What is up with Grandstanding Democrats?

Flying the Oberstar Skies
April 11, 2008

Journal readers tend to get around, so there's a good chance that the person reading this editorial has been among the hundreds of thousands of travelers stuck on a tarmac or waylaid in a hotel by the recent wave of flight cancellations. And if you're wondering where to point the finger, we'd suggest Capitol Hill. Allow us to explain.

After the Federal Aviation Administration fined Southwest Airlines more than $10 million last month for inspection lapses, Congress rounded up the usual scapegoats for some hearings. FAA officials told the House Transportation Committee that the Southwest situation was "an isolated problem, not a systematic one." But James Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the panel, was unpersuaded.

"It's clear we have a structural problem at the FAA," declared Mr. Oberstar, to nationwide headlines. "I fear that complacency may have set in at the highest levels of FAA management, reflecting a pendulum swing away from vigorous enforcement of compliance, toward a carrier-favorable, cozy relationship."

The regulators got the message and went into panic mode. As is wont with government bureaucracies like the FAA, it proceeded to swing the pendulum waaaay back in the other direction – and hasn't stopped. An industry-wide "audit" commenced, and FAA inspectors set about finding something – anything – awry with an aircraft to show Mr. Oberstar and other Congressional overseers that the agency was up to the job of enforcing federal maintenance requirements to the letter.

American cuts more flights; Fliers fume

By HARRY R. WEBER, AP Business Writer 1 hour, 12 minutes ago

ATLANTA - American Airlines grounded hundreds more flights Friday as the inspection-related mess frustrated passengers and hurt an industry already bleeding cash thanks to high fuel costs.

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Lawmakers were asking questions and some fed-up air travelers headed for trains. Others gave the airlines a pass, saying the companies were doing the best they could.

"If somebody's got a choice between being in a plane crash and being late, is there a choice?" Jane Bernard, a writer from New York who was delayed by at least three hours en route from LaGuardia Airport to Miami, said Thursday.

Mingo Valencia, a 60-year-old stuck at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport while heading home to Midland, Texas, wasn't so gracious.

"Poor management," he said bluntly.

Congress also weighed in Thursday. The Federal Aviation Administration official who ordered safety audits last month, Nicholas Sabatini, faced tough questions from a Senate subcommittee about the agency's lax oversight of airlines and his own accountability for recent breakdowns. The FAA noted that airlines had 18 months to check electrical wiring on MD-80 jets since an initial order was issued in September 2006.

American, a unit of Fort Worth, Texas-based AMR Corp., canceled another 595 flights Friday, bringing this week's total to nearly 3,100 due to safety inspections of its MD-80s. The carrier said disruptions will continue through Saturday as it works to comply with the federal safety order.

Alaska Airlines, Midwest Airlines and Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines Inc. joined the wave, each canceling a small number of flights on MD-80 aircraft Thursday.

At least 250,000 passengers have been affected by the American cancellations this week alone.

Other carriers like Continental Airlines Inc., JetBlue Airways Corp., AirTran Airways and Northwest Airlines Corp. said they passed the first round of FAA audits with a clean slate and did not expect extra maintenance work or flight delays. It was impossible to say whether that could change since the FAA is conducting another round of safety audits.

The cancellations come at a time of high fuel prices and mixed success among the major air carriers at getting domestic fare increases to stick. The fact that airplanes are flying very full is making it difficult for airlines that cancel flights to find empty seats on other carriers to rebook their passengers.

"This disruption is severe," said Webster O'Brien, an industry expert with aviation consulting firm Simat, Helliesen & Eichner. "People are going to be unhappy. There isn't going to be an easy way to walk everybody out of it."

Maybe those smart guys in manglement could come up with a solution to this??

It seems that with their new deal Northwest doesn't have enough pilots to fly their schedule. Last I checked there were these newfangled things called computers that can figure out how many hours the airline flies a month and it could even divide that number by the number of pilots to see if there are enough. Reasonable people might even hire a few guys to make up the shortfall or maybe only schedule the number of flights that have pilots.

Northwest cancels flights for lack of pilots

By Jim Jelter, MarketWatch

Last Update: 5:16 PM ET Jul 29, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Northwest Airlines Corp. cancelled as many as 200 flights over the weekend, pointing to empty cockpits as the culprit.

At the peak of the summer travel season, Northwest said it is seeing a big jump in absenteeism among the crews that fly its narrow-bodied jets, which means the shortage is hurting mainly domestic rather than international flights.

The result is thousands of stranded passengers at airports across the country.

"Friday morning we saw a sharp spike in pilot absenteeism. We flew about 93% of our scheduled flights on Friday and about the same yesterday. We expect that to go to about 91% today," Northwest spokesman Roman Blahoski told MarketWatch.

The problem stems from over-scheduling. And it's not new. Northwest saw the problem flare up in late June, when the number of pilots staying at home jumped 80% from a year earlier.

