neos, and B787s that have been pouring into the fleet. Today, it’s just the B757/767/777s that are the last of an old generation, and the B757s/767s will likely be gone fairly soon. The B757 replacement — the A321XLR — has just started arriving, and there are a lot more deliveries coming throughout the fleet.

What does all this mean? There aren’t any key takeaways to crystallize what we’re looking at into a pithy one-liner. Having newer technology doesn’t have to mean it’s a better airline. As Delta has shown, you take care of old aircraft, and they can be a great option. But this is just a useful way to help think about the evolution of airlines over time.

This lawsuit has been in the works for a long time. The rules for suing Los Angeles required you to file a government claim before you sue. The city can either accept the claim, reject it, or do nothing. There was no chance the city was going to accept this. If it did nothing for 45 days, then a two-year window would open during which LINXS could sue the city. LA did not do that. It outright rejected the claim on January 21 of this year. When that happened, LINXS had a six-month window open to sue. It waited until the end of that window, but it did file what I assume will be the first of many lawsuits on July 9. (If you’d like to follow along, you can search the docket at the LA Superior Court using case number 26TRCV02456.)

So what is LINXS’s beef? If only there was just one issue. LINXS has a laundry list of complaints, so we might as well talk through them all if, for no other reason, just for the sheer entertainment value.

The Problematic Metering Cabinet

Connecting the people mover with electricity is a very complicated process. There are sub-stations which receive power through LA’s Department of Water and Power (DWP), and then at some point there is a join where DWP’s work meets LINXS’s. There are metering cabinets in multiple places which measure the usage, just like at your house.

One of these metering cabinets has become a flashpoint. According to the lawsuit, these metering cabinets were not in scope for LINXS to design, build or really do anything, yet it seems that LINXS (“Developer” in the lawsuit) actually did the work anyway for some reason. Here’s how the lawsuit says it:

LAWA has alleged that Developer procured the Metering Cabinets at issue from Pioneer Power Solutions and had them installed, but, in any event, the Metering Cabinets were not in Developer’s contractual scope of Work.

I find it very funny that LINXS says LAWA has alleged this, but it doesn’t confirm it nor does it deny. It just says it doesn’t matter if LINXS did the work, because it wasn’t supposed to. That’s… a strategy.

Anyway, DWP screwed up, as those who live in Los Angeles won’t be surprised to hear. They didn’t have big enough cables to provide electricity, so in September 2024 they fixed the problem which required going into the metering cabinet to connect the cables. Apparently “within days,” the metering cabinet failed.

In January 2025, DWP apparently heard a noise coming from the cabinet, so it opened it up and found “moisture and debris” in there. Now, LINXS says this could have only happened when DWP opened it up to fix the cables. Why? Because DWP locked the cabinet and didn’t give LINXS a key. Apparently, LINXS doesn’t think it’s possible that this could have been manufactured or installed wrong, assuming it would admit it actually did install it in the first place.

Meanwhile, DWP had to cut power from February to July 2025 to allow — wait for it — LINXS to fix the thing, so LINXS thought it deserved a project completion date extension. LAWA said no, and because of that, it could withhold a $115 million progress payment. I won’t get into the weeds on why, but as you can imagine, LINXS doesn’t like that one bit.

This dispute went to what’s called a “project neutral,” who is supposed to quickly help settle disputes. The project neutral agreed with LINXS, but it turns out, the project neutral has never once agreed with LAWA. It sounds like this person may not be so neutral. (For more on this, I highly recommend watching this video.)

As if that’s not enough, LINXS says that it has uncovered that LAWA knew this was DWP’s fault the whole time and it was a big cover up.

So, that’s… one issue.

Other Contractors Ruin Everything

LINXS has been working in its project area at LAX for many, many years now. As the years go by, more unrelated projects need to get started in that area, but LINXS says they should all stay out of the way. They aren’t doing that. Even more than that, LINXS goes dramatic by saying some of its work has been destroyed. What happened? Apparently some work by other contractors on 96th St resulted in “damaged Developer installed irrigation lines and valves, as well as planters, shrubs and trees.”

Sounds a lot less dramatic that way, huh? And also, I will point out, this is landscaping. How this prevents them from running a train, I have no idea. But wait, there’s more. See, these contractors working in the LINXS project area is a safety issue. And yes, something has happened.

“…one of LAWA’s Other Contractors, in the process of demolishing a glass lighting pylon, ejected shards of thick glass plate onto the guideway over which the People Mover vehicles travel. Fortunately, no workers were on the tracks at the time, and the vehicles were not being tested in the area showered by glass.

Right, well, I’m going to assume that this other contractor probably made sure nobody was around when it decided to demolish a glass pylon. LINXS seems to want to use this as leverage by now slowing down other projects to run as slowly as its own.

Oh, and I almost forgot another favorite. LINXS says other contractors are stealing its electrical power! Sounds like someone needs to talk to DWP.

The Drawing Scandal

A sub-contractor for LINXS submitted some drawings to the city for approval for some roadway construction work. And then, SCANDAL.

According to LINXS, somebody “altered and resubmitted” these drawings and “deleted certain elements of the roadway work….” Wanna guess who LINXS blames? That’s right, it says LAWA did it. But why?

Developer is informed and believes, and based on that information and belief alleges, that LAWA was behind the resubmission of the [engineer’s] roadway drawings, and the purpose was to obtain permits for a reduced scope of roadway work so that LAWA could attempt to declare (wrongfully) that Developer’s work in certain areas is complete, such that LAWA’s Other Contractors could work in those areas.

