AvTalk Episode 207: Time for a Safety Summit

AVT 207 Transcript
EPISODE 207
[EPISODE]
[0:00:07] IP: Hello and welcome to episode 207 of AvTalk. I am Ian Petchenik, joined once
again by –
[0:00:15] JR: Jason Rabinowitz. Hello, Ian. Good to be back.
[0:00:18] IP: Hello, Jason. How are you, sir?
[0:00:20] JR: Sleepy. I don't know what day it is, or what time it is. I think I'm home. I'm pretty
sure I'm home, but happy to be back.
[0:00:29] IP: Well, welcome back. We'll make this a quick show this week, because Jason is, in
fact, just off a 13-hour flight from Japan.
[0:00:38] JR: What a way to go.
[0:00:38] IP: We gave him time to splash some water on his face, and now we're recording the
podcast. We'll make it a quick show and come back in full force next week. Jason, yeah, you
turned your attention away from aviation over the past week or so, and dove right into the rail.
How was Japan? How was the flight there?
[0:00:58] JR: It was good.
[0:01:00] IP: Then we'll talk about the flight back.
[0:01:01] JR: Yeah. I did the thing where I only talked about trains for about a week, but that's
pretty much what we did in Japan. Went all over Tokyo and west from there. Tokyo, Hiroshima,
Osaka, Nagoya, Toyama, Kanazawa. All over the place, just riding the trains in the way we don't
typically get the chance to do here in the US. MY first train ride back from JFK this afternoon
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would prove that our experience here is awful in comparison. It's another way of life entirely. But
it was great. Flew JAL both ways, non-stop on miles, which was nice.
Economy on a 787 on the way out there, which was not so bad, because JAL is the only airline
in the world operating the 787 in the originally intended seats across, which is a nice treat. That
was nice. Then scrounged together enough points. Thanks, mom and dad, for the assist on that
one, since my points were tied up in my original booking that I couldn't cancel. But some first-
class reward availability popped up and I couldn't say no to that.
[0:02:12] IP: How was it?
[0:02:14] JR: It's interesting. JAL’s first class on the 777, it's not a new product, but the aircraft
were probably designed in the mid to early 2000s, even. The seat itself is fine. The
entertainment system is fine. The Wi-Fi is fine, but really the service from the second you step
foot in the terminal off of a train, almost certainly. Then through the moment you get off the
plane is just like nothing else I've experienced. It was really, really great. They were above and
beyond helpful, attentive, the food in the lounge and onboard the aircraft was absolutely
amazing. I wish I could do it again, but it might be a while before I scrounge up enough points to
be able to do that again.
[0:03:00] IP: You got to repay your parents with a flight somewhere first.
[0:03:03] JR: I do. I do. I have the miles to do it, but I had my original booking. I didn't want to
cancel that, until I had something else booked, so I was in the limbo. Yeah, I'm going to figure
out a way how to repay that.
[0:03:15] IP: You and I have both fallen prey to cancel and re-booking, and then the re-booking
doesn't work.
[0:03:22] JR: Yes, you could [inaudible 0:03:22] and then it just says, “Well, you know, the
availability was there, but now it's not.” I really didn't want that to happen.
[0:03:27] IP: Now it’s not. Yeah, especially not whether you're in Japan.
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[0:03:31] JR: No. But no, it was a great trip. Everything went as fine. Flew out of Narita both
ways. Didn't mean to do that. Originally, we were booked on the United out of Haneda and
economy both ways. This was a very different trip at the end of the day, what was actually
booked. But Narita, man, it's out there.
[0:03:50] IP: You got to ride an extra train.
[0:03:52] JR: I did. I did. A couple unexpected extra trains, which is nice. If one goes to Haneda,
there's a chance you can take a monorail to the airport. Didn't get to do that. But I know some
things happened this week. There were some airplane related shenanigans and stuff that I was
not paying attention to at all. Let's talk about what happened, because I really don't know.
[0:04:13] IP: All right, well, let's start with what happened today, which is Wednesday, March
15th, 2023. Today was the FAA's Safety Summit, the surface aviation surface safety summit.
