American has decided to add a new dot to its route map. The winner is… Provo, Utah. This might sound like it’s coming from left field, but this is exactly the kind of market that American is trying to serve with its small-city strategy. And regardless of whether this is the right strategy to pursue or not, American is the right network airline to serve a market like this. Provo might seem like an odd decision. After all, the city lies less than an hour south of Salt Lake City’s airport where there is ample service. Further, Provo is a college town — hello, BYU — which means it’s not exactly kn ..read more

Last week on The Air Show podcast, Jon Ostrower, Brian Sumers, and I dove head first into the two northern corners of the Continental US, Boston and Seattle. Delta has officially designated each city as a hub in the last decade, but the competitive situation and outcome has been dramatically different. If you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, well, you’re missing out on our discussion. Here’s how you can do that: Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Amazon Listen on Pocket Casts But some of you who are already listening to the podcast were curious to see the numbers we t ..read more

Delta Ekes Out Q1 Profit As it usually is, Delta Air Lines was the first major U.S. carrier to release its earnings report, and the airline squeaked out a $37 million profit for the first three months of 2024, a far cry from last year’s lost of $363 million during the same time period. The profit came on nearly $12.6 billion of revenue, a 6% bump from last year despite being slightly below analyst projections. Delta expects its Q2 revenue to set a company record with as much as a 7% bump from last year forecasted. Delta says its corporate sales drove a lot of the demand in Q1, with a 14% YoY i ..read more

Cirium recently loaded the Department of Transportation’s DB1B data for Q4 2023, and I eagerly dove in to look for trends. What kept standing out everywhere I looked was American’s poor revenue performance in the quarter. My initial thought was that American’s efforts to abandon its sales efforts have left a mark, but the airline tells me otherwise, suggesting there hasn’t been a negative impact at all. I find that hard to believe, especially on a day when Delta announced corporate demand had come roaring back with a 14 percent increase in Q1, but I don’t doubt there are other factors involved ..read more

If you happen to be around the Fort Lauderdale airport and hear a grinding sound, don’t worry. It’s not an airplane’s mechanical problem. It’s just Spirit Airlines deciding to effectively grind its growth plans to a halt next year. This is understandable but concerning news for the airline. Spirit announced yesterday that it would defer all new airplanes scheduled to be delivered from second quarter 2025 all the way through the end of 2026 (except for two “direct lease” airplanes which will still come in) until the 2030-2031 timeframe. You can just assume this counts as “some random time in th ..read more

Rumors had been swirling, but on March 22, United’s VP of Corporate Safety Sasha Johnson put out an internal memo explaining that the airline would be under increased scrutiny from the FAA due to a string of non-life threatening but highly-publicized incidents. The wording was vague regarding what that meant in concrete terms, but now we know one thing as confirmed with the airline. It can’t open new cities, and both Newark – Faro and Tokyo – Cebu will not fly this summer. The list of incidents coming out of United was long but not particularly noteworthy. According to The Aviation Herald (I a ..read more

Frontier’s FAs Don’t Like New Schedule Format As Frontier shifts its scheduling model to have more out-and-back turns to improve its shaky operational reliability, its flight attendants are voicing their concerns over how it’s affecting their bottom line. With the carrier’s new scheduling model, there are far fewer multi-day trips for FAs, leaving same day turns which can be less profitable. If an FA wants to work 12 days per month, and previously worked four separate three day trips, that meant just four commutes to and from the airport (whether by air or locally by car). But the new scheduli ..read more

This is a post that probably could have been written a decade ago. After all, the idea that Southwest would eventually start flying redeyes always seemed like a foregone conclusion. It was just a matter of when. Now we seem to be getting a little bit closer to this being a reality with about 50 daily flights coming in the not-too-distant future. When Southwest started flying, the idea of having a redeye was never even considered. The airline only did short hops around the country, so flying overnight just wasn’t an option. Southwest didn’t touch the East Coast until the summer of 1993 when it ..read more

After more than 50 years, Boeing has finally announced plans to cancel the Boeing 737 program. The company is going to launch the new and long-awaited 797 aircraft to replace the 737. In a real surprise, the company says development work has been quietly underway for some time, and the aircraft should be certified relatively quickly. Boeing has had a challenging two decades, and the downhill slide has yet to be arrested. It’s hard to know where to start this saga, so let’s start in late 2018 when the Lion Air 737 MAX crashed shortly after takeoff. Boeing blamed the pilots for the accident, an ..read more

FAA Casts Eye Towards United The FAA is putting United on its own version of a performance improvement plan, as it increases oversight of the airline to ensure it’s complying with safety regulations and mitigating risk.  This comes after the carrier has had several incidents that raised an eye at the FAA including a runway excursion in Houston, a B777 that lost a tire taking off from San Francisco, and others.  None of the reported issues caused any injuries to customers or those on the ground. The FAA’s authority is broad in these cases, with the government in a position to potentia ..read more