AA’s Pilots Reject Holiday Bonus Offer
American Airlines pilots’ union rejected the airline’s offer of bonus pay around the holidays, after similar offers were accepted earlier this week by the carrier’s flight attendants, mechanics, and other staff.
The union’s board voted the offer down in a 20-0 unanimous result. The union said that it preferred to work with AA for permanent improvements to pay and how the carrier builds its schedule. American’s offer to plots was time-and-a-half pay during the holidays plus double pay for picking up open trips during the holiday season.
The union has made repeated complaints about the lack of slack in the schedule and difficulty in changing trips. The pilots are also frustrated with a lack of hotel rooms on overnights, often being forced to sleep on air mattresses provided by the airline on the wings of their aircraft as it the plane overnights at outstations.
Allegiant Shows Growth During October
Allegiant released passenger traffic results for October and the carrier’s results were promising, as it flew 1.16 million passengers in the month, a 5.1% jump from October 2019. The figure is more than 50% better than what it flew in October a year ago, as the domestic carrier takes advantage of the jump in domestic travel demand.
Available seat miles were up for Allegiant by nearly 20%, which allowed for the growth despite load factor dropping from two years ago. This October’s load factor for Allegiant was 75%, a drop from 83% in 2019, but a marked improvement from 63% last year.
Allegiant operated 9,094 flights in October, up 14.7% from 7,929 two years ago and 26.7% from 2020. The carrier is also able to include any passing yardage racked up by the Raiders in Allegiant Stadium as part of its miles flown for the year but running yards do not count as they aren’t earned through the air. The airline is encouraging the Raiders to throw the ball more to help its bottom line, but the coaching staff is not yet willing to commit to passing regardless of down and distance quite yet.
UK E-Gates Failure Leads to Lengthy Immigration Waits
For the third time in three months, e-gates points of entry in the UK failed, as they were unable to scan passports and let travelers into the country.
Passengers arriving at airports across the UK were faced with lines of two hours or more as each person entering the country had to be processed manually while being checked to ensure no one was smuggling decent tasting food into the country.
The UK has 270 e-gates at 15 airports and train stations, all if which were offline this morning.. The Home Office, which manages the e-gates said in a statement that a software glitch caused the error, which is like the fire department telling you a spark caused the fire. Officials from Heathrow declined to comment as they were taking advantage of the shorter lines at the airport’s Duty Free shops, stocking up on holiday gifts.
- Aeromexico awarded logistics firm Menzies a 15-airport contract to provide the carrier with ground services.
- Air Canada announced its reversal of a previous decision to cancel an order for two A220s and is going to accelerate delivery of four B737-8s from Boeing. Both requests were accepted because the carrier asked very politely.
- Air Leap finally took the leap and dropped two of its regional brands.
- AirAsia appointed ColinCurrie as its ChiefCommercialOfficer.
- Asiana was hit with a tax fine of $82 million from the Korean government. The carrier simply forwarded the bill to Korean Air, saying “it’s their problem now.”
- British Airways is recalling hundreds of flight attendants who have been on long-term leave during the pandemic.
- Middle East Airlines now plans to use the A321-200NX that it will receive soon on routes to Africa.
- Qatar and China Southern signed a MoU to expand the codeshare agreement between both carriers.
- Silver took delivery of the first of five ATR72-500 freighters it ordered to fly on behalf of Amazon. The plane flew its first revenue flight yesterday from Fort Worth to Des Moines.
- Virgin Atlantic is removing the A350 from its London-Los Angeles route in December and also reducing service with 3 less flights per week during the month.
- Vueling signed a five year contract with Lufthansa Technik to service the carriers’ fleet of A320 aircraft based in Barcelona.
A semicolon got arrested. It got two back-to-back sentences.