That was put together in the wake of multiple runway incursions that occurred over the past few
months. After this safety summit was announced, there were more runway incursions that
happened, including one that happened last week at National Airport in Washington, D.C. The
topic of today's Safety Summit was basically, or the gist of the Safety Summit today was
basically, the system is safe, but we need to make sure that it stays that way and actually gets
safer.
The summit was opened by the FAA's acting administrator, Billy Nolan. The bulk of his
comments were that there's confidence in the system. There are thousands of safely operated
flights every day. There are issues that are cropping up. Let's pay attention to those and let's not
be complacent. Let's make sure that we're making the system safer. Then they broke off into
smaller groups and things like that, including the participants included the NTSB, members of
the FAA, pilots, flight attendants, various unions, including air traffic control, so what have you,
all coming together to try and make the system safer.
What's interesting to me is I hadn't seen a slide that showed the runway incursion statistics,
because we talked about a spike in incursions. That's been the media lingo. There's been a
spike in incidents. Then I looked at the actual numbers and I don't know if you can classify this
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as a spike and we'll put the graph in the show notes, so everybody can see what I'm talking
about. I went and looked at the actual reported numbers from the FAA's runway safety statistics.
The statistics go through the 10th of March, but I just graphed through February, because
obviously, the full month statistics are going to show a fuller picture than the partial month
statistics. We'll put a link and you can go check out the most up to date statistics. I just don't see
the spike in incidents. I'm not seeing that. Certainly, I think the question of the severity of recent
incidents is a different conversation and one, I think, we've been having.
[0:06:44] JR: Yeah. I think that's exactly the point that yes, there's definitely some heightened
media awareness of this. They acknowledge that at the summit that every single little go
around, no matter how insignificant gets a hit in the news these days, which is not anything new,
but certainly to this extent is a bit new. The severity of some of these incidents has definitely
been extremely alarming. Most noteworthy, of course, was, I think, the JFK incident between the
Delta, was it a 739 and the American 777. That was not great.
It'd be interesting to see if there were – is really are these incidents more noteworthy than
incidents in the past, because anecdotally, seemed like it. But maybe it's just there's more
visibility on them these days.
[0:07:32] IP: Yeah. I think we're caught in between those two. I think the JFK incident and the
incident in Austin at the beginning of February, I think those two things combined with the close
proximity to the other incidents involving the Qatar Airways flight that was departing Doha that
got so much media attention, as well as the United flight that was leaving Hawaii, both of which
dove towards the sea after departure before recovering. I think all of that has come together to
China, much bigger spotlight on it.
I'm not saying that to say, “Oh, there shouldn't be the safety summit. We shouldn't pay attention
to that.” Not at all. I mean, this is good to pay attention to. I'm just trying to put the numbers in
context. I mean, for instance, the incident at DCA the past week, that involved a Republic
aircraft that crossed the runway as a United A319 was beginning its departure roll, crossed the
runway a few thousand feet down the runway, because they had made a wrong turn. They were
supposed to cross a separate runway and they crossed the active runway.
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The United flight was moving it at six knots. They were very easily able to slightly press the
brakes after moving the throttles out of takeoff position and then just circle back around on the
taxiway to depart –
[0:08:53] JR: But still got a lot of coverage.
[0:08:54] IP: - a few minutes later. But it still got a lot of coverage. I think, drawing a distinction
between how many incidents there are and how severe some of these incidents are. I don't
know if the statistics go into the severity of the incidents. The FAA classifies the severity of the
incidents, but the statistics I'm seeing don't have that classification readily available. That's one
of the things I want to look into a little bit more to see if the severity of the incidents has
increased, or if there's been an increase in the number of severance.
[0:09:27] JR: Yeah. I don't know exactly what the hope and the intent of this summit was. I
guess, it was the release data to show what was going on, what's happening, what can be done
to prevent more of these from happening in the future. I don't know if we'll actually get that
outcome, but at least all the right eyeballs are pointed in the right direction. That's a good start.
[0:09:50] IP: Right eyeballs in the right direction. We’ll take it. Let's talk about Canada.
