As we anticipated, United will cease operating flights utilizing its remaining pair of slots at Heathrow-JFK . The airline is leasing the slots to Air Canada for a period of 3 years, according to Kevin Done of the Financial Times. (Entire article is free on MSNBC.)

More details of interest on the deal – Delta is apparently paying United about $21 million for its Gatwick/JFK routes.

If I’m United, I gotta love that.

Speaking of United, the airline announced second quarter earnings today. The big news here? For the first time in six years the airline reported an honest-to-god quarterly profit.

The not-so-good news? While the numbers were better than the most recent consensus numbers from the analyst community — a fact highly touted by the airline — those numbers were lowered, for the most part, because of guidance from United after first quarter numbers were released.

Mix it up and what do you get? The $119 million profit the airline reported was good news, but certainly not in the same league as the level of profits we’ve seen reported by Southwest, US Airways, American, and Continental this quarter.



Finally — on Friday we originally mentioned here that ANA had recently begun service from Dulles-Narita. This was a brain fart. Obviously ANA has flown out of Dulles to Narita for years. Since 1986 as a matter of fact. However they just recently increased the frequency of service from Dulles, in addition to adding their new Boeing 777 service.

Sorry for the confusion. The new service is what I was thinking about, but obviously what I was thinking and what I ended up writing was two different things.

I have since corrected the original post, but I was still getting direct emails question on it. So, hopefully now all will be back to normal. If not, well, I’ve done all I can do to get us there.