Hello everyone.

This week’s 120-plus page earnings issue of PlaneBusiness Banter is now posted. Yes, it’s that time again. This week we have our in-depth analysis of the first quarter earnings results and earnings calls from American Airlines, Alaska Air Group, Southwest Airlines and United/Continental. Oh, and we have a PlaneBusiness Earnings Summary for JetBlue as well. We’ll do our in-depth look at them next week — along with US Airways, Delta Air Lines and Hawaiian Airlines.

Short and sweet? The worst performance last week was clearly posted by AMR. Best overall performance was turned in by Alaska Air Group.

No wonder AMR announced it was going to hold its annual shareholder meeting in Los Angeles next month. That’s right. The airline doesn’t want to hold it in Dallas — because they know there will be a huge turnout of unhappy employees.

I bet there are a fair number of unhappy employees who turn up in L.A. anyway. But let’s face it — LAX is not a huge American Airlines operation. The turnout will undoubtedly be much smaller than if they held it here in the DFW Metroplex.

But we talk about other stuff this week as well. The NTSB issued an update on its investigation of the Southwest Airlines‘ aircraft that popped its top. Interesting reading that was. Are misshapen rivet holes a production issue, or some kind of metal fatigue problem? Either way — it looks like Boeing has some problems here.

Then there is the ongoing air traffic control mess with the FAA. As expected the agency has responded to a spate of recent sleeping controller incidents by issuing some typical knee-jerk reaction responses. This is not a knee-jerk problem.

The deep-seated FAA/air traffic controller problems have been there for years. This is not about naps.

Can FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt finally do the hard work and solve the problems? We know he can. He’s got the labor negotiation background to pull it off. But does he want to?

US Airways filed a lawsuit against Sabre last week — the latest salvo in the airline/GDS wars. We have a copy of the actual filing for subscribers to peruse. Interesting reading.

In our “Retro Moment of the Week” we take a look at comments former airline analyst Sam Buttrick made about consolidation in 2000. How do they stack up in hindsight?

We also look at Rodman and Renshaw analyst Dan McKenzie’s latest capacity analysis. Which airlines are moving capacity out of what markets — and which airlines are looking at more competitive capacity moves in the second quarter?

Oh, and what airline merger does Dan think is a strong possibility?

All of this and more in this week’s large and unwieldy issue of PlaneBusiness Banter. Subscribers can access the issue here.