[0:09:55] JR: Oh. You don't hear that one often.
[0:09:58] IP: Not often enough. I love a good Canada conversation.
[0:10:01] JR: Yeah, Canada is great. They're just usually a pretty quiet country for all things
airline related. They don't have that many. But they have more than ever.
[0:10:10] IP: Well, they have more than ever, but they're about to have one fewer. Canada
approved the WestJet acquisition of Sunwing. Sunwing is known for its package travel. You
book with them, you get the flight, you get the hotel, the all-inclusive resort in the Caribbean kind
of thing. WestJet wanted to buy them and there was a lot of back and forth. Finally, they've
gotten the okay to do so. The government said, “But you have to do a few things.” Sunwing has
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to extend its holiday package offerings to five new Canadian cities. I'm not sure if there's a
stipulation on what size those cities are.
[0:10:51] JR: Could be thousands of new potential passengers.
[0:10:54] IP: Yeah. The combined airline must also maintain its capacity on routes most affected
by the merger. They didn't specify exactly which those were, but they seem to be major routes
between Canada and Mexico and the Caribbean, because the competition bureau in Canada
said that “A merger of the two carriers would create a monopoly on more than a dozen routes
between Canada and Mexico, or the Caribbean and would lessen, or prevent competition on
more than 30 others to those same destinations.” Something that the competition bureau is
keen to head off, but the merger has been approved nonetheless.
It'll also be interesting to see how they – it is part of the approval of the merger agreement.
Canada says, they have to keep a few of their headquarters, as well as grow staff, which is not
usually what happens, at least at first, in a merger agreement. It'll be interesting to see how that
works out.
[0:11:51] JR: Or how that's actually enforced in the long run.
[0:11:54] IP: Yes. Or how it’s actually enforced.
[0:11:56] JR: Like you said, any company that after a merger promises to increase the number
of employees, they're lying. It's always a lie. Maybe it won't come tomorrow, maybe not next
year, but in two years, they're going to start cutting employees. The head count is going to go
down. It always does. That's how these things work. I hate that promises are made to regulators
like this and there's just no real enforcement teeth that, “Hey, in two years from now you lied.
You said you were going to have more employees somehow. Now you're going to have more
employees.” It never happens.
Mergers are good in that it creates a larger, more, I don’t know, capable airline, but I wish
companies like this wouldn't just lie about having more employees, or maintaining separate
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headquarters. How many times do we have to see that this is not what ends up happening at
the end of the day?
[0:12:46] IP: It's very, very Charlie Brown and the football.
[0:12:49] JR: Yeah. I can't think of a single instance where this is actually the case, but
whatever.
[0:12:54] IP: Maybe Canada is a land of unicorns. I don't know.
[0:12:58] JR: Sure. Why not?
[0:12:59] IP: In what I find more interesting news, Flair Airlines had four of their 737 MAXs
repossessed last week. Now, they have sued the lessor for 50 million dollars, saying that the
seizures were unlawful. The lessors seized in very dramatic – I don't know how dramatic it was,
but dramatic enough to show up at 3 in the morning and take the log books and the
maintenance records to take back possession of those planes. Because they say, Flair had
defaulted on payments multiple times and owed millions of dollars.
Flair says, “We owed about a million dollars and we were a couple days behind.” They're also
alleging that the leasing corporations and Airborne Capital Incorporated, which is the aviation
leasing management company for these aircraft, Flair is saying these companies found a better
deal for the aircraft. Basically, “Set Flair up to default on these lease payments, so that they
could then repossess the aircraft and place them with another airline.”
Now, they filed a lawsuit. They, I guess, intend to prove this in court. They've offered no proof
yet and Flair CEO said, well, I'm not going to name names right now. For their part, the leasing
companies have said that Flair's argument is without merit, is the most polite way I can put it
and probably the most polite way they can put it. It'll be interesting to see how far this goes in
court. Because this is a bizarre one.
