IAGblog Podcasts

Today a thought piece was published by David Bentley, a principal with BigPondAviation.com. Southern Airlines’ Chairman, Si Xianmin, warned that emerging competition from China's expanding high-speed rail network is a “major challenge” for China's airlines. Mr Xianmin stated competition from high-speed trains is "already visible" and costing China Southern, Air China, China Eastern and other carriers market share on major routes where high-speed service is also available. According to Mr. Xianmin, traffic may fall by more than half on 518 of the carrier’s weekly services, while 38 of its 160 domestic routes will compete directly with high-speed railway lines.

This is amazing, since China is still developing and its airline industry is in early growth phase. To see such a rapid impact from high speed rail is unprecedented.

The decision was much anticipated but still came as a shock - Boeing's unions are angrier, and they were angry to start with. Jon Talton, Economy Columnist at The Seattle Times and Jon Ostrower from FlightGlobal are Boeing watchers and share their views of this news. The "blame game" has started and there is enough to share. Management at Boeing has to accept responsibility here but clearly the unions also helped to create the situation. Even the politicians in Washington state could have performed better.

There are so many firms that seem fearful of entering the field. But listen to emerging media diva and old school journalism veteran Benet Wilson explain why is nothing to fear. She even encourages people to make mistakes because there are no other schools to go to but the school of hard knocks. So no matter how big your firm, just give it a try.

In the airline business, if you don't make buckets of money in the summer then, historically, you run out of money in winter. But old models don't seem to apply anymore. Reviewing the third quarter US airline results we have George Hamlin and Doug Abbey; two veteran industry analysts. The discussion revolves around the relatively great results at Alaska - with obvious mention of Allegiant. The LCCs seem to be holding on better than network carriers. But the data speaks of a nasty winter as revenues simply cannot sustain the amount of seats.

As the economy remains slumped, few jobs could be more stressful than working at an airline. This is particularly true of those who wear uniforms. Bob Mann is a leading airline industry analyst and he explains how airline labor is going through the current economic slump. He points no everyone is having a rough time. We also discuss American's pilot union and its stand on JAL and open skies immunity for oneworld. Finally we discuss the real impact of flying hours and why pilots are bumping up maximum endurance - and perhaps this is why we are having the problems we are seeing.

There are hot rumors that the travel industry's global distribution systems might be thinking of a grand "get together". This sort of move would cause something of a ripple to spread around the industry as airlines and other vendors already don't like the the costs the systems add to their sales channels. Airlines have especially been aggressive in developing alternatives like website sales. But Michele McDonald, editor of Travel Technology Update explains that the industry has been through this before. Moreover she suggests that if Travelport and Amadeus get together the combined firm might split into two pieces.

Its tough being in the oneworld alliance - beset with challenges in EU and US and now in Japan. JAL is in trouble and nobody can quite make out what is happening - its all covered in true, timeless Japanese opacity. Meanwhile there are the issues with American Airlines, British Airways and Iberia.

Discussing these issues are Ron Kuhlman, a columnist for The Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation and Managing Partner for oneworld, John McCullogh. These are vexing days in the airline industry in general. Being involved with oneworld is even more complex.

There is much excitement over the news that Lufthansa is bringing back FlyNet. It was a service that was appreciated by some 30,000 people per month at its peak - or ~20% of the long haul seats the airline flew.

Although Lufthansa plans to add the service to its 95 long haul planes, Jennifer Janzen, Lufthansa's Communications Manager in New York tells us the A380s are going to take a while to be included. Lufthansa is focusing on its own fleet before adding Swiss and Austrian. This is clearly a deliberate strategic move that puts the airline ahead of its network EU competition.

A very excited Panasonic made official what many have known for some time - Lufthansa is back in the in-flight Internet space. The original pioneer with Connexion, Lufthansa was more than a bit irritated when Boeing shut down the service. As evidence, listen to our second podcast with Lufthansa's Bernhard Seiter back in 2005 here.

David Bruner, VP Global Communication Services at Panasonic took our call in Frankfurt today and tells us about the news and shares some thoughts on how they will partner with the airline.

At this year's WAEA, we had a chance to catch up with Row44, which announced a novel concept for in-flight WiFi. Passengers now have access to a walled garden of content without having to buy internet access. The "Skytown Service" has content that is browsed via a WiFi device - like online shopping, destination information and even messaging. This content is supported by advertising and e-commerce. Think SkyMall magazine without the paper.

It is likely to be an effective way for passengers to get comfortable with in-flight WiFi without paying. It seems like a great idea and we suspect it will be very successful.

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