So, LAWA wants to reduce the scope and help the project reach completion faster, but now LINXS doesn’t want that? Make up your mind, people. Do you want to finish this thing or not?

But wait, there’s more. Because the updated drawings still had the original engineer’s seal and signature, LINXS says this is now a criminal issue.

Don’t Be a Blocker

LINXS says that LAWA is blocking simple things, and that’s preventing the project from being finished. This is like two kids fighting.

• There is a solar farm which will power the people mover but also send power back to the grid. To connect this with DWP, “the customer” needs to sign a document. LINXS says LAWA needs to sign, but LAWA says LINXS needs to sign.
• LINXS is supposed to be doing some street/landscape work which includes installing irrigation. LINXS says it did that, but it had no responsibility after building it. The work is done, but LAWA never applied to DWP to turn on the irrigation.
• There was a requirement that LINXS put together a cybersecurity plan. It did that, and then it submitted some modifications which it called minor clarifications. LAWA said the intrusion detection system was removed, but LINXS said that didn’t happen. Oh, and crucially, “LAWA complained that a word was missing at the end of a sentence that was unrelated to the substance of the [plan].”
• LINXS submitted a test plan for a surveillance system. LAWA said it had issues with it, but LINXS said that’s crap.

Clock’s a Tickin’

So, here we are. And while they fight this out over some seemingly stupid things — just look at how many of these actually involve the SkyLink train itself — the clock is ticking.

If LINXS doesn’t have this thing ready by October 8, then lenders can call the loan. While it doesn’t definitively say so, the implication is clear. LINXS will go bankrupt, and it wants LAWA to know that will be bad news for LAWA. As of now, the projected opening date is November, so, uh, something’s gotta give.

See, if LINXS goes bankrupt, then LAWA will apparently have to pay a ~$900 million termination payment, and the airport will have to find a new operator which LINXS says will cost a lot more. Why would a new operator be needed? Well, this is a deal that spans decades and includes the actual operation of the people mover for many years to come, not just its construction.

If this all sounds bad, just wait. LINXS has already submitted another batch of government claims on June 5, and these were rejected by the city on July 7. So, the six month clock is now ticking for a whole new round of lawsuits.

Meanwhile, millions of travelers have to sit there and wait just to get a damn train.

American Airlines CEO lays out his vision to close a more than $3 billion profit gap – CNBC

There seems to be a bit of a thawing in the Metroplex. American is trying to open up a little bit more to media to talk about an actual plan, and that includes making CEO Robert Isom available to talk about his vision, as he did with CNBC’s Leslie Josephs. I don’t think I’d call what she got from him a true vision. He effectively said the airline wants to be premium like Delta and United but with more domestic flights. Oh, and “be best at everything that we do.” Sure.

With Delta going back into Manila for the first time since the pandemic, Brian and I decided to pick apart Transpacific strategies. This is one place where Delta is truly playing catch-up, but the discussion isn’t limited just to Delta. Listen in and join the discussion to LinkedIn.

The Air Show

A podcast about the business of the sky

Listen on Spotify   |   Listen on Apple Podcasts

JetBlue Wins LGA Slot Auction

JetBlue Airways emerged as the winner for Spirit’s former slots at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. It paid $58.5 million for the right to operate up to 12 more daily roundtrips flights, outbidding Frontier by $1 million. The ink isn’t dry on the deal yet, and JetBlue is already considering a move to the now-deserted Marine Air Terminal at the airport. The historic terminal is without a human tenant at the moment as Spirit was its lone carrier until it ceased operating. The rats that fled the old central terminal for the MAT have indicated a willingness to share the space once again.

The Marine Air Terminal was the home of the Delta Shuttle with nearly hourly service to Boston, Chicago, and Washington at various times in its history until December 2017. Delta moved its full operation to Terminal C at that time while Alaska and JetBlue moved to the terminal. Alaska left LGA altogether in December of 2019, and Spirit joined JetBlue in April 2021. B6 left for Terminal B on July 9, 2022, but this deal proves that what’s old can be new again.

A move for JetBlue would lower its operating costs at LGA. It currently flies to just four destinations from the airport, Fort Lauderdale, Nantucket, Orlando, and West Palm Beach with the bulk of its NYC operation a few miles away at JFK.

Southwest Barrels to Record Revenue

Here’s an idea: Open a business and give a lot of things to your customers included in the price of what you’re selling — regardless of what it is. Maybe its napkins and straws at a restaurants, or water and towels at a gym — or checked bags and seat assignments for an airline. Then start charging for it and see what it does to your revenue, because Southwest Airlines announced gross revenue of $8.4 billion, the highest in its history, and a 16.4% increase from last year.

Net profit for Southwest was $233 million which came out to $0.47 per share. Southwest’s fuel bill came to $2.2 billion, a whopping 67% jump from Q2 in ’25. The carrier paid $3.92 per gallon (imagine how any Rapid Rewards points the carrier could have if it used its RR Visa to pay for the fuel), somewhat better than the $4.10-$4.15 it expected to pay. Looking forward, it expects Q3 fuel to be around $3.75 per gallon. To keep pace, the airline saw one-way fares jump 21% up to $225.61 — this is not your father’s Southwest.

Q3 forecasting was underwhelming for Southwest as it now expects a $3.25 to $4.25 profit per share for the full year, compared to the $4 profit per share it predicted back in January before that whole inconvenient war thing broke out. It ended the quarter with $3.8 billion in cash and cash equivalents plus about $500,000 in gatehouse boarding group signage that’s now collecting dust in a secret vault located 100 feet underground at the point equidistant to DAL, HOU, and SAT airports.

