That’s the question this Business Week column asks and the answer they conclude is (of course) that United should be broken up and sold.  The reasons aren’t particularly compelling – in fact, it appears that the reasons given are:
1) The pilots aren’t happy;
2) One of the columnist’s co-workers had a delay last week.
I’m not sure [...]

(Thanks to reader Doug for the heads up)
The 12 major US carriers sent out an email (copied at the bottom of this post) blaming oil market speculation as the reason for the increase in the price of fuel (they say up to $60 of the cost of a barrel of fuel is due to this [...]

United delayed a Denver to Des Moines flight by 6 hours after a passenger reported seeing a tick on the plane (3 ticks were later found).  You’ll see this story elsewhere if you want to know the details.

Back in early 2005 Delta introduced a program called Simplifares that basically eliminated minimum stays, Saturday night stays, roundtrip requirements and a number of other things people hated about airfares.  United (and everyone else) followed suit.
Well, take everything in that program and throw it out, because your favorite parts of airfares – Saturday night stays [...]

This is an odd one:
A United Airlines pilot on a flight from Salt Lake City last week told passengers that he was too angry too fly after a heated discussion just before he boarded the aircraft.  I won’t bother to get into the details here (because I can’t be bothered) but it involved him possibly [...]

I was away when the Continental/United tie-up was announced and everyone else has already commented on this already.  I won’t bore you with a long blah blah blah about it, I’ll bore you with a short point:
- We’re at least a year from this being implemented.
- Many of the details haven’t been decided, so it’s [...]

United has now joined American in charging $15 for the first checked bag.  Look for the other dominos to fall this week.
In other fee news, the guys at FareCompare (who are even more nuts about the minutia of the airline industry that you and I are), have created a full list of every fee the [...]

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 [...]

2 separate bits of news & rumor I’m putting in 1 post:
Spirit sent a letter to employees saying that they may have to lay off 60 percent of flight attendants and 45% of pilots. In the letter they mention that they may have to close their LaGuardia base for flight attendants. This [...]

A friend just wrote to tell me that he was planning on flying a same-day round trip with United today.  He got a call last night canceling the flight.  Here’s a rough transcript of the ensuing conversion:
Friend: OK, please change the day of my trip to next Wednesday.
United: No problem.  That will be $150 for [...]