Pilots are allowed to fly just so many hours during the course of a month. At Northwest, the maximum number of hours the airline scheduled for flight crews in June was 88 to 90. That was apparently too much.

To help ease the problem, Northwest whittled down their July flight schedule, a move they are again taking in August, further reducing the amount of time pilots are to be in the cockpit to 86 hours. The net impact on Northwest's schedule will be about a 4% reduction next month in domestic flights.

Northwest would not disclose the number of flights it cancelled over the weekend, but the Web site FlightStats.com reported the carrier scrubbed 166 flights on Saturday.

Northwest said it has about 1,300 flights scheduled for Sunday. If it only expects to complete 91%, that translates to about 117 cancellations. While some are due to weather or air traffic control, the vast majority are due to the pilot shortage, Lahaska said.

Northwest (NWA17.98, -1.01, -5.3% ) , which emerged from bankruptcy at the end of May, has about 5,000 active pilots on its payroll.

The Air Line Pilots Association, which has a long history of tangling with Northwest management, has earlier accused the Egan, Minn.-based carrier of setting an unrealistic schedule given the number of pilots it employs.

Jim Jelter is Industrials Editor for MarketWatch in San Francisco.

Religion of Peace of Update

. . . someone else had this story under the category of "not ready for civilization"! I guess there weren't any carpets or camels available for long distance travel.

Sheikh delays plane over seating

Fri Jul 27, 2:15 PM ET

MILAN (Reuters) - A Qatar sheikh held up a British Airways flight at Milan's Linate airport for nearly three hours after discovering three of his female relatives had been seated next to men they did not know.

When none of the other business class passengers agreed to swap seats, the sheikh, a member of Qatar's ruling family, went to the pilot, who had already started the engine, to complain, an airport official said.

But the pilot ordered him and his traveling companions, the three women, two men, a cook and a servant, off the plane.

The London-bound flight took off nearly three hours behind schedule Thursday evening and around 50 of the 115 passengers missed connecting flights.

Traditions in the conservative Gulf Arab region bar women from mixing with unrelated men.

Now, why are my shares worthless?

Isn't $1B how much they took from their pilots? How do you come out of bankruptcy one day and then just 1 quarter later show that much profit? Can those guys do my books for me?

Delta Air Lines Posts $1.77B Profit
Jul 18, 8:21 AM (ET)
By HARRY R. WEBER

ATLANTA (AP) - Delta Air Lines Inc. (DAL) (DAL), the nation's third-largest carrier, cited a 5.5 percent gain in sales as it reported Wednesday that it swung to a profit in the second quarter, which saw it emerge from bankruptcy after shaving billions of dollars in costs.

The Atlanta-based company's results beat Wall Street expectations when one-time items are excluded.

For the three months ending June 30, Delta said it recorded net income of $1.77 billion, or $4.49 a share, compared to a loss of $2.21 billion in the same period a year earlier. The corresponding per-share figure for the year-ago loss was not provided in Delta's balance sheet.

Excluding reorganization and related one-time items, Delta said it had a profit of $274 million, or 70 cents a share, in the second quarter. On a comparable basis, analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial were expecting a profit of 59 cents a share.

The reorganization and related one-time items Delta accounted for in the second quarter of this year stemmed from $1.5 billion of income primarily due to the discharge of claims and liabilities in connection with its bankruptcy proceedings and the adoption of fresh-start reporting..

Revenue in the April-June quarter rose to $5 billion, compared to $4.74 billion recorded in the same period a year earlier.

At the end of the quarter, Delta had $3.7 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, of which $3.4 billion was unrestricted. Delta also has an additional $1 billion in unrestricted liquidity available under its undrawn revolving credit facility.

Delta recorded roughly $40 million in cash gains on fuel hedge contracts settled during the quarter.

For the first six months of the year, Delta said its net income was $1.64 billion, compared to a loss of $4.28 billion for the same period a year earlier. Per-share figures were not given. Six-month revenue rose to $9.24 billion, compared to revenue of $8.54 billion in the same period a year earlier.

Check that flight plan

How could it possibly have taken 25 hours???? Why didn't anybody DRIVE them to JFK from Atlantic City? What does that take at 12:30 at night, 2 hours?

JetBlue passengers endure 25-hour trek from Fort Lauderdale to N.Y.

By Arlene Satchell and Tom Stieghorst
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Posted June 29 2007

A 2 ½-hour JetBlue Airways flight bound from Fort Lauderdale to New York on Wednesday turned into a 25-hour odyssey that finally ended Thursday afternoon, as a chain of problems left 150 passengers staggered by the mind-boggling delay.

The cascade of problems occurred just four months after a disastrous five-day period in February when the airline canceled more than 1,000 flights in the New York area. And it again raises questions about how much of the blame should fall on airlines when flights encounter unexpected delays.