American Squeaked Out a Small Profit

American squeaked its way to a tidy $71 million profit in Q2 on $16.7 billion in gross revenue. That figure was an all-time record for the airline for any quarter in its history. Just like everyone else, the carrier took it on the chin at the pump as it pAAid just shy of $5 billion on fuel — a figure in line with its rival United.

The $71 million profit represents about $0.11 per share, down significantly from Q2 last year in which its $599 million profit came out to $0.91 per share. The record revenue figure was a 16% jump from last year and included a 10% leap in unit revenue.

AA’s forward-looking guidance is less bullish on the rest of the year, predicting the stock to end up somewhere between a $0.65 loss and $0.65 profit per share, quite the range. In Q3, however, it’s expecting to lose between $0.10 and $0.70 per share despite an increase in revenue of 16-19%. The airline remains burned by $29 billion in long-term debt that is eating away at what profits it does have. In some good news, it did end the quarter with over $11 billion in available liquidity which means they can probably spring for the mid-tier liquor at the holiday party later this year.

Alaska Adjusts Hawaiʻi Fleet, Announces Earnings

Alaska Airlines continues to walk a tightrope in an attempt to align its own Alaska brand with Hawaiian’s brand on flying to, from, and within the islands while also keeping Hawaiian somewhat separate to keep the locals happy.

The carrier is going to swap the current B717 fleet that flies interisland service with a new B737-800 fleet which will feature Starlink for those who can’t afford to be off the grid for 25 minutes. These planes will have more cargo room for surfboards, but there was no confirmation they’ll also have more room for suckling pig, nor on how many pallets of spam can fit onboard.

In other Alaska news, the airline’s Q2 reporting shows a loss of $76 million on gross revenue of $4.1 billion, a 10% increase from last year. The story was much of the same for Alaska — rising everything including costs and fuel. Forward looking guidence says ASM will jump next quarter 2-3%, with RASM up low double digits, all of which will lead to $0.00 to $1.00 profit per share.

For more on Alaska’s aircraft swap in Hawai’i, please visit Wednesday’s post from crankyflier.com.

United Drops 11 in the Windy City

United’s grand plan to outflank American in Chicago and operate the largest schedule in ORD history is shrinking, as it will not operate 10 regional routes it previously planned to fly this summer, along with one route to Mexico.

You’ll recall that earlier in the season we had the FAA guest starring in Beyond ORD Gates, and the government told both airlines that its planned summer schedules were not reasonable and both needed to pull back. As a result, United will not begin these 11:

• Bloomington (IL)
• Central Wisconsin
• Champaign
• Erie
• Kalmazoo
• La Crosse
• Lansing
• Marquette
• Rochester (MN)
• Tri-Cities
• and…Guadalajara

As of now, UA could bring these back (can you bring something back that never started?) some day, but for now, the good people of Bloomington and Champaign can probably drive to ORD. For everyone else, it might be time to introduce you to American Airlines…or Detroit.

• Aerolíneas Argentinas is leasing six B737-10s.
• Air Astana applied for rights to begin operating to the U.S.
• Air Canada is working with Airbus to scale domestic Canadian SAF, whatever that means. The people of Santa Fe had no comment.
• Air France is wet-leasing an A220.
• airBaltic owes the Latvian government $34 million.
• Alaska‘s entire B787 fleet will be equipped with Starlink by the end of the year.
• BA is putting Pratt & Whitney engines on its A320neos.
• BermudAir placed an order for 10 A220-300s. Delivery is expected to begin late next year.
• Emirates revealed a new headrest in economy that it seems to be really excited about. But the carrier is less excited about the first batch of B777X aircraft with its president Sir Tim Clark saying he would not accept delivery of the planes and compared them to “baked bean tins” which seems offensive to the beans.
• Etihad chose peace, not war, as it expands its interline agreement with Air Peace.
• Finnair adjusted its capacity guidence downward.
• Fuji Dream Airlines fulfilled one of its dreaming adding to its E175 fleet.
• Gulf Air is buying JetZero’s Z4 if it ever actually becomes a thing.
• IndiGo posted a loss.
• LATAM received $505 million in aircraft financing.
• Philippine Airlines plans to join oneworld late next year.
• Qatar is adding 1x daily service between Brisbane and Auckland as a tag on its Doha-Brisbane route.
• Ryanair saw its profits drop 34%.
• Saudia signed an MoU to expand its partnership with Garuda Indonesia.
• Uganda Airlines ordered four B737-8s and four B787-9s.
• US-Bangla Airlines, our third favorite Bangladesh-based airline, wants to launch a LCC which would then become our fourth favorite Bangladesh-based airline.
• Vietnam Airlines is leasing 19 B737 MAX 8s.

My friend’s girlfriend wrote on a balloon, “Will you propose to me?”

He immediately popped the question

Now that the first lawsuit has been filed, there is more public information available on what exactly has gone wrong. I will post about that soon, but first, it’s time to set the stage about what exactly the plan has been for the so-called SkyLink train and why it is so important.

Anyone who has driven in the infamous horseshoe that carries cars around Los Angeles International Airport’s (LAX) central terminal area knows just how miserable it can be. Gridlock is common, rogue car rental buses dart out in front of you — I’m not kidding, I had one sideswipe me several years ago, curse you, Enterprise — and travelers are constantly playing Frogger to get to and from the parking garages.

But fear not, the LAMP is underway and it will solve all your problems.* That stands for the Landside Access Modernization Program, and I’m pretty sure it was launched in 1963 shortly after the central terminal area opened. That’s only a slight exaggeration. But the idea is to make it easy for people to avoid the dreaded horseshoe. After years of discussion, this is the plan that was settled on.

