Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: July 2008 Archives

So British Airways announces yesterday that they're buying L'Avion which was the last of the all-business class airlines flying the trans-Atlantic route. L'Avion was the one French entry in the snooty class airlines. BA announced that they intend on merging operations with BA's new Open Skies subsidiary airline which means that there is still an all-business class airline flying across the pond.

I don't know but I suspect that Open Skies is a pretty astute move on BA's part. They stand back and let the various start-ups establish whether or not there is a market for all-business class flights and then they wait for them to go belly up when they fail to secure enough capitalization and are impacted by high fuel costs. Then they buy the one remaining airline eliminating the last competition, well other than the upper class products from the other legacy airlines. It'll be interesting to see how this all works out. I suspect that it'll be a good play. With weakening demand because of the economy and fuel prices, I suspect that there will be a lot less demand from the economy class travelers while the business class travelers will remain unaffected, at least for a while. Or I could just be whistling Dixie.

Hopefully some day soon we'll get a chance to try Open Skies.

Ok, well not mania. Perhaps some rather mild excitement. Like when Starbucks rolls out yet another new coffee drink. Anyway, American is rolling out their new wireless broadband service for domestic flights. Well, only a few domestic flights. Actually, specifically only flights between JFK and LAX.

The service is free now but when it's rolled out to the rest of the Boeing 767-200 aircraft in the American fleet they'll start charging and it's not gonna be all that cheap. Around $13 for flights or more than 3 hours and $10 for shorter flights. I'm hard pressed to think any time when I've absolutely, positively had to go on-line while airborne rather than waiting till I got on the ground so I'm probably not going to spring for the service anytime soon. Of course I don't have any plans to travel between New York and LA in the near future so it's all pretty much moot. On the other hand there are times on flights across the water when I've wished I'd have been able to surf the web and catch up on news but so far no one's got anything going on the WiFi front on intercontinental flights. I know several airlines are looking into it so it will be interesting to see how the American tests work out.