Southwest’s profitability has been well-publicized, and they’ve had another fine quarter due to them running a fantastic operation, and their oft-discussed fuel hedges.  Well done.
Allegiant, which I speak of frequently, also turned a tidy profit and got almost no credit for it.  Their management team has built an impressive operation around a tight strategy:  fly [...]

The Wall St. Journal has an interesting article looking at how much it’s costing airlines to fly you from here to there – you may be surprised to hear that upwards of 70% of your fare may be going just to pay the fuel bill. For example, American’s fuel bill for a roundtrip flight [...]

I thought it might be useful/depressing to pass along a quick overview of the horrible/annoying/depressing things we’ve seen happen since the fuel hike:
Northwest/Delta merger (less service + higher fares = unhappy flyers in Minot)
American’s $15 first bag fee
Everyone else’s $25 second bag fee
US Airways removes snacks from domestic flights
American cuts domestic capacity 12% and decimates [...]

Something about this is extremely fishy:
A man is suing JetBlue because, he says, he was forced to spend most of a flight from San Diego to JFK sitting on a toilet.  The passenger wanted to get on the flight but was told that there were no seats available.  He says a flight attendant offered to [...]

Fuel cost have caused Oakland and LAX to lose existing and planned service:  American is pulling out of Oakland after serving the city for more than 60 years.  Oakland has also lost service from ATA, Aloha and Skybus in the past month or so.
JetBlue said that it will not launch planned service between LAX and [...]

You’ll read about this elsewhere, but United just raised their ticket change fee on domestic flights to $150 from $100.  Expect other majors to follow.  Remember that JetBlue only charges $40 for a change, and Southwest doesn’t charge anything.

JetBlue’s founder David Neeleman announced that he has raised $150 million and ordered 36 Embraer aircraft to launch an as-yet-unnamed airline in Brazil.  Neeleman hopes to get the Sao Paulo-based carrier off the ground in early 2009.  If you speak Portuguese, you can check out his site about the airline here.  If you do not [...]

One small additional piece of info about JetBlue’s new added-legroom seats:  although they’re likely meant to attract business travelers, the seats are not available for sale through travel agents (which is, of course, where many business travelers must purchase their tickets).  This is not the fault of JetBlue (it’s the fault of the GDSs, the [...]

JetBlue confirmed that later this year it will begin to charge extra for seats with additional legroom. Planes will not be reconfigured — the airline will now charge more for the first rows on the aircraft and for exit rows. While this is annoying news for people who have enjoyed business class-like legroom [...]

A Texas man was sentenced to 10 months in prison after a drunken incident on a JetBlue flight from Houston to JFK.  Jose Roman, Jr, got drunk and was refused additional drinks when he asked flight attendants for them.  So far, so good.  He then got rather belligerent, freaked out on the flight attendants, and, [...]