^{*Or at least some of them}

It is hard to explain in words just how much of an undertaking this was. See the rental car center at the upper right? That used to be an entire neighborhood from the post-WWII period called Manchester Square. As you can see below, in 2005 it was still a crowded neighborhood with homes and even a school. By 2015, it had been largely abandoned as the airport kept buying up property for expansion, many of them having been knocked down. And today? It’s a gigantic rental car center.

Maybe the scale still isn’t clear. The rental car center is the second largest concrete building in the US behind the Pentagon. And that’s just the upper right corner of that map showing the entire project’s scope.

The next stop to the west is the LAX/Metro Transit Center which finally, after many years, brought light rail (in pink) to the airport with the K (Crenshaw) line going north-south and the C (Green) line heading east. Previously, C line travelers had been forced to get off at a station south of the airport which isn’t even on this map. It had a slow and infrequent bus into the terminal area. The opening of the K line and the eventual SkyLink will change the game here, especially since this is also where buses from all over the LA Basin will park.

Still further west, we have the Intermodal Transportation Facility – West, which is going to be generally referred to as the economy parking stop. But this is also where hotel shuttles will go along with a park & ride area for people to drop off passengers. In other words, the horseshoe will be rid of car rental buses and hotel shuttles, and travelers will have the option of being dropped off remotely and then taking the train in. This is going to make a huge difference. It may eventually mean the ultimate demise of the hated LAXit lot for rideshare as well. We’ll see how that goes.

Inside the central terminal area, there are three stops. They opted to go with a train running right up the spine instead of around the horseshoe, and that’s a good thing. It means getting to United in Terminal 7 will be a lot quicker than it otherwise would be. There are bridges that take people from the train right into each terminal area. Well, ok, close enough. Terminal 1 doesn’t appear to have a bridge. I think that’s supposed to go into Concourse 0 when it’s built, but it probably won’t be built. So there will be a bit of overshoot to get in there.

And that’s just the train itself. There’s more to this project, including making 98th Street go all the way through to take some of the pressure off of the main artery, Century Blvd, which people take to and from the east of the airport today.

There are other projects which will reconfigure Sepulveda Blvd to try to make traffic flow more smoothly, but I’m not even getting into that. Suffice it to say that the LAMP alone is a massive undertaking with an incredible result… when that SkyLink opens. Because until then, shuttles still flood the horseshoe and those on Metro still need to take a slow bus to the terminals. The SkyLink solves all those problems, and we are all just waiting for it to open.

As I mentioned up top, this has turned very ugly, and now, it’s lawsuit time. I’ve read through this first suit so you don’t have to, and I’ll have more on why we still can’t take the train next week.

Hawaiian officially announced yesterday that it will replace its B717 fleet with the B737-800 as first reported by The Air Current, and as we discussed on The Air Show podcast. I had the chance to sit with Hawaiian CEO Diana Birkett Rakow and Head of Hawaiʻi Operations Jim Landers on Tuesday to learn more about the plan.

Hawaiian has been in a bind. The B717 fleet has aged noticeably over the last couple of years, requiring more downtime and maintenance work. Temporarily expanding that fleet was considered a non-starter, and so the interisland operation has suffered. There have been operational issues, and the only solution was to pull down the schedule to give the existing fleet more of a breather. The problem has become so acute, especially in the middle of the day, that Hawaiian is putting a temporary solution into place.

Starting this October, Alaska — not Hawaiian — will fly three daily roundtrips between Honolulu and Kahului (Maui) on a B737 that will rotate back into the mainland fleet. Since this is Alaska-branded, there will be no pog juice or any Hawaiian-style service. This is simply a band-aid until they can bring the real solution into place.

That will start in 2028 when the first B737-800 painted in the Hawaiian livery and with Hawaiian-branded service will enter the fleet. The full timeline for the retirement of the B717 has not been determined, but this will not be drawn out. They just don’t have all the answers yet.

^{Rendering via Hawaiian}

For example, we don’t yet know how many of these airplanes will enter the Hawaiian fleet. They need to figure out exactly how many flights at what time of day they need to operate with these higher-capacity aircraft, so they will back into the exact number later. That’s easy to do when you have a whole fleet of -800s at Alaska today that gives flexibility, but I was assured that this will continue to be a high-frequency operation the same way it is today. And when asked if all interisland routes that operate today would continue to be flown with these bigger airplanes, Diana responded, “I don’t see us pulling out of any of those markets”

What will these look like on the inside? If you’ve been on an Alaska -800 today, it will be pretty similar. Those airplanes just had a full refresh, so the configuration will remain the same with 16 First Class, 30 Premium Class (extra legroom), and 115 in coach for a total of 161 onboard. While none of that will change, the color schemes onboard will, including the bulkheads and seat covers. This will look like a Hawaiian-branded airplane.

This means the interisland experience will be better in several ways. Most notably, these airplanes will have an extra inch of pitch in coach, a full extra legroom section, and double the number of First Class seats onboard compared to the 128-seat B717. The reality is that with 33 more seats on the airplane, they don’t need to try to squeeze more capacity into the aircraft, so they can make it a little more comfortable.

The bigger First Class cabin and new Premium class also means improvement for elites who will have more upgrade opportunity, but it also means more seats are available in general. Diana said, “a lot of guests really do purchase First Class.” First Class is also helpful for paid connectors in First Class, especially those from Japan and Australia who have to funnel via Honolulu before going to another island.