[0:14:43] JR: This is interesting. Not something you typically see in a country like Canada, or
even the US really. This feels more like a fly by night African, or Southeast Asian airline that has
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an aircraft taken back. I mean, I just saw one of Flair's Max today at JFK Terminal 1. Clearly,
that one was not repossessed. But it almost feels like, the leasing company was waiting for that
exact moment, where maybe Flair forgot to set like, auto pay and they were five minutes late on
payments, so they snatched the aircraft back.
[0:15:15] IP: Yeah. Flair is saying that they had been working with the leasing company. Flair's
not saying they weren't behind. They're saying, “We were behind. We owed a million dollars or
so and we were a few days late, but we were working with them and they seized the planes
anyway.” The lessor, the leasing companies are saying, “No, no, no, no. You owed us a bunch
more than one million, and you hadn't paid for months.” Then Flair says, “You were just trying to
get the plane so that you could lease into somebody else for a better deal.” The leasing
company says, “No, I don't think so.”
[0:15:44] JR: I mean, that's interesting.
[0:15:46] IP: Very, very strange.
[0:15:47] JR: I didn't think the market for gently pre-owned MAXs was that hot, that the leasing
company would need to do this. I thought the market was flooded with availability of off-lease
MAXs, no?
[0:16:00] IP: If you had said that they were doing this with a wide body, I would say, okay,
maybe. But yeah, I didn't know the market was that tight. I'm keen to see if this goes anywhere,
or if this is all just bluster, so that they can settle up and move on. Very strange.
[0:16:20] JR: Keep an eye on that one.
[0:16:22] IP: We move to Saudi Arabia, or we switch over to Saudi Arabia. I don't think either of
us are moving there anytime soon.
[0:16:27] JR: I hope not.
[0:16:28] IP: If we did, we could soon fly a new airline.
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[0:16:34] JR: But why, is the question? Why?
[0:16:36] IP: That's a really, really good question. This week, Saudi Arabia's public investment
fund started a new airline called Riyadh Air. They are going to be positioning themselves as
competitors to the likes of Emirates, Qatar Airways, and Etihad. They're even run by former
Etihad Airways Chief Executive, Tony Douglas. That airline will still be separate from Saudi
Arabia's existing state carrier, Saudia. Both airlines ordered a bunch of 737 MAXs this week.
Riyadh Air opens up with 72 787-9s.
[0:17:24] JR: That's a lot.
[0:17:25] IP: That's a lot of planes. 39 787-9s in a firm order, options for 33 with deliveries to
begin in 2025. Then Saudia’s also taking, ordering 39 more 787s with a handful of Dash 10s
and the balance will be the Dash 9. I mean, a 121 787s going out the door, all of them going to
Saudi Arabia for two airlines, one of which is starting from nothing.
[0:18:03] JR: Yeah. As you said on Twitter, they'll probably all somehow be picking up units
from Hainan.
[0:18:10] IP: It's the only possible explanation. I asked on Twitter. I said, “I do not get it.” I said,
“Someone please explain this to me like I am five.” The best explanation I got was along the
lines of Saudi Arabia is trying to position itself as a transit and tourism hub. They have seen
what the likes of Emirates and Qatar and to a much lesser extent, Etihad have been able to do,
as well as Turkish really. I think Turkish often gets left out in that, but they have a very similar
model. They want a piece of that action. They want things to move to Saudi Arabia, as far as
transfers and things like that to go.
The question about what Riyadh Air will offer as part of an onboard product in the airport and all
sorts of things, that is still up in the air. One would assume that if that's their positioning, it's
going to be a much, much different airline than Saudia is.
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[0:19:09] JR: Yeah. This is just awfully confusing. It's like, if one day, like you said, Qatar or
Emirates just decided, “You know what? We're going to spin up another sister mega connecting
airline, but we're both going to be here. We're still going to have Emirates or Qatar, but we're
just going to have this other massive airline in the same country.” It's just, what? We knew this
was coming. This was not announced overnight. We knew this exact business model was
coming for a long time. I didn't really expect it to actually happen, because I still don't
understand it.
There's a portion of the world's population that will not fly through Saudi Arabia, myself included.
