Well, not those Feds.

Southwest Airlines chairman Herb Kelleher was named Thursday to the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas for a one-year term.

Each regional Federal Reserve bank has a nine-member board that includes representatives of commercial banks, the public and members appointed by the Board of Governors in Washington.

Alright Herb! The Dallas Fed could probably use a little levity these days.

However, I don’t think they allow smoking in those Fed meetings.

This could pose a problem.

Pardon me while I take a moment to bask in the hysteria that is New Orleans today. Tomorrow will only be worse. Or better — depending upon your point of view.

And trust me — chances to actually feel good about something in this part of the world are few and far between. So excuse my overt enthusiasm for what, in other parts of the world, would be viewed as just your normal run-of-the-mill NFL playoff game.

Not here. Here it is a chance for people to forget the otherwise depressing story of New Orleans. It’s a chance to shift gears, change the channel, go to another planet. Bask in something that feels good — not bad.

Yesterday, thousands of city residents marched on City Hall out of frustration and anger at the city’s total lack of leadership in addressing the city’s mounting crime problem. But today, it’s time to forget all about that. If only for a day. Or two.

Yep, living in New Orleans these days is not easy. I’m not sure what it is, but one thing I do know is it requires a lot of flexibility, stamina, and well, a schizophrenic personality probably doesn’t hurt.

But today the countdown to the NFC playoff game against the Philadelphia Eagles begins in earnest.

Tomorrow night it will culminate in a wild frenzy of black and gold clad fans, all of whom look to the Saints success this year as a hopeful metaphor for their own rebirth and restoration.

Kick-off is at 7.

I’m off to find my bloody mary.

Oh, hi there.

It’s just us. We’re up late tonight. How ’bout you? Thought we’d pretend like we worked for an airline that is considering a deal for another airline. And stay up all night.

Heh.

Okay enough goofiness. This week’s PlaneBusiness Banter is now ready for perusal. Subscribers can access this week’s issue here.

Not to be outdone by US Airways’ “sweetened deal” move on Delta Wednesday, Thursday morning it was disclosed that AirTran has sweetened its own hostile bid for Midwest Airlines.

AirTran is now offering to purchase Midwest for about $345 million, an increase of about 18% over its previous offer.

The new offer is the equivalent of $13.25 a share, based on the closing price of Midwest stock on Monday. It’s also a 3% premium on the closing price Wednesday. It’s also just about where most analysts and observers had estimated AirTran would have to move to — if the airline was to have any chance at forcing a deal.

The Midwest board of directors voted “no” in early December on AirTran’s initial offer of $11.25 a share.

Not surprisingly, this time Joe and the folks in Orlando took the deal directly to Midwest’s shareholders, completing ignoring the airline’s board of directors, which has been loathe to discuss a potential merger with AirTran.

According to Joe Leonard, AirTran CEO, “We thought we’d let the owners decide.”

The deal expires on Feb. 8.

My thoughts on this one? I’m not convinced this is as good a move for AirTran as the airline has put forth.

Having said that — at $13.25 a share — this offer is clearly in the range of being one that just might be too good for the larger institutional shareholders of Midwest to pass up. Don’t think that AirTran management has not been in direct contact with them and therefore feel they have a good sense of what it is going to take to get these guys onboard a deal.

I don’t think there’s any question this is going to bring intense pressure from those shareholders towards Midwest management.

And hey — at some point the members of the Midwest management team has to start looking at what they would get out of this deal — and start to think about how nice it would be to see all those dineros in their bank accounts.

Having said that, from an airline standpoint alone — this one is really not a potential match-up we like. I understand why AirTran wants to do it — I’m just not sure it’s going to work out very well for them in the long term — for a number of reasons.

Tickers: MEH:AMEX,AAI:NYSE,LCC:NYSE

The DOT made it official today. It awarded the new China route to United Airlines.

United was granted the right to fly its proposed “capital to capital” service from Dulles to Beijing. US Airways supported the United proposal. Continental, Northwest and American had also applied for the right to fly the route, but, as you may recall American’s proposal was amended in December. The DOT ruled the change to the airline’s proposal came too late and was too great — therefore American’s revised proposal which had it flying one-stop from DFW to Beijing, via Chicago, was not even considered.

The tentative order can be found here.

Ticker: UAUA:Nasdaq,LCC:NYSE,CAL:NYSE,AMR:NYSE

We knew it was going to be ugly, and yep, it is.

Frontier issued its December traffic release tonight.

Revenue passenger miles decreased 2.2% to 606,723,000 for December 2006 from the same period last year. Available seat miles increased 1.7% to 889,373,000 for December 2006 from the same period last year. This resulted in a load factor for December 2006 of 68.2%, a decrease of 2.7 points from December 2005, when the airline reported a load factor of 70.9%.

CEO Jeff Potter added the frosting to the mess that is going to be the airline’s financial result for December, as he added in the release,

“December passenger revenue performance was negatively impacted by approximately $11 million due to two major December snowstorms, one of which completely shut down our primary hub, Denver International Airport (DIA), for almost 48 hours,” said Jeff Potter, President and CEO of Frontier Airlines. “In addition, while we are unable to provide a definitive snowstorm cost estimate at this time, we do anticipate that there will be significant variable expenses, such as glycol expense ($1.1 million in storm related costs), partially offset by variable costs we didn’t incur while the airport was shut down. Combined with these net additional storm related expenses, our loss of storm related available seat miles (ASMs) in the December quarter will result in higher unit costs than previously anticipated.”

Ticker: (FRNT:Nasdaq)

Liz Fedor at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has a good update on all the many issues going on with MAIR, Mesaba and the proposed sale of Mesaba to Northwest. Article was posted about an hour ago.