Friday Flyer – September 22, 2023

You may have noticed a break in the Flyers the last few weeks.  I was on paternity leave, so I decided to give the Flyer a few weeks off.  As you can imagine, the airline world didn’t take a break, so I have lots of news to share, so let’s get to it.

Interesting Aviation Stories

  • If you want to see an internet debate get heated, just suggest the idea of child-free flights and get your popcorn ready.  One airline in Europe, Corendon, is introducing child-free zones on its flights.  It will be interesting to see how this goes.
  • This happened a few weeks ago, but still worth mentioning given the disruption it caused.  The Air Traffic Control in the UK suffered a large outage that resulted in significant delays for passengers.
  • Speaking of the UK, a “new” airline, Monarch, is set to launch soon.  I say “new” because Monarch collapsed about 6 years ago, so this serves as a relaunch.
  • Mexico’s VivaAerobus is reportedly working on a Stub Hub style method of passengers selling their tickets to other consumers.  It’s an interesting idea that allows a passenger to get out of their purchase.  However, this also opens the door to ticket resellers buying up the seats and then selling them for more money on the secondary market (like concerts and sporting events suffer today).
  • To some, your paper boarding pass is a nuisance as you need to remember where you put it, get a new one if flights change, etc.  To some of us though, they’re a memory of flights taken.  I personally keep most of my paper boarding passes (with some plan to do something with them).  It appears the paper boarding pass is on its final leg as digital boarding passes are becoming more prevalent globally and even more broadly are eliminating boarding passes entirely by using biometric identification.  Here’s a history of the boarding pass for those interested in it.
  • Related to the above, Singapore has announced that they want to remove the need for your physical passport when going through their airport.  The method will be those biometric methods mentioned above.  It’ll be a while before that becomes prevalent for all, but it’s a step in that direction.
  • In some of the biggest news while I was out, Alan Joyce, (now former) CEO of Qantas, accelerated his retirement by two months and stepped down.  Things have turned quite tumultuous in Australia towards their national carrier, so Joyce made the decision to accelerate to step down.  His successor, Vanessa Hudson, started her tenure with a video message apologizing to their customers and pledging to make changes.
  • Delta announced changes to their SkyMiles frequent flyer program this week.  These certainly weren’t popular with Delta loyal flyers.  That spurred this article that discussed the role of the FF program at airlines.   
  • To end this week’s stories on a fun note, here’s a story that is tangential to the airline industry.  We all know that RM is all about supply, demand, and willingness-to-pay.  This pub in the UK took note of the airline pricing approach and instituted it for their beer pricing!

Interesting Aviation Fact

If you pay attention to airline stories, you’ll likely have seen a headline touting a wild landing.  What you may see in some of those is the plane appearing to land at an angle to the runway.  That’s generally due to the plane landing in a crosswind.  Here’s some information about crosswind landings.

Cool Aviation Photo

This is a great capture of an Antonov An-124-100, sister aircraft to the now-destroyed An-225 Mriya.  Rest assured that the plane didn’t actually fly through the sun!