Diana and Jim highlighted a lot more about the improved onboard experience including power outlets and Starlink onboard, but who really cares when your longest flight is less than 45 minutes? I suppose it’s still a nice bonus, especially for the local business traveler. But ultimately, this is just something they’re going to milk since it’s already on the fleet at Alaska today.

The Decision

I was most curious about how they arrived at the -800 as the right airplane, and Jim gave some really helpful context since he was at Hawaiian before the merger. He explained that while “there isn’t another perfect 128-seat tank being built,” it was a previous generation narrowbody which seemed to be the best fit. Pre-merger Hawaiian was circling its efforts on a second-hand fleet of either A319ceo or A320ceo aircraft since it would give more commonality with the Airbus fleet.

Now that Hawaiian is part of Alaska, the decision tipped in favor of a B737 fleet instead, but it’s for the same basic reason… engines. New generation Pratt & Whitney GTF or GE LEAP engines just don’t work well for short, frequent hops. I did ask about the Embraer 195 E1 which uses engines from that generation, but the combination of already having the -800s in the fleet and wanting more capacity made the -800 a no-brainer, especially in the middle of the day when they don’t have enough capacity now They would rather have bigger planes with enough capacity during the peak and then fly with more empty seats in off-peak.

I did ask if this meant the A321neo was not long for the fleet, Diana said that wasn’t the case. As she explained it, “we are maximally using every airplane we have at our disposal right now, we want all those airplanes.” What to do with the A321neos is something for much further down the line.

The Added Bonus

These airplanes will be based in Honolulu and will be flown only within the islands… usually. There is an added bonus of having this fleet in the same configuration it is in now, and that is the ability to sub the airplanes on to mainland routes if needed. This isn’t going to be something that’s scheduled, but what if a plane breaks in Honolulu? In my view, they don’t need to have significant spare capacity for the mainland fleet, because they can press a -800 into service if needed and maintain the schedule.

They have yet to figure out how training and maintenance and all that will be handled, and that’s going to make some Honolulu-based employees a little anxious. But Diana did point out that Alaska just opened a new global training center in Renton outside Seattle. I would be surprised if that’s not where primary training happens which would obviously be a change from how training is done on the B717 fleet. Maintenance functions will, of course, be significant in Honolulu, but they don’t know what the plan is for heavy checks yet. Or at least, they aren’t ready to talk about it.

While this will make some people anxious, Diana did say, “we intend to keep a strong headquarters [in Honolulu] with training and front line resources.”

The Cargo Angle

Also announced yesterday was that Alaska Air Cargo will expand from five to nine aircraft, and at least some of those airplanes will be branded Hawaiian Air Cargo and will be based in Honolulu to fly between the islands. The exact split isn’t yet ready to be announced, but they will start flying in the first half of 2027.

^{Rendering via Hawaiian}

Hawaiian hasn’t had a dedicated cargo fleet in nearly a decade. Back then, it leveraged the ATRs that were flying to Molokai and Lānaiʻi to bring in some cargo-only aircraft to fly between the bigger stations. Jim was there for that, and I actually met with him in 2018 to learn more about the operation. But the pandemic brought big issues. With reduced jet flying, the outsourced passenger ATRs had to be grounded to avoid busting the pilot contract. In the end, Hawaiian decided the operation just wasn’t worth it, so it shut the whole thing down.

Now, Jim is bullish once again. He said that there were “bright spots in the ATR service,” but they also had real reliability issues thanks partially to their age. That was magnified by the fact that routine service and parts availability were all pain-points. Jim says they had “plenty of customers lining up,” and now they’ll be able to go back to them with much bigger airplanes. I can’t imagine Aloha and Kamaka are thrilled about this prospect, but with Transair having a much-diminished presence flying only Shorts 360s after crashing a B737 in 2021, maybe there is opportunity for all.

Either way, with Alaska already having a successful air cargo business, adding more to the fleet to fly within the islands is a whole lot easier than standing something up from scratch. All of these changes show some of why Alaska taking over Hawaiian can have a real benefit.

Once all the media fun was done at Hawaiian’s oneworld event, it was time to come home. I opted for the morning flight back to LAX which arrives mid-afternoon. Most tourists prefer something later, but this is a great flight for kamaʻāina (locals) to get to the mainland earlier in the day. Besides, this is a flight that gets some of the best service the airline has to offer. The morning flight is a turn for the Honolulu-based flight attendants, flying to LAX in the morning and then coming right back that evening. It gets flight attendants a lot of hours in a very short time without having to ever sleep in a hotel, so it is highly desirable and goes very senior. I’ve found those are the flight attendants you really want to have at Hawaiian, and I was proven right once again on this trip.

[Hawaiian provided my travel at no cost to me]

I took an Uber which dropped me off at 6:45am. The main checkpoint going into the Mauka concourse had TSA Precheck closed, so I walked over to the next one by the interisland gates and was through quickly. Then I walked back to gate A2 to wait in the very sterile concourse. I really don’t love these new gates; the facility has no real character.

The gate agent announced we had a very special flight attendant on this flight, Kuʻulei had just celebrated her 60th year with the airline, and they had a ceremony for her. That kind of time at one company doing one job is just hard to even fathom. The gate area gave a round of applause.

We were called for boarding, and I was in the B group again, as a silver elite. In this concourse, you go through the agriculture check required for those departing the islands in the gate area, and then you get onboard.

