Travelers in Europe can be forgiven for wondering what the heck has been going on the in last week or so, as furious transport unions have launched walkouts and strikes, or threatened to.
In a word: payback. In several words: payback prompted by cutbacks.
British Airways cabin crew have voted to authorize a strike. Lufthansa pilots walked off the job for a day, then walked back on the job, then said they'll walk out again next month.
French air traffic controllers are spooked by proposals to integrate European nations' air-traffic systems under one regime - what the International Air Transport Association (IATA) calls "a single European sky.'' The French controllers fear this means job losses.
These and other labor actions are payback for staff cutbacks and various austerity measures imposed by cash-strapped employers on their employees.
How cash-strapped? Consider this: Air France-KLM lost 215 euros in the third quarter of its fiscal year. The Spanish flag carrier Iberia - poised to merge with BA - lost 273 million euros in 2009. Other European carriers are also feeling pressure. Scandinavian Airlines could come apart, with the governments of Sweden and Denmark talking about selling their stakes in SAS.
Europe isn't alone. Asian and North American carriers, too, are straining under high operating costs for fuel and security, and low revenue due to global recession, security fears and nervousness about the overblown H1N1 swine flu virus. Japan Airlines is bankrupt. U.S. carriers have bled money and are still downsizing to smaller planes, cutting the number of flights and eliminating unprofitable routes. Part of the cost-cutting in the United States includes slashing pensions, wages and benefits. Employees are understandably angry and afraid.
The simple, brutal truth is that disruptions in service will continue in the foreseeable future, especially in Europe, where organized labor is traditionally strong. What can we as travelers do about that? Not much. Fasten your seat belts: It may well get worse before it gets better.
Showing posts with label Air France. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Air France. Show all posts
Friday, February 26, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
The Last Flight of the Concorde
Today, nearly 10 years after the crash of a Concorde supersonic jetliner in Paris that killed 113 people, a trial to assign responsibility for the accident is getting underway in France. The crash of the Air France Concorde in a plume of fire just after take-off on July 25, 2000, helped put an end to the Concorde and the era of supersonic luxury passenger service. At issue is whether carelessness by Continental Airlines workers caused debris from a Continental aircraft on the runway to puncture fuel tanks on the Concorde. Continental strongly denies the charge.
News of the trial sends my mind racing back to Concorde, the stunningly gorgeous, delta-wing, needle-nosed jetliner that flew commercially from 1976 to 2003, until lingering fears from the 2000 crash combined with recessionary post-Sept. 11 economics to ground the Concorde for good. As it happens, I was on the very last scheduled commercial flight of the Concorde, British Airways flight 002, which zoomed from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to London Heathrow International Airport on Oct. 24, 2003, carrying 100 half-smiley, half-teary, totally excited passengers. (Air France stopped its Concorde service on May 31.)
Everyone on board that day knew the likes of Concorde would not come again for a long while. Even one-way ticket prices north of $6,000 USD to cross the Atlantic didn't allow BA and Air France, the only two airlines ever to fly the Concorde, to recoup the astronomically high costs of fuel needed to operate a combined fleet of 14 Concordes. The 1970s technologies of the Concorde were very fuel-inefficient, and the ear-pounding booms when the plane broke the sound barrier prompted authorities to severely restrict how long and at what speeds the Concorde was allowed to fly over land. That, too, undermined the economics of flying the plane, which had been built with billions of taxpayers' pounds and francs.
I was in the last row of the plane when we took off shortly after sunrise, television camera crews racing in trucks along the runway at JFK to record take-off. As soon as the seatbelt signs blinked off and BA captain Michael Bannister welcomed everyone on board, passengers began popping up, taking each other's photographs in the narrow single aisle, heads bent beneath the low overhead bins, clinking flutes of Champagne as BA flight attendants wriggled past to commence the meal and beverage service. There were lobster fish cakes on the menu, and wild mushroom truffled omelets, and smoked Scottish salmon with caviar. I sipped Pol Roger Cuvee Sir Winston Churchill 1986, one of three Champagnes served that day.
We presslings were seated in the rear cabin of the aircraft; celebrity guests were up front in the first cabin, at safe remove from the journalists. I spotted David Frost, a regal Joan Collins, a chipper and pretty Christie Brinkley. It was a rollicking party all the way across the pond for about three and a half hours - three hours faster than normal aircraft could make the trip. As advertised, the skies were darker when we reached cruising altitude of 57,000 feet and we could see the curvature of the earth, though barely - it was a less dramatic sight than I expected. Also as advertised, the windows felt warm, almost hot, to the touch, thanks to the Mach 2 top speed: 1,350 miles per hour. I had a window seat, so I was nicely positioned to enjoy the special effects.