It doesn't matter if you call it Saudia or Riyadh Air, I will not fly this airline and will not connect in
Saudi Arabia ever, probably. If you offer a compelling low-cost, decent product to get people
from A to B through C, most people don't care where C is. Yeah, maybe this is a successful
story here in the future, but maybe they just siphon off enough capacity to make it not viable for
Emirates and Qatar and Turkish and Etihad all be doing this, but maybe they know something
we don't know.
[0:20:23] IP: I would love to see some of the calculations that went into this. The Saudi
transport minister says that they're going to fly 330 million passengers through Saudi Arabia by
2030.
[0:20:35] JR: How are they inducing an additional 330 passengers that just didn't exist in the
past?
[0:20:43] IP: They're just giving me the numbers and I'm just reading the numbers. What's
interesting to me is that Jazeera Airways has – is starting a new low-cost carrier that will be
operating in Saudi Arabia. Jazeera is based in Kuwait. They're going to move next door and
operate a new airline in Saudi Arabia as well. The low-cost carrier is going to be based in
Dammam. The Riyadh Airways is no surprise. Riyadh Air is going to be based in Riyadh and
Saudi is based in Jeddah. There's no continuity here.
It's very, very confusing to me how they're going to make this work. I get the argument for this.
But putting this into practice seems like it's going to be a very, very challenging thing. They've
got some years to make it work. We'll revisit this, I'm sure, once they actually launch service.
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[0:21:38] JR: Yeah. Maybe we're wrong. In a few years, 330 million people will be flying Riyadh
Air to Saudi Arabia to go see that super long thin city thing that they're building for some years
of dollars.
[0:21:50] IP: That was the total number for Saudi Arabia, not just Riyadh Air.
[0:21:53] JR: Ah, okay.
[0:21:55] IP: But still, it's a big number.
[0:21:56] JR: Yeah. I don't know. There's a lot going on in that country that I do not understand
and that most people don't understand. Whatever, I'm sure Boeing's happy. It's a lot of
airplanes.
[0:22:08] IP: I think that's the top line right there. Speaking of things we don't quite understand,
but this one makes a little bit more sense. ANA is launching a Zip Air competitor. Zip Air is Japan
Airlines low-cost carrier flying from Japan to the US West Coast. ANA, I don't think this surprises
anybody, is launching its own version, but it's going to be called Air Japan, not to be confused
with the pre-existing ANAs, Air Japan, which operates some ANA flights.
[0:22:39] JR: Okay.
[0:22:39] IP: I got that right, right?
[0:22:41] JR: Yeah. I have actually flown the Air Japan pre-existing subsidiary. They operated
76s and some 73s, I think, to some close-in destinations. I think I flew them to Hong Kong. It's
just so huh, that they'd spin up a subsidiary with that same name. Come on.
[0:22:57] IP: They already had this stationary printed.
[0:22:58] JR: They did. They had the business cards and everything. Come on, pick a different
name. This is confusing. I, of course, welcome more low-cost options to Japan, having literally
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just come back from there. Oh, God. That's still today. I just wish that would come to the East
Coast, because I know Zip Air has some outrageously low fares out of the West Coast of the
US. I very much welcome that here on the East Coast.
[0:23:22] IP: I'll make some calls and see what we can do.
[0:23:23] JR: Okay. We'll see what can happen. Yeah.
[0:23:25] IP: Okay, let's close out the show with some quick things. Airbus and the German
Aerospace Center had a bit of fun last week, playing sniff my gas.
[0:23:34] JR: Excuse me?
[0:23:35] IP: Exactly.
[0:23:36] JR: I missed a lot last week. I was not paying attention.
[0:23:38] IP: You missed this one.
[0:23:40] JR: You're going to have to explain this one a little better.
[0:23:41] IP: Airbus is all in on alternative fuels, working its way towards hydrogen. In the
meantime, they want to certify everything on a 100% sustainable aviation fuel, *sustainable
under only certain circumstances. What they did was fly the A321XLR in front of the German
Aerospace Center's Falcon 20. The Falcon 20 especially fitted with a bunch of scientific
instrumentation, including a very long pointy probe that takes the exhaust gas coming out of the
A321XLR. Then they measure all the particulate matter, what's coming out of the engine when
it's burning a 100% SAF in both engines.