Hawaiian 810
July 1, 2026

From Honolulu
➤ Scheduled Departure: 8a
➤ Actual Departure: 809a
➤ From Gate: A2
➤ Wheels Up: 829a
➤ From Runway: 8R

To Los Angeles
➤ Wheels Down: 413p
➤ On Runway: 25L
➤ Scheduled Arrival: 420p
➤ Actual Arrival: 421p
➤ At Gate: 69A

Aircraft
➤ Type: Airbus A330-243
➤ Delivered: November 11, 2010
➤ Registered: N382HA, msn 1171
➤ Livery: Maile Lei colors

Flight
➤ Cabin: Coach in Seat 21A
➤ Load: ~99% Full
➤ Flight Time: 4h44m

I was originally seated in a standard coach seat, but I snagged an extra legroom one on the seat map when I had checked in… put another few dollars in the “elite status benefit” jar.

The captain welcomed us onboard, and he said we were ready to go but they were still loading cargo. Alright. Departure time came and went, and it wasn’t until about 10 minutes late that we pushed back. This is where I had flashbacks to the last time I tried to take this flight… and ended up with two gate returns. Fortunately, history did not repeat itself. We taxied to the runway and climbed out to the east.

The flight attendants asked us to have patience with them, because it was the first day of the new pre-ordered meal option. That was no problem, as I waited to get the corned beef hash I had ordered online for ~$15 before travel. But in reality, they didn’t need anyone to have patience with them, because they were pros. Yes, the most senior flight attendant had just hit her 60th anniversary milestone, but remember how I said this trip goes senior? The most junior onboard had 38 years. This crew was one of the best I’ve seen.

The flight attendants communicated well, first coming through with a beverage service including the complimentary-for-all Koloa rum punch and a granola bar.

Flight attendant Debbie told me and my seatmate that we were both entitled to free drinks throughout the flight, making sure we knew about our benefits. This was helpful for my seatmate who, it turns out, was on a basic economy fare and hit the jackpot when his seat was assigned. He was a nice guy coming home from seeing family in the islands, and we had a few good conversations throughout the flight.

After that was done, a little more than an hour into the flight, they came through with the pre-ordered food.

I learned from the flight attendants that Hawaiian has capped the number of meals initially at 50 (+ special meals and First Class) as they get used to the process. This flight hit the 50 cap, which is either a good sign that people are willing to pay or simply a reflection of the kamaʻāina who are members of the Huakaʻi program for locals. They were given a couple of free meals to ease them into the new paid program.

The corned beef hash was delivered in all-paper containers with two dipping sauces alongside the main. First impression? It looked good.

Second impression? It WAS good, really good. Chef Sheldon Simeon has done an incredible job.

That was a real egg on top that was cooked perfectly, the yolk oozing out when punctured. The food was very flavorful and heated well. I wolfed it down so fast, that by the time they came around with a second beverage service right after food was delivered, I was already done.

I settled in to work thanks to Starlink being blazing fast as usual. I flipped on movies I’d already seen just as background noise, and then it was time to head to the lav.

While I was waiting, I struck up a conversation with Debbie and another flight attendant Noe who had 43 and 40 years of service respectively. They had known each other since even before they started working for the airline, and they were so good at this job. If you know Hawaiian culture, just imagine a handful of aunties running the show onboard and you’ll get the picture. They were warm, efficient, and attentive, but you could also tell in an emergency that they would turn into no-nonsense pros. These are the people you want as flight attendants on your flight.

I didn’t want to distract them, but they seemed happy to chat. I stuck around for a bit each of the two times I came to use the lav. The second time, there was a flight attendant in management up there who was on this flight to help monitor the new food process and take notes. They were all constantly looking for feedback on the food and the process. For the most part, it seemed to be a big hit. There was one complaint from someone that the food was too salty, but… come on, why did you order the corned beef hash? Of course it’s salty. Everyone else loved the food. There were just a few ordering glitches for some huakaʻi members.

While I was there, Kuʻulei came back from First Class where she was serving, and we chatted a little. She started on the DC-3 in 1966. Just imagine what she’s seen.

Back at my seat I was working again. An hour and a half out from landing, the flight attendants came by with another beverage service and gave us a goodbye AlohaMac.

Debbie came back later and gave me a card she had written up. Not only did she take the time to write it, but she got the entire crew to sign.

I know what you’re thinking. They knew I was media, and they were going over the top to please me. First of all, I can’t imagine 40+ year flight attendant doing that just to try to get the company slightly better press. But more importantly, I clearly wasn’t the only one enjoying this crew. There was an older man in the bulkhead who was with his wife, but he told Debbie he was going to take her to Rome with him. My seatmate mentioned on descent that this was one of the best flights he’d taken. I’m pretty sure this is just who those flight attendants are, and it is a great reflection on the Hawaiian brand.

We passed over Catalina Island and then up from the south before landing. After a short taxi, we were at the very same gate I had left from two days earlier. I was sad to leave this flight, especially since it meant another painful journey through public transit. This time, the only painpoint was a 20 minute wait for the shuttle to show up at LAX. But none of that was going to erase the glow of such a pleasant trip home.

In the summer of 2023, Southwest’s interisland operation peaked with 64 daily flights between the islands. That had dropped to 50 in April 2025, where it remained until this new schedule for next March which has a mere 32 daily. Interisland flying has now been consolidated to only include flights from Honolulu to the four main neighbor island airports of Hilo, Kahului, Kona, and Līhuʻe. All flying between the neighbor islands themselves has been canceled.

Daily Southwest Interisland Flights in Hawaiʻi

^{Data via Cirium and Southwest}

But this is more than just a reduction. It’s a structural change in how the interisland flying network operates. Take a look at Honolulu departures by hour over these three different schedules.

