PlaneBusiness Banter Now Posted!

home-typewriter copy 1Hello all great friends and fans of the airline industry. It’s that time again. That’s right. This week’s issue of PlaneBusiness Banter is now posted.

This week we pick up where we left off last week with our take on this year’s ISTAT Americas Conference.  Factoid of the week: Bet you didn’t know there is an airline leasing company that only leases one kind of airplane — Airbus A380s. But there is.

Speaking of Airbus, is the manufacturer going to build an A330neo? We’ll tell you what Air Lease founder and CEO Steve Hazy had to say about this. Among other topics.

Meanwhile, it was a busy week in terms of labor pains.

First, pilots at American Eagle voted down the proposed tentative agreement with American Airlines.  We can now all watch as Eagle, aka Envoy, ends up becoming a very stagnant entity as the airline will in all probability move forward with the RFP process involving third party providers regarding new E-Jet flying.

Interestingly, we had been hearing that the vote on the TA between Republic Holdings and its pilots had been trending negatively as well. Both groups were scheduled to announce the results of the votes today.

Eagle did, but the Teamsters, who represent the pilots at Republic posted a note on their website after the Eagle vote went public, saying that voting had been extended until next Friday, as a result of a “high number of replacement ballot requests.”

Uh-huh.

Meanwhile, strikes by airport workers in Germany are making travel in that country difficult this week and pilots at Lufthansa announced they plan to hold a three day strike against the airline next week — after negotiations between the airline and the pilots union broke down. These negotiations have been going on for more than 2 years.

We have two earnings reports this week to talk about — GOL and Virgin America. GOL posted a loss for 4Q13 and Virgin America posted a profit. How ’bout that?

Look for a Virgin IPO this year.

And what about Etihad? The airline is to failing airlines what Emelda Marcos was to shoes. The airline looks like it may be writing big checks for a stake in both in Air Berlin and maybe…maybe….Alitalia? 

Meanwhile, yours truly was hanging with the big boys in New York last week as I spoke at a meeting of Tzell Travel Group. I shared the platform with Tom Klein, CEO of Sabre, and Ed Bastian, President of Delta Air Lines. Had a blast. Met some great people. Thanks to Jerry Behrens at Tzell for the invite.

Oh, and no, we don’t talk about Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 this week. If you want more speculation, you can watch CNN. 

But while we don’t talk about Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, we do talk about lots of other things in this week’s issue of PlaneBusiness Banter!