Captain Bannister brought the plane in low and slow down the Thames, heading east past Buckingham Palace and Big Ben before turning west toward Heathrow. Our plane was the last of three Concordes to land in quick succession, the first two having flown around Britain before returning to Heathrow. At the airport, there was a red carpet rolled out to the foot of the aircraft and scads of spectators taking photos and videos; some airport workers stood on the rooftops to have a last look at the fastest and most beautiful passenger jet ever built. At the head of the red carpet, disembarking passengers were greeted by the dignified Lord Marshall of Knightsbridge, BA's chairman. The red carpet led into a big tented area where one found abundant finger food and, of course, more Champagne. I wandered about for a bit, then headed out of the tent - there was, to my surprise, no customs or immigration inspection - and over to my car for the slow glide into London and the posh comforts of the London Ritz Hotel.
It all seems like a long time ago now. I read that assorted entrepreneurs are planning to build a new generation of supersonic passenger jets - though these will probably be private jets and fly at speeds of Mach 1. If and when that happens, it will be a back to the future moment.
News of the trial sends my mind racing back to Concorde, the stunningly gorgeous, delta-wing, needle-nosed jetliner that flew commercially from 1976 to 2003, until lingering fears from the 2000 crash combined with recessionary post-Sept. 11 economics to ground the Concorde for good. As it happens, I was on the very last scheduled commercial flight of the Concorde, British Airways flight 002, which zoomed from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to London Heathrow International Airport on Oct. 24, 2003, carrying 100 half-smiley, half-teary, totally excited passengers. (Air France stopped its Concorde service on May 31.)
Everyone on board that day knew the likes of Concorde would not come again for a long while. Even one-way ticket prices north of $6,000 USD to cross the Atlantic didn't allow BA and Air France, the only two airlines ever to fly the Concorde, to recoup the astronomically high costs of fuel needed to operate a combined fleet of 14 Concordes. The 1970s technologies of the Concorde were very fuel-inefficient, and the ear-pounding booms when the plane broke the sound barrier prompted authorities to severely restrict how long and at what speeds the Concorde was allowed to fly over land. That, too, undermined the economics of flying the plane, which had been built with billions of taxpayers' pounds and francs.
I was in the last row of the plane when we took off shortly after sunrise, television camera crews racing in trucks along the runway at JFK to record take-off. As soon as the seatbelt signs blinked off and BA captain Michael Bannister welcomed everyone on board, passengers began popping up, taking each other's photographs in the narrow single aisle, heads bent beneath the low overhead bins, clinking flutes of Champagne as BA flight attendants wriggled past to commence the meal and beverage service. There were lobster fish cakes on the menu, and wild mushroom truffled omelets, and smoked Scottish salmon with caviar. I sipped Pol Roger Cuvee Sir Winston Churchill 1986, one of three Champagnes served that day.
We presslings were seated in the rear cabin of the aircraft; celebrity guests were up front in the first cabin, at safe remove from the journalists. I spotted David Frost, a regal Joan Collins, a chipper and pretty Christie Brinkley. It was a rollicking party all the way across the pond for about three and a half hours - three hours faster than normal aircraft could make the trip. As advertised, the skies were darker when we reached cruising altitude of 57,000 feet and we could see the curvature of the earth, though barely - it was a less dramatic sight than I expected. Also as advertised, the windows felt warm, almost hot, to the touch, thanks to the Mach 2 top speed: 1,350 miles per hour. I had a window seat, so I was nicely positioned to enjoy the special effects.
Captain Bannister brought the plane in low and slow down the Thames, heading east past Buckingham Palace and Big Ben before turning west toward Heathrow. Our plane was the last of three Concordes to land in quick succession, the first two having flown around Britain before returning to Heathrow. At the airport, there was a red carpet rolled out to the foot of the aircraft and scads of spectators taking photos and videos; some airport workers stood on the rooftops to have a last look at the fastest and most beautiful passenger jet ever built. At the head of the red carpet, disembarking passengers were greeted by the dignified Lord Marshall of Knightsbridge, BA's chairman. The red carpet led into a big tented area where one found abundant finger food and, of course, more Champagne. I wandered about for a bit, then headed out of the tent - there was, to my surprise, no customs or immigration inspection - and over to my car for the slow glide into London and the posh comforts of the London Ritz Hotel.
It all seems like a long time ago now. I read that assorted entrepreneurs are planning to build a new generation of supersonic passenger jets - though these will probably be private jets and fly at speeds of Mach 1. If and when that happens, it will be a back to the future moment.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Safety First
What 24/7 attention is for Sarah Palin, what money is to Bernie Madoff, what hemoglobin is for blood transfusions, safety is for airlines: The essential ingredient.
On the heels of Monday's scary, football-sized hole in the body of a 15-year-old Boeing 737 Southwest Airlines plane, frequent fliers can be excused for asking: What's going on in the sky?