Daily Southwest Interisland Departures from Honolulu by Hour

^{Data via Cirium and Southwest, chart via Claude}

At its peak in 2023, the Southwest interisland schedule was smoothed throughout the day. By 2025, you could see some peaks forming, but there was still a variety of flying at different times. Now, we are in a very clear bank structure where all four other airports get flights at the same four times. There is no longer a morning departure bank from Honolulu, so the airplanes start their day on the neighbor islands before coming to Honolulu.

The end result is something that will generally appeal to the very price-sensitive locals who care less about schedule, but it further cements Hawaiian’s position as the airline that makes the interisland economy go. For Southwest, the local market looks more like an afterthought.

This interisland flying plan is going to largely serve connecting markets from the mainland, and that is probably what it should be doing anyway. Honolulu becomes something of a transit hub with service from 10 mainland cities… four of which — Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario, San Jose, have no service nonstop to the neighbor islands at all.

The mainland market has evolved as well with some pretty significant swings in capacity over the last few years, including massive changes in departure times now that redeyes exist in the Southwest network.

Looking at a Saturday in the summer of 2023, Southwest had 13 departures from Hawaiʻi to the mainland before 11am and 17 between 11am and 4pm. Next March, there will be only two departures before 11am, 16 between 11am and 5pm, and then 10 redeyes. The destinations on the mainland have also shifted.

Weekly Southwest Departures to Hawaiʻi by Mainland Origin

^{Data via Cirium and Southwest}

Think of Las Vegas – Honolulu as a hub-to-hub market. Las Vegas remains solidly the most important connecting point for travel east of the Rockies, and it maintains flying that doesn’t exist in other hubs. That includes the only mainland flight to Hilo as well as a new westbound redeye from Vegas to Honolulu (which is beloved by the kamaʻāina who fly Hawaiian already).

San Diego has now surged into a very clear second place with flying now to all four main neighbor island airports (Kona and Līhuʻe are new weekend flights). While this will take some connections, this looks more like Southwest fighting for the local San Diego market with Alaska in general.

On the flip side, you can see just how far the Bay Area has fallen. Oakland had the first flight on Southwest to the islands, but it is now a fraction of what it used to be. San Jose has also fallen dramatically, now only having a Honolulu flight. Even Sacramento is down.

In Southern California, it’s a mixed bag. LAX has lost most of its service over time, now down to only a poorly-timed daily Honolulu flight (westbound in the afternoon, redeye back) and a Saturday-only flight to Kahului, Kona, and Līhuʻe. Long Beach too has fallen, now with only 5x weekly to Honolulu. But that 5x weekly pattern has now spread to both Burbank and Ontario as well, so there is some good news for those who like those airports.

With these moves, Southwest has become a niche player in the interisland market and a more focused player from the mainland to the islands. Las Vegas and Honolulu will be the two big connecting points, but then the airports in the west that have strong demand to Hawaiʻi will still have flights… just fewer of them (except in San Diego).

That’s a far cry from what people thought would happen when Southwest first entered the market, but it did not make the kind of inroads that it had originally hoped to see.

United Reports $805 Million Profit

United Airlines’s Q2 earnings were released Wednesday after the close of the market, and the carrier earned a profit of $805 million on $17.7 billion in gross revenue. The revenue figure is a 16% jump from last year’s Q2 but profit dropped more than 17% primarily due to rising fuel costs but also from extensive miscellaneous costs the airline simply listed under “Newark sucks” on its report.

Its total unit revenue (TRASM) jumped 12.1% but was outpaced by a 15.2% rise in CASM. While a significant amount of its rise in costs was direftly tied to fuel, its CASM-ex (unit costs excluding fuel) were up as well by 6%. United’s fuel spend was a whopping $5.1 billion dollars, a cool 84% more than Q2 in 2025. That comes out to $4.19 per gallon, a figure curiously close to the national average for a gallon of milk, which is currently $4.22. It makes one wonder — what’s United putting in its airplanes? Jet A…or milk?

The carrier earned $1.99 per share for its overlords shareholders, outpacing the $1.88 expected at the start of the quarter. It forecasted between $2.50 and $3.50 earnings per share in Q3, while analysts are expecting closer to $3.60 per share. As part of its forward looking guidance, the airline expects to earn between $9 and $11 per share for the full year, at the high end of its previous guidance of $7-$11.

And if you’re in need of some quick cash (or milk), we suggest giving Scott Kirby a call. He and United are sitting on $10.1 billion in cash and cash equivalents at the close of Q2.

Southwest Adds a Heap of New Flights

Southwest extended its schedule through peak March spring break and added 19 routes, particularly beefing up its operations in Austin, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Orlando.

The 19 new routes are:

• Austin: Detroit, San José (CR)
• Baltimore: Philadelphia
• Columbus: Punta Cana
• Dallas/Love: Detroit
• Las Vegas: Boston, Knoxville, Miami, Philadelphia
• Nashville: Aruba, Des Moines, Liberia, Montego Bay, St Thomas, Wichita
• Orlando: New York/LGA, Pensacola
• San Diego: Kona, Līhu’e

Along with those additions, Southwest will debut its first westbound redeye as it retimes a Las Vegas – Honolulu flight to depart at 2:45 a.m. and arrive into Honolulu just after 6 a.m. The carrier is also increasing its service from HNL to both Burbank and Ontario to 5x weekly. More on that market next week.

As it built this new schedule, Southwest took a day-by-day approach with Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays seeing more than 4,400 flights per day while Tuesdays, Wednesday, and Saturdays will see just over 4,000, a roughly 10% reduction from peak days. They thought about pulling a Chick-fil-A and just not flying on Sundays, but instead they just shaved about 100 flights off the peak to round out the week.

