Hello earthlings. How was your week this week? It was a fairly comfortable one here in the Metromess weather-wise, although Verizon FIOS pushed me to the limits of my patience until late Wednesday, after a Verizon networking failure prevented me from accessing a lot of sites — including PlaneBusiness.com! 

I just love IT failures.

Anyway, enough of my chit-chat.

This week we have a good issue. First, we take an in-depth look at the earnings reported last week by Spirit Airlines. Short and sweet? The airline posted great numbers, and 2014 is looking mighty fine. Wall Street obviously agreed, as shares of the airline that everyone claims to hate, picked up a nice double-digit gain last week.

Republic Holdings reported earnings this week. We give you the basics from their earnings report, while next week we’ll do our usual in-depth dive into the earnings call.

With that, the U.S. airline industry earnings season will officially be over.

This week we talk a lot about three hot topics — the pilot situation here in the U.S., Delta’s announcement about its new frequent flyer program that is based on amount spent, not miles; and United Airlines’ guidance bombshell the airline dropped after the close of trading Thursday.

Needless to say, we’ll give you our take on all three.

In other news, we give you a sneak peek at the fabulous new ad campaign for American Airlines’ new transcon service. We like it. A lot. As a retro fan that believes a company’s heritage and how it got to where it is is incredibly valuable — from a marketing standpoint — I think the blend of old and new used in the campaign is brilliant. It almost, ALMOST, makes me not hate the tail so much.

It was a good week for airline stocks last week, but this week is not going to end on such a positive note. As we talk about in this week’s issue, it remains to be seen how much of United’s bigger-than-expected revenue drop in January was due solely to weather, or if the airline is still having revenue management issues. We’ll begin to put the pieces together as other airlines begin to give better guidance for the quarter in the next two weeks.

All of this, and more, in this week’s issue of PlaneBusiness Banter.