Southwest inspected all of its nearly 200 of its Boeing 737-300s overnight, clearing them for take-off. But this incident can't be reassuring after Southwest and American Airlines were instructed in April 2008 to re-inspect hundreds of their aircraft for potential safety violations and Southwest was fined $7.5 million by the Federal Aviation Administration. In fairness, many industry observers thought that last year's crackdown was at least in part motivated by the FAA's desire to get Congress off its back when the bill to reauthorize and fund the FAA was pending - in other words, the agency wanted to look tough - but it's still a tad unsettling.
Just a few years ago, the world's commercial airlines went an entire year without a single fatality, a remarkable achievement. Compared to other modes of travel, flying is very safe.
Still, this has been a troubling year, with a FedEx cargo plane crashing at Tokyo Narita airport, killing two people; a commuter plane crashing and killing more people in Buffalo, N.Y.; and most mysterious of all, an Air France jetliner going down over the Atlantic Ocean on its way to Europe from Brazil. Authorities recently said they are scaling back the frustrating search for the underwater site of the Air France aircraft's data-rich black boxes, so we may never know what happened. That crash killed all 228 people on-board.
Then, too, a Yemeni airliner crashed last month over the Indian Ocean, killing 153.
On July 15, things got worse: A Russian-made Caspian Air passenger plane bound for Armenia crashed in Iran. The toll this time: 168 people gone, according to Iranian state media.
The causes of the crashes vary widely, including at various times, human error, faulty and antiquated eqipment and bad weather.
According to a report moved July 10 by Reuters, there have been 12 crashes this year involving fatalities, compared with 16 for all of last year. Still, this is on track to be an average year, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited on June 30 statistics on crashes compiled by a London aviation consulting company called Ascend. Ascend uses as its leading metric the number of hull losses - "planes that end up totalled after an accident,'' according to the Journal.
This may be a useful technical measure, but it overlooks the sheer terror of falling from the sky, and ignores the measure that most people use to judge the severity of an accident: namely, the number of human beings who perish in an accident.
Plane crashes hold a special place in the topography of fear. Auto accidents kill many more people - tens of thousands every year in the United States alone. My wife and I just last year fortunately walked away from an auto accident that nearly totalled our car, and I can attest that auto accidents can be very frightening.
And yet, despite the fact that car crashes result in far more injuries and fatalities, plane crashes command our attention even more. Statistics on hull-losses that are meant to be reassuring are cold comfort.
On the heels of Monday's scary, football-sized hole in the body of a 15-year-old Boeing 737 Southwest Airlines plane, frequent fliers can be excused for asking: What's going on in the sky?
Southwest inspected all of its nearly 200 of its Boeing 737-300s overnight, clearing them for take-off. But this incident can't be reassuring after Southwest and American Airlines were instructed in April 2008 to re-inspect hundreds of their aircraft for potential safety violations and Southwest was fined $7.5 million by the Federal Aviation Administration. In fairness, many industry observers thought that last year's crackdown was at least in part motivated by the FAA's desire to get Congress off its back when the bill to reauthorize and fund the FAA was pending - in other words, the agency wanted to look tough - but it's still a tad unsettling.
Just a few years ago, the world's commercial airlines went an entire year without a single fatality, a remarkable achievement. Compared to other modes of travel, flying is very safe.
Still, this has been a troubling year, with a FedEx cargo plane crashing at Tokyo Narita airport, killing two people; a commuter plane crashing and killing more people in Buffalo, N.Y.; and most mysterious of all, an Air France jetliner going down over the Atlantic Ocean on its way to Europe from Brazil. Authorities recently said they are scaling back the frustrating search for the underwater site of the Air France aircraft's data-rich black boxes, so we may never know what happened. That crash killed all 228 people on-board.
Then, too, a Yemeni airliner crashed last month over the Indian Ocean, killing 153.
On July 15, things got worse: A Russian-made Caspian Air passenger plane bound for Armenia crashed in Iran. The toll this time: 168 people gone, according to Iranian state media.
The causes of the crashes vary widely, including at various times, human error, faulty and antiquated eqipment and bad weather.
According to a report moved July 10 by Reuters, there have been 12 crashes this year involving fatalities, compared with 16 for all of last year. Still, this is on track to be an average year, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited on June 30 statistics on crashes compiled by a London aviation consulting company called Ascend. Ascend uses as its leading metric the number of hull losses - "planes that end up totalled after an accident,'' according to the Journal.
This may be a useful technical measure, but it overlooks the sheer terror of falling from the sky, and ignores the measure that most people use to judge the severity of an accident: namely, the number of human beings who perish in an accident.
Plane crashes hold a special place in the topography of fear. Auto accidents kill many more people - tens of thousands every year in the United States alone. My wife and I just last year fortunately walked away from an auto accident that nearly totalled our car, and I can attest that auto accidents can be very frightening.
And yet, despite the fact that car crashes result in far more injuries and fatalities, plane crashes command our attention even more. Statistics on hull-losses that are meant to be reassuring are cold comfort.
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