This was the first time and Airbus narrowbody had run on 100% SAF in both engines. This is the
first time that they're taking these measurements to understand not only the carbon dioxide
that's coming out of the air, or coming out of the engines as part of the exhaust, but also, what
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else is coming out of the engines as part of the exhaust, based on the feedstock for the
particular SAF, because that'll be different depending on the feedstock, what comes out.
Interesting to follow along with. They were flying both near and far flight. The closest they got
was a 100 meters, and then they were flying a little bit further away as well to get sniffs from all
over, I guess you could say.
[0:25:09] JR: Neat.
[0:25:09] IP: Neat.
[0:25:10] JR: Cool. Yeah, that's nice.
[0:25:12] IP: Yeah. Not the first time the DLR has done these types of things. They performed
some flights with NASA a few years ago with NASA's DC-8, along similar lines, testing the
exhaust gas and things that. This one is pretty cool and they'll continue those types of flights as
they continue to develop the SAF certifications going to work and things like that. Last week, we
didn't talk about a Delta Airlines A350 being hit by gunfire in Santiago, mostly because the story
sounded so outrageous. I knew that it probably wasn't true. As it turns out, it wasn't because the
airplane flew home the same day on time and actually arrived back in the United States a few
minutes early.
[0:25:56] JR: Burnt hill.
[0:25:58] IP: Guess what the bullet holes in the A350 really were?
[0:26:03] JR: Well, having just recently flown a composite winged aircraft that looked like crap,
even though it was only a six-year-old aircraft, it had more patches on the paint than it had paint
left on the wing. I'm going to assume it was just a crappy paint job.
[0:26:20] IP: It's exactly what it was.
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[0:26:22] JR: Man, these composite aircraft are just a pain in the ass to keep the paint on, isn't
it? In this case –
[0:26:27] IP: It really is.
[0:26:28] JR: - it made the news in a weird way.
[0:26:30] IP: Yeah. In a very weird way. What happened was, is there was an attempted
robbery in Santiago. A group of armed robbers were trying to rob a shipment being handled by
Latam. The Delta A350 just happened to be in close proximity. Someone posted a video from
the airfield of the aircraft and said, “Look, there's bullet holes in it.” Then that turned out to just
be paint chips.
[0:26:58] JR: Whoops.
[0:26:59] IP: Yeah. It's not great. I mean, puts another spotlight on A350 paint jobs. As Jason
mentioned, he was on a 787 earlier this week. That's been an issue on the wings as well. I
guess, composite paint job’s hard?
[0:27:15] JR: Yeah. What's even harder is to discern what news is real and what you should not
retweet and what you should not take as facts, because there are a lot of aviation accounts –
[0:27:26] IP: I’m erring on the side of caution.
[0:27:27] JR: Yeah, a lot of aviation accounts out there that will just tweet whatever they think is
reality. You should probably approach that with an ounce of caution. In this case, not exercise
that caution. Turns out, the story was completely fabricated.
[0:27:40] IP: Yeah. Just plain wrong. Speaking of composite aircraft and repainting it, Qatar
Airways put their second A350 back in the air for the first time this week, their second repainted
and repaired A350. They did a flight test out of Doha. Hopefully, look for those to be back in
service soon. That's some good news on the composite paint front.
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[0:28:06] JR: Wonderful.
[0:28:06] IP: Some not so good news on the composite aircraft front. The space jet that was at
Moses Lake in Washington, the Mitsubishi SpaceJet, one of the flight test vehicles that was
there has now been scrapped.
[0:28:22] JR: Ooh. Yeah. That happened quickly. I feel like, after the program was terminated,
as I said, it was just in Nagoya earlier this week, which was the home of Mitsubishi Heavy
Industries, I believe, and where the base for the SpaceJet was. I forgot to go to the airport, poke
around, look for any SpaceJet, MRJ memorabilia that they may have been selling in the airport.
[0:28:43] IP: Rip something off the wall.
