Cockpit Confidential (41 page)

Remember too that in most people's minds the air travel experience is measured curbside to curbside, not takeoff to landing. Southwest reaps the advantage of not only how it flies, but where. Aiming off-center in many markets, it allows customers to savor the logistical ease of a Manchester, Islip, or Providence, instead of the hectic snarls of a Boston, Newark, or La Guardia. The legacy giants, with their reliance on mega-hub feed, can't succeed this way. Southwest is the closest thing we've got to an official airline of the suburbs.

Its streamlined operational structure is another asset. Southwest flies only one type of aircraft, the 737, specializing in ultra-fast turnarounds in a domestic-only market. It's apples and oranges when you start making comparisons with the network carriers, which have immensely different and far more expansive operating structures. Consistency and predictability are a lot harder when you've got four hubs and a fleet of six hundred aircraft serving six continents.

Southwest has always bristled at the idea of adapting its model beyond American borders, and probably smartly so. Cheap tickets, high frequencies, and all-economy services don't lend themselves to long-distance operations and foreign accents.

Just ask Freddie Laker. The inimitable Sir Freddie, who passed away in 2006, was a high school dropout who showed the same kind of entrepreneurial panache that would later make Richard Branson famous (both received knighthoods). He launched the Laker Airways “SkyTrain” between London and New York in 1977. President Carter, prepping for his deregulation move, gave his blessing after Laker spent six years petitioning. Although people stood in line for hours to buy a $236 round trip, the SkyTrain's margins were microscopic and its success short-lived. PeoplExpress and Tower Air were two others that tried and failed in the no-frills, long-haul arena.

If Southwest Airlines represents, for better or worse, the Walmartification of flight, then what can we say of Hooters Air? Yes, I'm talking about the restaurant, which for a time was flying a foursome of leased Boeings out of a base in Myrtle Beach. Operations have since ceased, but the venture deserves a posthumous mention if for no other reason than to savor one of those only-in-America sighs.

The first Hooters Air joke I heard was this: “In the unlikely event of a water landing, your flight attendant may be used as a flotation device.” Two token “Hooters Girls,” loaned from the chain's franchises, were strategically carried on every flight. Their aircraft were set up with blue leather seats and generous legroom. The company called it “Club Class,” which is a brand once used by British Airways for its business class. Hooters Air was about as far from British Airways as a Hooters restaurant is from a banquet at Buckingham Palace, but their planes were probably more comfortable than most. Hooters Air reported large numbers of passengers requesting aisle seats and claimed this was “for the scenery.” Those at the windows had a view of mountains, while on the aisles… Well, only one of the views was real.

Airline genealogies can be complicated. Many carriers have changed names and identities or have blurred their pedigrees through mergers and acquisitions. But most airline historians—there really are such people—agree that the world's oldest existing airline is Amsterdam-based KLM. That's
Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij
for those of you speaking Dutch, or Royal Dutch Airlines in English. It was founded in 1919. Here are the five oldest still flying under their original monikers:

• KLM (1919)
  
• Qantas (1920)
  
• Aeroflot (1923)
  
• CSA Czech Airlines (1923)
  
• Finnair (1923)
  

If we allow for name changes and mergers, Colombia's Avianca would be up there at number two, having started out in 1919 as something called SCADTA. It's a shame to see Mexicana (previously in third place) gone from the list. The airline ceased flying in 2010 after eighty-seven years. If you're surprised that places like Mexico, Colombia, Russia, or Australia have such a long aviation heritage, remember that rugged terrain, lack of roads, and vast distances made these countries natural spots for aviation to take hold.

In the United States, Delta is the eldest, harking to 1928.

Code-sharing is the widespread practice whereby an airline sells seats, under its own name, on
another
carrier's airplane. It's a way for partner airlines to share passengers and revenue. The financial intricacies of these arrangements isn't something we have room to get into, and from the flyer's perspective it's not important. What
is
important is knowing which airline you're actually flying on. Waiting in a concourse in Boston one night, a man walked up to me in a state of obvious fluster, trying to find his gate. He was traveling on Qantas, he told me. I asked to see his ticket, which sure enough was emblazoned with that airline's familiar red kangaroo. The problem here is that Qantas doesn't fly to Boston and never has, despite lighted signs and announcements on the airport bus to the contrary. “No,” I explained. “You're looking for American.”

All but a few of the biggest carriers are in cahoots with at least one other airline, and many are hooked up in huge supranational alliances, namely SkyTeam, Star Alliance, and OneWorld. The idea is to cover as much real estate as possible, with at least one participant from each of the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America.

And just as you can code-share your way to Paris, Frankfurt, or Mumbai in a 777, you can do so to Syracuse, Montgomery, or Eugene in an RJ. Virtually every “Connection” or “Express” flight is a code-share operated by an independent regional carrier on behalf of a major airline. Call United to book a trip from Newark to Buffalo, and you'll find yourself delivered to the door of an RJ flown by ExpressJet. Delta's popular shuttle routes from LaGuardia to Boston and Washington are flown by a company called Shuttle America. And so on. Full disclosure of exactly whose metal you'll be riding on is required. Check the fine print on your ticket. Or look at the flight number. With rare exception, any four-digit flight numbers beginning with the number 3 or higher signifies a code-share operator. If you bought your ticket from United and the flight number is 201, you're flying on a United aircraft flown by a United crew. If the flight number is, say, 5201, it'll be a carrier operating
on behalf
of United.

