“Good Night, Sweetie”: Now a Terrorist Transmission?
In yet another sign that exactly one airline is completely out of touch with customer-reality, the Twitterverse popped up a story today about media consultant John Battelle, who was recently stopped, on a wifi-equipped aircraft flying between New York and San Francisco, from using video chat to say “good night” to his wife and daughters.
Which airline is it? Here are some clues:
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When Outsourcing Kills: Colgan Air and Its Big 3 Partners
PBS’ Frontline unit has done a fascinating and disturbing bit of documentary journalism that tells the story of Colgan Air and the circumstances surrounding the crash of Continental flight 3407 in Buffalo, New York in February, 2009.
Colgan provides feeder services for United Airlines (as United Express), Continental (as Continental Connection), and US Airways (as US Airways Express), serving approximately 50 cities in the northeastern United States and Texas.
Click here to view the program in its entirety on the PBS site:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/flyingcheap/view/
(You may also want to read the alarming comments of a United Airlines mechanic on the same page, who asserts several instances of serious, questionable maintenance practices at United’s mainline fleet.)
A total of 50 people (45 passengers; 2 crew members; 1 on the ground) lost their lives in the Colgan/ Continental incident, which was investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board. NTSB concluded that the crash, first believed to have been caused by icing during bad weather, was avoidable; the root cause of the crash was determined to be operational errors by both pilots, almost certainly exacerbated by both inexperience and fatigue.
jetBlue: Relationships + Leadership + Innovation2
Author and journalist Marc Gunther offers up some wonderful insights concerning the nature of jetBlue’s success, in a CNN article published last Thursday that was accompanied a day later by a post in Gunther’s own blog.
Gunther accompanied jetBlue CEO Dave Barger on a flight to jetBlue University in Orlando, the airline’s employee training facility, and his writing seems to confirm that jetBlue is the “new Southwest.”
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Tale of the Tagues: An Airline Story, Part 2
[Read first » Tale of the Tagues: An Airline Story, Part 1]
After his first departure from ATA, John Tague and two partners started The Pointe Group, an airline consulting firm with presence in both New York and suburban Washington, D.C. Tague’s only two consulting engagements as an ex-ATA executive were short, almost simultaneous, and quite unusual. At the request of a west coast investment bank, he became the consulting CEO for two ailing regional airlines: Air South, based in Columbia, South Carolina and, a few months later, Vanguard Airlines, based in Kansas City, Missouri.
It wasn’t clear to industry observers at the time how a single CEO was going to simultaneously nurse back to health two struggling airlines that were located 850 miles apart. One analyst, George Hamlin of Global Aviation Systems in Washington, D.C., likened the airlines’ plight to “two drunks staggering down the street trying to hold each other up.”
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