[0:28:44] JR: Yeah. I needed to take something. Unfortunately, I forgot to do that. Then later
that day, I saw the news of the SpaceJet being broken up unceremoniously. But tragic for an
airplane that then never even really got –
[0:28:59] IP: Never found an audience.
[0:29:01] JR: No.
[0:29:02] IP: Never found an audience.
[0:29:02] JR: It was never going to happen. But you hate to see it broken up like that. It's got
some valuable metals and pieces inside that maybe they'll make their way into another aircraft.
[0:29:11] IP: There you go.
[0:29:13] JR: Circle of life.
[0:29:15] IP: Big how sad as it is. We close the show with a big thank you to everyone who
visited our new flightradar24.com beta site over the past week. It's been fantastic to see people
interacting with the site, getting to use it, sending us feedback. Lots of helpful feedback on bugs
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that users have found, that we've either already fixed and put on the site, or are in the process
of fixing. Lots of great suggestions about things to modify, or add in future releases. That's been
a lot of fun to read through. Thank you to everyone who listened last week and then visited the
site. If you haven't visited the site yet, there'll be a link in the show notes. But you can always go
to flightradar24.com/openbeta and go poke around there and absolutely leave some feedback
for us; good, bad, ugly, let us know what you like, what you don't, and what still needs work.
Thank you everyone for that. We hope you're enjoying that.
[0:30:18] JR: Wait. One more thing. I had just realized that my email had been signed out for
the past week. I have a 137 messages to scroll through. One of them, I see that I can't believe
you didn't tell me this, but Northern Pacific Airways actually announced its first routes, or routes.
Do you know what that route is?
[0:30:39] IP: I do. We actually got some inside scoop on why.
[0:30:43] JR: Oh, did you talk about this last week and I didn’t listen?
[0:30:45] IP: No, no. We didn't really talk about it last week, but we did some follow up this
week. there's a great post on the blog that explains what's happening. Give the listeners the
route.
[0:30:56] JR: Northern Pacific, which is coming off –
[0:30:59] IP: North and Pacific area. Yup.
[0:31:00] JR: North and Pacific using 757s that’s acquired from ex-American Airlines. Some of
them used to belong to US Airways. They are flying from – I'm checking my notes here, Los
Angeles to Las Vegas, which is decidedly not Pacific, or Northern in any way, on a route that
already has an absolute metric ton of competition. This is real, apparently. Ontario, not even
LAX. Ontario to Las Vegas. What's happening there? What was in the blog that I missed?
Because apparently, my email broke for the last week.
© 2023 AvTalk 16
AVT 207 Transcript
[0:31:33] IP: That's okay. Long story short, they have to do something with the planes and they
want to get them in the air. They've decided to fly them between Ontario, California and Las
Vegas. They're going to fly into Vegas on a Friday. They're going to make the aircraft available
for a charter service on a Saturday and hope that a casino wants to charter the aircraft. Then
they're going to fly back from Vegas to California on Sunday.
[0:32:01] JR: Okay. All right.
[0:32:04] IP: Basically, the closure of Russian airspace completely blew up their plan, because
now they need ETOPS if they're going to make it work to go to Japan. That takes a lot more
work and a lot more effort and changes the business model a bit. They're still working on that,
but they've got the planes, they've got the people and they want to start flying. Now they're
going to fly this route. They say that people are buying tickets.
[0:32:28] JR: Okay. As we know, people buying tickets is not usually always equate to making
money. This is one of those routes. Los Angeles to Las Vegas that it's not typically a money
maker. I wish them luck.
[0:32:42] IP: I'm just telling you what I know.
[0:32:43] JR: Okay. I had to call that one out, because I almost – I couldn't believe that. What?
Wow. Okay.
[0:32:52] IP: Breaking news to Jason and some helpful information for everyone out there. If
you do fly Northern Pacific, drop us an email and let us know how it goes.
This has been episode 207 of AvTalk. Jason is back from Japan and is now sorely due for a
nap. Hopefully, by the time the podcast comes out this week, he'll have woken up. I am Ian
Petchenik, here, once again, as always with –
[0:33:16] JR: Jason Rabinowitz. Thanks for listening.
[END]
© 2023 AvTalk 17