"Pilot Air"

Recall that the airline that screwed up Principal Skinner's reservation enabling spring break to start a day early was SkyAmeriWestica. Don't forget Gabbo Air, Transhemispheric Airlines, and Krazy Klown Airlines. Which has yet to become a laughingstock, last time I checked.

Good article!

The airline, now defunct, was Midway. And I thought, well if we get that far w/o dropping out of the sky we're ahead of the game.

One of your suggestions -- Zip-Air -- has already come and gone. Air Canada started it as a low-cost subsidiary to compete in western Canada. The planes were painted in pastel colours. The planes are in the Mohave. Photos at: http://www.airliners.net/open.file?id=1259397&WxsIERv=Obrvat%20737-217%2FNqi&Wm=1&WdsYXMg=Hagvgyrq%20%28Mvc%20Nve%29&QtODMg=Zbwnir%20%28ZUI%29&ERDLTkt=HFN%20-%20Pnyvsbeavn&ktODMp=Abirzore%202006&BP=0&WNEb25u=Jreare%20Ubeingu&xsIERvdWdsY=P-TWPC&MgTUQtODMgKE=Sbezre%20732%27f%20bs%20Mvc%20Nve%20orvat%20ernpgvingrq%20ng%20ZUI&YXMgTUQtODMgKERD=563&NEb25uZWxs=2007-09-04%2022%3A17%3A58&ODJ9dvCE=&O89Dcjdg=22728%2F911&static=yes&width=1024&height=745&sok=JURER%20%20%28%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271259397%27%20BE%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271255162%27%20BE%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271250461%27%20BE%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271226523%27%20BE%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271223825%27%20BE%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271223824%27%20BE%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271221773%27%20BE%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271219801%27%20BE%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271218837%27%20BE%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271207177%27%20BE%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271195818%27%20BE%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271180934%27%20BE%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271172327%27%20BE%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271166388%27%20BE%20cubgb_vq%20%3D%20%271164204%27%29%20%20beqre%20ol%20&photo_nr=1&prev_id=&next_id=1255162&size=L

oh come on someone from Boston complaining about use of the language? I seem to remember torturing such words as Lobster (lobstah) or park the car (paahk the cah) or citys such as Peabody (Pibidy) or Revere (Reveah) not to mention the Kennedy favorite Cuba (cuber)

all in good fun

Mar3ie

You left out my personal favorite, China's new Okay Airlines, and what should be its slogan: "It's...Okay"

Sorry; still trying to re-attach my ass after laughing it off. I lived in Deutschland [Doytch-lont] for 3 years at different times from 1950 to 1967, so I know how to say Looft-hon-sa [approximate].

I'm not a pilot, but a sports car enthusiast, and the US mis-pronunciation of Porsche gripes me. It's NOT Porsh; it's Por-sha, similar to the Shakespearian character Portia.

No wonder Joe Sixpack doesn't get the rest of the world. Get out into it, and learn to pronounce it, dammit!

Freedom was actually created by Mesa in an attempt to bust the pilot's union. Originally it was non-union, and the pilots agreed to a concessionary contract in exchange to a provision that all Mesa Airlines pilots would be members of ALPA. Of course, the company denies this was their motivation for creating the Freedom certificate, but it's entirely in keeping with their CEO's philosophy. You also forgot to mention Mesa's newest venture in Hawaii...Go! airlines. Not just Go Airlines which would be bad enough, but Go! with a !

AirOne, the Italian airline you mentioned, ows its name to a playword: "airone" (eye-ROH-neh) is the Italian for crane (the bird, not the lifting piece of machinery). And for slick, modern, cool names, considering the Spanish upstart Vueling, a bilingual chimera made of vuel- (as in "vuelo", flight), and the English verbal suffix -ing. TV and street ads for Vueling are actually tetralingual, using a mishmash of Catalan, Spanish, English, and French words.

I think the worst airline names pick a meanless compass direction -- Southwest, Northwest, Eastern, Western etc. Or the are completely generic names that could be used on any product or service -- American, Continental, United, Delta.

English "th" is not a diphthong, but a digraph -- a single sound represented by two letters (see also "ch" and "sh"). A diphthong is a sound that begins as one simple vowel and morphs into another within the same syllable, like "oi" in boil or "i" (ah-ee) in fine. I know you're not trying to present yourself as an expert in liguistics, but still . . . .

How hard would it be to simply ask someone how to pronounce the airlines you're going to be reading? Even write them down phonetically on a scrap of paper before you read the list, a-la JFK (eeech been ayn berlinn(-ah)<-couldn't help myself..sorry Boston).

Its little stuff like this that makes me think, maybe the Europeans are right, we are uncultured swine. I'm not asking the woman to know that Lufthansa references the Hanseatic League, the great Northern-European trading alliance of the middle ages (founded in Luebeck, Germany in the mid 1100s CE)...but it would be nice to maybe understand the basic principles of a language before go reading them into a microphone, probably to be heard by native speakers returning to their home countries, some of whom may be forming their opinions of American culture as we speak.

It probably shouldn't bother us so much...but such is the plight of the pronunciation nerd.

As for airline names, my favorite is still one nobody could get wrong.. AEROBANANA!!..even if it is only one plane, I still hold hope that one day the Mexican skies will be speckled with yellow.

But was that an American pronunciation of 'Air France' or the infinitely seductive French pronunciation of 'Air France'?

Being a sucker for accents from the American south, I have to admit that even 'Lufthansa' sounds sexy coming from a Texan lady.

I had a Japanese teacher (I am a native English speaker; she was Japanese teaching Japanese) who made me rethink words and especially names taken from other languages. For instance, she said it was wrong to call San Francisco's Japanese section "Nihonmachi" because it is known as "Japan Town", and that is what the Japanese tourists call it too. She also thought that my writing the city of Chico as (in Japanese syllables) "chi ko" was wrong; the Spanish may well be pronounced with a sort "i", but the American city is pronounced by its natives with a long "i" as "chi i ko". It may be confused, but her bigger argument was that names take on new pronunciations when they move to other languages.

Look at what happens to country names. We call the country "Japan" but that is because we got it roundabout from several other languages referring to a lacquer process, I believe. Their name is "Nippon" or "Nihon" depending on what other words are used with it phonetically. The country to the south of the US is pronounced "MAY hee ko" by them and "MEK sih ko" by us. When the Japanese made a name for it, they took it from the US pronunciation and call it the twisted "may kee shee ko" when the native pronunciation would work perfectly well in Japanese.

Japanese syllables end with vowels or are vowels alone, mostly, so you go to "mah koo doh nah roo doh" and order "bee goo mah koo" and "foo ray unn choo foo ri zu".

So if Lufthansa changes pronunciation here, well, so do Paris, Tokyo, Rome probably just about every Central and Eastern European name, in fact, probably just about every name in every language changes when pronounced in a different language.

I side with Lift-hann-zer or however Bostonians want to mangle it, whatever doppleganger Dixie denizens want to twist it into, and just about every other variation which goes into the recipe for the spice of life.