Ordinarily, flights going eastbound are assigned even numbers; those headed westbound get odd numbers. Another habit is giving lower, one- or two-digit numbers to an airline's more prestigious, long-distance routes. If there's a flight 1 in an airline's timetable, it's the stuff of London–New York. Numbers might also be grouped geographically. At United, transpacific flights use three-digit numbers beginning with 8, which is considered a lucky number in many Asian cultures. As discussed in the last question, four-digit sequences starting with 3 or higher are, most of the time, indications of a code-share flight.

Technically a flight number is a combination of numbers and letters, prefaced with the carrier's two-letter IATA code. Every airline has one of these codes. For Delta, American, and United, it's DL, AA, and UA, respectively. For jetBlue, it's B6. Lufthansa uses LH; Singapore uses SQ. In the United States, we tend to ignore these prefixes, but overseas they are used consistently. In Europe or Asia, the airport departure screen might show, for instance, flights LH105 or TG207. That's Lufthansa and Thai Airways. (When filling in your immigration forms before landing, you should use the full designator where it asks for the flight number.)

Flight numbers along a given route can remain unchanged for many years. American's morning departure from Boston to Los Angeles had been flight AA11 as far back as the 1960s. That ended on September 11, 2001. After an incident, one of the first things an airline does is change the number of the affected flight.

Mostly it's about two things: passenger connections and aircraft utilization. Flying from New York to Paris, for instance, a sizeable percentage of passengers will be continuing onward to places elsewhere in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, etc. Arrivals are timed to dovetail with these connections. Not to mention many of the folks who boarded that evening in New York actually began their journey much earlier—in, say, Salt Lake City, San Diego, or New Orleans; Syracuse, Roanoke, or Harrisburg. Returning westbound, same thing: landing in New York (or Chicago, or Houston, or Dallas, or Miami) in the afternoon leaves ample time for connections to points throughout North America.

It's similar with flights to Asia. Flying from Chicago to Tokyo, you will take off in the morning and arrive in the afternoon. Later, a bank of departures will leave Tokyo destined to cities deeper in Asia. Say to Bangkok, for instance, where you'll touch down about 11:00 p.m. That aircraft spends the night, then returns to Tokyo early the next morning, landing at midday and allowing easy connections back to North America.

This way, too, the aircraft spends minimal time on the ground. Lease payments on a widebody jetliner are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, and a plane can't make money resting idle on the tarmac. Airlines strive to keep their jets in the air as much as possible, scheduling the quickest feasible turnaround times (figure ninety minutes, minimum, for an international flight).

One wrinkle is with flights to and from South America, where service is often an all-nighter on both ends. An aircraft arriving after sunrise in Buenos Aires can't turn around and fly back to New York, or it will get there after dark with few opportunities for connections. Many airlines bite the bullet, letting their aircraft sit for ten or twelve hours before heading back again in the evening. (My carrier often uses this opportunity to deep-clean its interiors. Even our normally filthy cockpits come back scrubbed and vacuumed.)

Some carriers do provide limited service focusing on what's called origin-and-destination (O&D) traffic, suited for flyers who aren't connecting. British Airways, for example, has traditionally offered daytime flights to London from a few U.S. cities. Leave New York at around nine in the morning, and you'll reach Heathrow around 8:00 p.m.

On a given flight, half or more of the passengers might be continuing on from their first stop. Some well-known carriers wouldn't be half the size they are if not for the number of transfer passengers moving through their hubs. Indeed, some of our largest and most profitable airlines hail from city-states with relatively tiny populations, where O&D traffic is only a portion of the total. Singapore Airlines and Emirates, for example. Singapore has one of the world's largest all-widebody fleets, hubbed in a country smaller than metro Philadelphia. Emirates, with a population base half the size of Massachusetts, flies close to two hundred widebodies, with fifty-plus Airbus A380s still on order. It comes down to strategic position, literally. Their success is less about carrying people
to
Singapore or Dubai, but carrying them
through
Singapore or Dubai. By fortune of geography these countries make excellent transit hubs along some of the busiest long-haul routes. They also invest heavily in their aviation infrastructures.

One night at the airport in Luxor, Egypt, I boarded an Airbus A340, a four-engine widebody capable of reaching almost halfway around the globe. Where was I going? Cairo, about sixty minutes away. Why would EgyptAir relegate its most long-legged plane to a nothing flight up the Nile? For any number of reasons. It's about capacity, positioning, and schedule more than outright capabilities of the machine.

Certain short-haul markets demand large planes because there is so much traffic. All Nippon and JAL fly 747s on some of their busiest Japanese domestic runs because that's the choicest plane into which they can wedge an industry-leading, if that's the right word, 563 seats. In other cases, shorter trips dovetail advantageously between long-haul assignments. Let's say a plane arrives from Europe at noontime and won't be headed back again until 8:00 p.m. Those hours in between allow it to pull valuable double-duty on a busy domestic segment. Similarly, a plane from South America that arrives in Atlanta in the morning might be scheduled for a European trip out of New York later that evening. The Atlanta-New York segment is, in effect, a repositioning run.

And don't forget freight. Airlines derive money not only from seats, but also from the pallets and containers beneath them. One plane might be best suited for a route specifically because its belly space is most advantageous. A 747 has 6,000 cubic feet of cargo space in addition to four hundred seats on the main deck.