Good evening my friends. Welcome back to the show that never ends.

Where is Holly this week? Last week I was in Nashville at The Beat Live. This week I’m in Long Beach at the APEX Convention. Next week? Back to the Worldwide Headquarters.

This week there’s no question what the top news story is for the airline sector — the meltdown in operations at American Airlines. What’s going on and is it going to get better or worse?

Then there are the July DOT Airline Travel Consumer Report numbers. We all only thought United’s numbers in June were bad. They were even worse in July. The good thing? Things are finally trending in a positive direction. Unlike what is happening in Dallas.

SkyWest announced a new deal with American last week. In addition the airline announced a huge stock buy back authorization. No wonder shares in the airline took off.

Unfortunately things were just the opposite at Spirit. The airline announced that it will see RASM figures under what they had originally estimated for the third quarter. A one-time thing — or a more worrisome pattern? We talk about it.

Is Frontier Airlines “penalizing” its passengers by giving those who book on the airline’s website a better deal? We don’t think so.

The word(s) of the conference at this year’s The Beat Live were: Big data.

The word(s) to describe the current “opt-in” number for the American Airlines‘ flight attendants who are going to accept the airline’s offer of an enhanced retirement package? Almost 2000.

All this, and much, much more in this week’s issue of PlaneBusiness Banter.