Flight 62's takeoff at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday was delayed for three hours. The jet departed, only to be diverted by bad weather to Atlantic City, N.J., where passengers stewed on the tarmac for four hours. At 12:30 a.m. Thursday, they were allowed off the plane. It would be another four hours until they finally were sent to a hotel for the night. The flight ultimately arrived at JFK International Airport at 3:21 p.m. Thursday.

Moving on, or, what were these guy's smoking?

I think it was Frued (or maybe Dan Ackroyd playing Frued in an SNL skit) who said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!

London, Friday 22.06.07

'Mile-wide UFO' spotted by British airline pilot

22.06.07

One of the largest UFOs ever seen has been observed by the crew and passengers of an airliner over the Channel Islands.

An official air-miss report on the incident several weeks ago appears in Pilot magazine.

Aurigny Airlines captain Ray Bowyer, 50, flying close to Alderney first spotted the object, described as "a cigar-shaped brilliant white light".

Aurigny Airlines captain Ray Bowyer, 50, described what he thought to be a UFO as 'a cigar-shaped brilliant white light', similar to the image supplied by Dennis Plunket of the British Flying Saucer bureau

As the plane got closer the captain viewed it through binoculars and said:

"It was a very sharp, thin yellow object with a green area. It was 2,000ft up and stationary. I thought it was about 10 miles away, although I later realised it was approximately 40 miles from us. At first, I thought it was the size of a [Boeing] 737.

"But it must have been much bigger because of how far away it was. It could have been as much as a mile wide."

Continuing his approach to Guernsey, Bowyer then spied a "second identical object further to the west".

He said: "It was exactly the same but looked smaller because it was further away. It was closer to Guernsey. I can't explain it. This was clearly visual for about nine minutes.

"I'm certainly not saying that it was something of another world. All I'm saying is that I have never seen anything like it before in all my years of flying."

The sightings were confirmed by passengers Kate and John Russell. John, 74, said "I saw an orange light. It was like an elongated oval".

The sightings were also confirmed by an unnamed pilot with the Blue Islands airline.

The Civil Aviation Authority safety notice states that a Tri-Lander aircraft flying close to Alderney spotted the object.

"Certain parts of the report have not been published. I cannot say why," said a senior CAA source.

Earlier this year however, the MOD declared its intentions to open its UFO files to the public.

Sky Team, Yay!

DALLAS (AP) - Continental Airlines Inc. is apologizing to its customers for "poor conditions" aboard a transatlantic flight where one passenger described sewage spilling down the aisle from a lavatory.

"I've never felt so offended in all my life," passenger Collin Brock of Washington state told Seattle's KING-TV. "I felt like I had been physically abused and neglected. I was forced to sit next to human excrement for seven hours."

Continental spokesman Dave Messing on Thursday confirmed that there had been a problem with the plane's lavatory during the flight.

Flight 71, with 168 passengers on board, had taken off June 13 from Amsterdam bound for Newark, N.J., but made an overnight stop in Shannon, Ireland, to fix the lavatory problem, Messing said.

He said everything appeared to have been fixed before the plane took off again for Newark the next day, renamed Flight 1970, but then "the problem developed again."

After the plane landed in Newark, airline employees determined the problem was caused by someone flushing latex gloves down the toilet—despite signs that warn not to discard foreign objects into the system, Messing said.

"We deeply regret the serious inconvenience to our customers and are apologizing to them and compensating them for the poor conditions on the flight as well as the diversion and delay," he wrote in a statement from the Houston-based carrier.

Continental is compensating passengers with travel vouchers, Messing said. He declined to say how much the vouchers were worth.

Brock told KING-TV he was offered a $500 voucher. He said he wasn't sure he would ever use it.

How to know if you shouldn't board a flight

Doesn't TSA do any COMMON SENSE screening?!?

"Doctors deliver baby on Delta flight

By GIOVANNA DELL'ORTO, Associated Press WriterFri May 25, 7:09 PM ET

Two doctors on a Delta Air Lines flight from Germany delivered a baby in the aisle of the plane and resuscitated him when he wasn't breathing, officials said.

Delta Flight 131 to Atlanta was over the Washington area when a woman about 32 to 36 weeks — or nine months — pregnant went into labor Wednesday afternoon, prompting an emergency stop in Charlotte, N.C., about nine hours into the flight.

Though the baby boy wasn't breathing when he was born, he was 'like a normal newborn' by Friday, one of the doctors who helped deliver him said.

The baby was born in front of the first seats after first class, one of the roomiest aisles in a plane. Using a stethoscope that was part of medical equipment onboard, the doctors realized the baby had a very slow or arrested heartbeat as the woman was in labor."

Doctors deliver baby on Delta flight

Delta flies out of bankruptcy court - Apr. 30, 2007

Well, my stock is worthless, I just hope my FF miles don't go away!






Delta flies out of bankruptcy court - Apr. 30, 2007