This week’s issue of PlaneBusiness Banter is now posted. Subscribers can access this week’s issue here.

This week we take a look at the Second Quarter Stock Performance for the sector. Guess which airline posted the biggest gain for the quarter?

Actually a non-passenger airline posted the biggest gain overall. But one of the legacy carriers came in second place.

Unfortunately the second quarter was almost a complete reversal of the first quarter in terms of the number of airline and airline-related stocks that posted double digit gains — as opposed to those that posted double-digit losses.

I guess you could say this week’s post Fourth of July holiday issue is somewhat food centric. We do our annual “Ode to a Hot Dog” column this week, and we also talk about the recent USA Today piece that took another look at the problems facing airline catering companies. As I said today, it puts a whole new spin on the phrase, “Roach Coach.”

But was the article a fair representation of the problems — and the scope of the problems?

Then there was the passenger on US Airways last week who apparently thought there was nothing wrong with bringing his own maggot-infested piece of meat stuffed in his overhead bag onboard his flight.

Until the maggots started to escape.

I think the guy should be banned from flying on any US airline for life.

Congrats to the guys in Corp Comm at US Airways who showed a good sense of humor in their employee publication this week as they led a story about the incident with the headline – “Airline to charge new fee for Carrion.”

We also talk a lot this week about the announced deal between Google and ITA Software. This deal intrigues the heck out of me. We talked to Forrester Research Analyst Henry Harteveldt about what this deal could mean for the airlines, the GDS companies, and meta search outifts like Kayak.com.

Guess who is going to feel the biggest impact the fastest?

Slot swaps, unionization efforts, new names for Frontier’s latest spokesanimal and more — all in this week’s issue of PlaneBusiness Banter.