Letters to the Editor
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Half the story?
As usual, your column was very insightful. But it seems like you fail to account for successful airlines from high wage, largely unionized countries. BA, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, JAL and others come to mind. And I think that I can still get cheaper flights on Ryan, Lauda Air or other European discount carriers than on most US lines. I wonder how much of the crunch the US airlines are in are not the result of unions or high fuel prices, but rotten service and incompetent management? For example, I don't think it was an accident that Southwest made the right call on hedging fuel prices while UAL and AA made the wrong one.
OK, I am off to the 11 hour SFO-FRA puddle jump. Keep up the good work.
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Not an alternative energy
there are no serious efforts being made to switch commercial aircraft to alternative energies like hydrogen.
Please, please don't make the common mistake that hydrogen is an alternative energy source, that might save the airlines money. It is merely an alternative means of energy transport. There are no big hydrogen wells in Siberia to serve the world's energy needs -- hydrogen is obtained through use of oil.
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U.S. airlines are just one part of a broken transportation system
The United States has a uniquely flawed transportation system. A larger proportion of trips are made by private car than just about anywhere else in the world, so the market for public transportation (including air trips) is relatively small. Within the public transportation sector, travel is about as inconvenient as a wealthy industrialized nation can manage. There is little integration between buses, planes, and trains. Outside the Northeast Corridor and a few other areas, there are practically no trains (and certainly none you can rely on). Even getting to the airport from the city is harder in the U.S. than just about anywhere else.
With little train service and poor connections, airports are overburdened with short-haul flights. Not only are these wasteful of passengers' time, they are also wasteful of fuel: the burden of takeoff and landing makes up a disproportionately large part of the total trip. And so many short-haul flights cause airport congestion, which means more airport improvement fees to pay for huge airport expansion schemes to mitigate the congestion.
I wonder what the CASM would be for a well-maintained modern train service over distances under 500 miles, such as Amtrak's Northeast Corridor (but without the dilapidated infrastructure). If airlines had the option of purchasing train seats to bring passengers into their hubs (instead of flying short distances), the way many European carriers do, they might be able to lower costs substantially. Even better, the travel experience could become less painful if carefully integrated air and rail services reduced total travel time and airport congestion. Who knows, maybe even some drivers would switch to the air/rail combination if it were faster and more pleasant.
The current fight-to-the-death climate makes such a proposal pretty utopian. A plan like this requires coordination and leadership, as well as substantial public and private investment for long-term benefits. None of that is very plausible right now. But it may be necessary to preserve the mobility that Americans have come to take for granted.
[Here in Canada the financial state of the airlines may not be so catastrophic, but the transportation system in general has most of the same problems.]
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JetBlue now has more than one aircraft type too...
Just a nit to pick: JetBlue is no longer an all Airbus shop. I got on a JetBlue flight from JFK to Buffalo during my Christmas-week travels last year and was disoriented by how small the plane was, since I was expecting the typical Airbus. Turns out they now have some of those new Embraers (E170, I think). Not sure what the rationale for the decision is...
jf
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Fuel!
Nice article (as usual - Patrick, have you checked out how many disgruntled subscribers at Table Talk who cited your column as one of the few reasons they still subscribe to Salon, and how many of those of us who hate the new design and lay-out that some weeks read _only_ your column nowadays?).
And a big thanks for the link to that article about Branson and cellulose ethanol. Could you hunt up some fuel engineer/scientist to interview about how viable running airplane engines on ethanol really is? I'd like a technical column again, for a change. Heck, even a general article on airplane engines and fuel efficiency (as compared to cars, boats and lawnmowers) would be nice. (I think you've touched on this lightly in some column, but it was some time ago.)
It was also very interesting to read that there's an extra tax on airplane fuel in the US that gets directly passed on to the passengers. Is this on top of or instead whatever (minimal) taxes you guys have on gasoline?
I have a hazy memory of airplane fuel (at least for airlines) being tax-exempt or at least taxed wayyy less than petrol for cars etc in many countries. Could you do a comparison? Does it matter very much for airlines where they fill up? Is it even possible (given weight constraints for landing etc) to save on fuel by carefully chosing where to make a stop on longer hauls, or are airlines just stuck with whatever the price is where they happen to land?
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Energy, and awful puns
hydrogen is obtained through use of oil.
This statement is currently true, but by the time anybody seems even relatively likely to be attempting to use hydrogen for mass transit, it probably won't be. Actually, I thought "catalyse some growth" was an awful pun on the part of the Pilot.
The problem with production of Hydrogen from water (by the photocatalytic route; other electrolytic routes aren't getting you anywhere) and also that with fuel cells as a power source is that only catalysts that produce hydrogen/energy at commercially significant rates are Platinum-based, which currently prices them out of the energy market. Hence, catalysis is the big barrier to alternative energy sources at the moment...the Pilot may or may not have known this, but I'm blaming him for punnery anyway.
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Airlines, Unions and Republicans
A quote from the article:
"The current administration, for all its pro-big-business policies and anti-tax rhetoric, hasn't given struggling airlines much breathing room."
As a retired veteran of two major airlines (one, Eastern, long gone), one reason for the above is this: the "legacy" carriers are viewed by this and past Republican administrations as overly dominated by labor unions, which are a curse that be destroyed. Even the marginally unionized Delta has to contend with ALPA. Airline management and the banks that control them do not disagree with this "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" mentality. Few things warm a Republican's heart more than to see a major carrier return to operation from Chapter 11 with its unions broken, even if it that carrier ultimately fails: the damage done to collective bargaining rights is more than worth it. Fuel costs, devastating as they are, have added a bigger club to this assault on unions.
The LCC's are most welcome in this brave new(?) world. I recall the silly opinions many of us had while Eastern was in its death throes circa 1989 that then President Bush would never allow a major carrier to go under, somehow oblivious to Frank Lorenzo's painfully easier excursion through Chapter 11 with Continental a few years earlier. Boy, were we stupid...