Legion of Angels News Archive

HONOLULU - Two pilots for Hawaii’s Go airlines who slept through their flight’s landing procedure were suspended for the careless and reckless operation of an aircraft, the Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday.

The pilots, who have been fired by Go, completed their suspensions on Sept. 9, FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said. He did not know whether they are flying again with a different carrier.

Captain Scott Oltman, 54, who was also cited for failing to maintain radio communications, had his license suspended for 60 days. First Officer Dillon Shepley, 24, was suspended for 45 days.

Gregor said no action was taken against Go because it did nothing wrong and provided the pilots with a 15-hour break before their shift, nearly double what the FAA requires.

The National Transportation Safety Board had determined the two pilots fell asleep on the Feb. 13 flight from Honolulu to Hilo.

Oltman was later diagnosed with a severe obstructive sleep apnea. It causes people to stop breathing repeatedly, preventing a restful night of sleep.

However, it was still unclear how both pilots fell asleep on the brief midmorning flight, which was carrying 40 passengers.

No problems were found after examining the aircraft’s pressurization system and carbon monoxide levels.

The pilots failed to respond to nearly a dozen calls from air traffic controllers over a span of 17 minutes.

In recordings obtained by The Associated Press, the controller is heard repeatedly trying to contact the pilots and talks to the pilot of another Go flight in hopes of reaching Flight 1002.

“I’m worried he might be in an emergency situation,” the controller says.

Finally, about 44 minutes into what is usually a 45-minute flight, the controller was able to establish radio contact. By that time, the plane had passed the airport at Hilo by 15 miles, and the controller ordered the flight crew to return.

The pilots were able to reverse course and landed safely at Hilo International Airport.

Go is an inter-island carrier run by Phoenix-based Mesa Air Group Inc. It declined to comment on the suspensions.

Source — MSNBC

Pick through the slag heap of the nation’s big network carriers and it’s easy to find the worst of the worst: United Airlines.

Just 29 months removed from the longest, costliest, and least-effective bankruptcy in aviation history, the nation’s second-largest airline is once again facing a financial abyss. United’s first-quarter net loss of $537 million was more than its two main competitors combined. Last month it paid a huge premium to avoid a default on its loan covenants. Its 4 percent decline in passenger traffic in May was twice as steep as that of any of its competitors. Last week’s announcement that it would ground 100 aircraft, reduce capacity by 10 percent, and shed thousands more workers was startling given the huge contraction it already experienced while in bankruptcy. A 19-month search for a merger partner resulted in rejections from Continental Airlines and US Airways, a carrier that was desperate to sell itself to United just eight years ago. The airline’s shares slid into single digits last week from a 52-week high north of $50.

United’s day-to-day operations have also deteriorated markedly. Its no-frills Ted sub-brand is being closed, the airline’s second expensive failure in the low-cost arena this decade. Travelers are furious about service cuts—the airline has eliminated some meals and some luxurious perks—on United’s high-priced P.S. (for premium service), which runs in the high-profile Transcon Triangle between New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. And in April, United’s overall on-time performance slumped to 72.7 percent, five points below the industry average and 18th among the 19 carriers tracked by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

United’s woes since the 1978 deregulation of the airlines are legendary. A mid-1980s pilots strike dragged on for almost a month. United failed as a travel conglomerate called Allegis in the late 1980s and ended up selling off all the hotel chains and car-rental interests it purchased. A flawed Employee Stock Ownership Plan in the 1990s tainted the entire concept of employee ownership of public companies. A merger attempt with US Airways in 2000 became a nationwide scandal after it was revealed that top managers at the carriers would have reaped hundreds of millions of dollars on the deal. A concurrent civil war with its own employees led to weeks when 75 percent of United flights ran late and passengers and baggage were stranded for days in distant locations. Then came 9/11, when two United jets were hijacked by terrorists.

But it was United’s collapse into bankruptcy just before Christmas of 2002 that is at the heart of the airline’s current crisis. Despite a 38-month stay, hundreds of millions of dollars of employee concession, and the largest pension default in corporate history, United emerged as a fiscal and operational mess. Worse, the airline’s new chief executive, Glenn Tilton, a former oil-company executive, embraced every old, failed idea ever tried by big network carriers.

Instead of a simple, cost-effective and passenger-friendly roster of in-flight services and streamlined fleet operations, United left bankruptcy in February 2006 with 26 separate in-flight seat configurations. It dabbled in everything from the upmarket P.S. to the downmarket Ted. It had five types of narrow-body jets, four types of wide-body aircraft and eight flavors of regional jets. Travelers were confronted with flights outfitted with an ever-shifting mix of one, two, three, or even four classes. (By contrast, the industry’s only consistently profitable airline, Southwest, flies just one type of aircraft and offers just one class of service.) United’s finances were equally chaotic. It left bankruptcy saddled with $17 billion in debt and its $3 billion exit financing was secured with mortgages on virtually all of the airline’s assets.

