Hello everyone.
This week’s issue PlaneBusiness Banter is now posted. Actually, this is our last issue for the year, as we take our usual publishing hiatus through the Christmas holidays.
But not before a rather long issue this week.
And we are talking about a lot of different things this week.
In terms of meat and potatoes, we talk about the recent presentations given at the Hudson Securities Airline Investor Conference in New York. The big U.S. players were there, in addition to Pinnacle and GOL.
Two presentations stood out for us, and we talk more about those as a result. The first was the one from JetBlue’s CFO Ed Barnes. One big reason this one was on the radar. The airline announced that it’s previous fourth quarter revenue guidance was going to come in just a tad lower than expected. Why? And is this just an airline specific thing? A route specific thing? An industry thing?
Second, US Airways’ President Scott Kirby took the opportunity to give investors a very complete and concise overview of how he sees demand and revenues shaping up. When Scott speaks, people listen. And with good reason — Scott is seen as one of the industry’s best revenue trend analysts. In fact, Dan McKenzie, analyst with Hudson pointed out at the conference that Scott “nailed” actual 2010 industry RASM performance at last year’s conference.
Naturally those in attendance wanted Scott’s take on 2011. We give it to you.
In our most enjoyable part of this week’s issue, we talk once again to our Mole at the North Pole — Clyde the Elf.
Every year Clyde “borrows” the letters from airline CEOs to Santa Claus, copies them, and then sends us copies via FedEx. We got the valuable package last Friday.
Let’s just say this: WikiLeaks has nothing on PlaneBusiness when it comes to classified airline industry documents.
In other news, it looks like the folks over at USAPA, the pilot union at US Airways, can’t read numbers correctly again. Dunno what’s with these guys, but this is not the first time we’ve had to call the union out for posting numbers concerning US Airways that were way out of line.
Oh gosh, we’ve got all kind of things we’re talking about this week including: Southwest Airlines’ want ad for an ETOPS manager (think this pretty much confirms those Hawaii whispers); an update on the negotiations with the flight attendants and American Airlines; a new damning report on how just easy it is to fool the TSA’s backscatter machines; a great first-person account of what it was like to be in the cockpit of Qantas Flight 32; union angst at Philippine Airlines; DOT numbers from November, and a whole lot more.
Subscribers can access this week’s issue of PBB here.