United Brings Euro Business Class Home

United’s new A321XLR aircraft will enter the carrier’s fleet later this year, and it will come with a new twist. A guaranteed blocked middle seat in one row of Economy Plus with a tray table over the middle seat will allow four passengers to enjoy both extra legroom offered to all Economy Plus passengers along with more elbow and shoulder room.

United’s original plan called for the two passengers on either side of the blocked middle to share access to the extra tray table, but as of press time, reports tell Cranky that the carrier is considering auctioning off tray table access to the highest bidder in the gatehouse prior to boarding.

The airline also says it’ll consider expanding this to other airplanes depending on well it does. The A321XLR is a single-aisle aircraft that will have new Polaris seats up front and will be used both domestically and to Europe.

The blocked middle will also potentially solve another problem for United — staffing the new XLRs on domestic flights. As currently laid out, the aircraft have 152 seats. Since the FAA requires an additional flight attendant for each 50 seats, by removing two middle seats, the capacity of the plane magically becomes 150 and allows it to be staffed lower.

Alaska Makes Changes to Hawaiian Network

Alaska and its warm-blooded subsidiary Hawaiian Airlines are adding new service to the islands from the U.S. mainland while ending one long-haul destination from Honolulu. Boise and Spokane will receive nonstop service to the islands for the first time in a while. Boise had a handful of flights to HNL in 2013 and 2014 on Allegiant, but that’s it between the two.

Both flights will begin in mid-December and will be operated by Alaska-branded B737 MAX airplanes. The routes will operate seasonally, flying through the spring. The Boise flight will operate 1x daily through March 21, while Spokane will fly 1x weekly through April 17. Both are timed for connections on both ends, with an arrival into HNL around 2pm and similar mid-afternoon departure times back to the mainland.

In addition to these two, the carrier is beefing up its service to the eighth Hawaiian island — Las Vegas. During its winter and spring peak, Alaska will up LAS-HNL from 3x to 4x daily on its A330 fleet. But it’s often a zero sum game in the airline world, and with additions, we get cuts. And the one left without seat when the music stopped this time is Auckland. The carrier’s 3x weekly seasonal AKL-HNL service is no more. This flight, which had been operated by an A330 was set to resume in November but now, that’s not happening.

Good and Bad News on the Canadian Labour Front

Flair Airlines pilots ratified a new 3-year contract with 89% of its electorate voting to accept the deal. Flair has about 270 pilots, and their new agreement will take effect immediately. Neither the airline or ALPA released the details of the new agreement other than for ALPA to say in a statement that the new agreement “offers meaningful improvements to compensation, retirement, scheduling, career progression, and overall quality of life.” We assume that means easier access to maple syrup and ice hockey.

On the other end of the labour spectrum, things are not so great at WestJet. Its FAs voted by an overwhelming 99% majority to authorize a strike. Canadian law requires a cooling-off period, which makes August 2 the soonest the FAs could walk off the job. Their current contract went into effect in 2021 and became amendable at the end of last year.

The union’s beef with the airline will sound very familiar. They want boarding pay, saying they have an average of 35 hours of unpaid work per month and that when you average out their months, they actually make less than Canada’s $18 federal minimum wage. The carrier responded saying it self-audited 40 FAs for nine months and found only four incidents where staff did not receive at least the minimum wage and blamed the specific FAs for the shortcoming saying they made shift trades that caused the drop in pay.

WestJet CEO Alex von Hoensbroech says the carrier is 100% committed to coming to an agreement with its cabin crew, while the union says “not so much.” Stay tuned.

• Aer Lingus will end flying to three U.S. destinations this fall: Denver, Las Vegas, Minneapolis/St Paul.
• Air Algérie received its first B737-8
• airBaltic needs $170 million…maybe try Scott Kirby?
• Boliviana is leasing 10 new Embraers.
• Brussels Airlines named Lorenza Maggio as CEO.
• Cabo Verde Airlines expects to begin 1x weekly service to Recife this fall.
• Cathay Pacific is adding its CX code onto Iberia flights from Madrid to two destinations in Brazil and one in the Dominican Republic.
• Cebu Pacific is adding Starlink by next year.
• China Airlines is updating the business class on its B787 fleet.
• Delta is permanently dedicating gate A25 in Atlanta to Braves outfielder Andruw Jones who will be inducted into the Hall of Fame next weekend. Delta originally wanted to do this at an E gate, but Andruw wasn’t having it.
• Fiji Airways is considering adding Premium Economy.
• JetBlue is pulling out of both Antigua and Daytona Beach.
• Kenmore Air named Cape Air COO Andrew Bonney its new CEO.
• KLM is being fined by the Danish government for what it called misleading SAF marketing.
• Korean earned a $170 million operating profit but a $65 million total net loss of during in Q2.
• LAM is spending €30.2 Million on five new aircraft.
• Lufthansa‘s Miles & More program is going through a dramatically ridiculous rebrand.
• Philippine Airlines expects to push its next widebody order to both Airbus and Boeing.
• Qantas operated the first trial cargo flight into the new Eastern Perth Western Sydney Airport.
• Singapore Airlines has a new lounge in Melbourne.
• TAP plans to add 24 new aircraft over the next two years.
• United is adding service to Charlottesville (1x daily), Knoxville (2x daily), NW Arkansas (1x daily), and Omaha (1x daily) from Newark. All four begin September 24.

Do you realize that if you are sitting on the toilet at 11:59PM, and the clock strikes midnight.

It’s same shit, different day.