And oil is the original sin at the post-bankruptcy United. The five-year plan of reorganization (P.O.R.) cooked up by Tilton and chief financial officer Frederic “Jake” Brace predicted crude would average $50 a barrel. It was laughable even then. When United filed the P.O.R. in February 2006, oil was already selling above $65 a barrel—and a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, had just discussed the ramifications of $120-a-barrel crude.

As a result, United’s future as a going concern is an open question. One thing that isn’t in doubt, however, is the financial wherewithal of the airline’s upper management.

Tilton and his top executives emerged from the bankruptcy with 8 percent of the new United Airlines and a fast-vesting bonus plan that the New York Times called “insanity squared.” Many of United’s management team have been flipping their shares as soon as they vested, yielding tidy profits as the airline’s shares topped out above $50. But rather than curb their enthusiasm now that the market has soured on the airlines in general and United in specific, Tilton et al will pitch a new executive-incentive plan at the airline’s annual meeting in California on Thursday. If approved, it will create 8 million new shares for the benefit of the top brass.

In other words, no matter how rough the ride for United’s employees and passengers, it will continue to be smooth sailing in the executive suite.

Source — MSNBC

The last of the transatlantic all-premium-class airlines could soon vanish, but not because of bankruptcy — and it’s not necessarily bad news for transatlantic high-fare fliers.

L’Avion, the French all-business-class airline that operates two Boeing 757s — each fitted with just 90 seats — between Paris Orly Airport and Newark Airport, has agreed to be purchased by British Airways.

Once BA and L’Avion obtain regulatory permission for the acquisition, BA intends to integrate L’Avion with British Airways’ new subsidiary OpenSkies. A source familiar with the deal says the airlines are hoping to be able to close the deal and begin integrating L’Avion and OpenSkies within the next month. Even before the L’Avion purchase was announced, OpenSkies and L’Avion already were operating a codeshare, with L’Avion selling seats on OpenSkies’ flights.

“L’Avion has built a fantastic business offering high-value premium service that has inspired tremendous customer loyalty on both sides of the Atlantic,” said Dale Moss, managing director of OpenSkies. “L’Avion will provide OpenSkies with immediate scale, increased access to Paris Orly and an experienced, talented employee base. This is a combination of two companies that are focused on bringing comfort and personalization to transatlantic travel.”

OpenSkies, which is almost but not quite an all-premium-class airline, launched daily flights between Paris Orly Airport and New York John F. Kennedy Airport on June 19. Like L’Avion, OpenSkies also operates Boeing 757s, which are fitted with even fewer seats than L’Avion’s jets — just 82, in three classes.

The new BA subsidiary’s 757s feature three cabins: its 24-seat Biz cabin, a business class service featuring what the airline says are the only fully lie-flat beds on the Paris-New York route; OpenSkies’28-seat Prem+ class, a new service category beyond other airlines’ premium-economy cabins that offers reclining seats with a 52-inch pitch; and economy class, featuring a cabin containing only 30 seats.

British Airways says the combined OpenSkies-L’Avion will operate up to three daily flights between Paris Orly and the New York area using the airlines’ existing Boeing 757s. The price of the L’Avion buy is Euros 68 million ($107.6 million), which covers the purchase of the airline and Euros 33 million ($52.2 million) of cash in its business.

Until BA completes its acquisition of L’Avion, the French airline will continue to operate its aircraft in their existing 90-seat configurations on its Orly-Newark schedule, which offers two flights a day, five days a week. L’Avion’s cabin features a 2×2 seat-row configuration with a wide central aisle Each seat reclines to 140 degrees, is separated from the seat in front by nearly 4 feet and is equipped with individual power supply.

BA has not said yet if it will reconfigure L’Avion’s aircraft to match OpenSkies’ three-class, 82-seat configuration, but it appears a likely move to ensure service consistency. However, BA has said its aim in integrating the two airlines is to offer customers benefits that will further improve the Paris-New York offering, including an increased schedule and BA Executive Club privileges.

L’Avion has flown more than 65,000 premium-class passengers since its start on Jan. 3, 2007. The airline has experienced steadily increasing load factors — the percentage of seats filled with revenue customers — since launch and has consistently outperformed its business plan objectives, according to BA.

This would make L’Avion unique among the recent batch of all-premium-class airlines that began service within the last three years, the other three — U.S. airlines MAXJet Airways and Eos Airlines and theUK’s Silverjet — all being forced into liquidation by insufficient loads and inability to raise additional capital as the U.S. credit squeeze tightened. Perhaps significantly, L’Avion is the only one of the four airlines that did not concentrate on the highly competitive U.S.-London premium-fare market.

OpenSkies came into being as the first airline created as a result of the new Open Skies agreement between the United States and the European Union, which allows airlines from either signatory jurisdiction to fly between any U.S. and any E.U. destination. The agreement came into effect on March 30, 2008.

Source — MSNBC