AvTalk Episode 365: Bag fees, bag fees, bag fees

Hello and welcome to episode 365 of AvTalk. I am Ian Petchnick, here as always with Jason Rabinowitz. Ian, we are so close to having an episode of this podcast for every single day of the year. Isn't that something? It's definitely something. If you include the special episodes, we have one for every single day of the year. I dare you, way back when. Go back. Listen to every one of them for every day. Just start now and you'll be done by next year. But yeah, we've done 360-some odd episodes because there's a few special episodes in there that don't count in the numbering. But if you think way back when, when the max was grounded, we did a whole special episode on that and some other things. So lots and lots to look back on. If you haven't revisited the back catalog in a while, there's always some good stuff in there, especially some of those really interesting interviews. So head back that way and see what you can find. Jason, you know what else is really cool? A lot of things, particularly, I think I know where you're going with this, spaceships are pretty cool. This week, spaceships are pretty cool. We don't talk about space much because airplanes don't typically go into space. Typically leaves open a wide berth to it's happened that they've gone into space. And I would like to learn more about that from you at a later date. But let's stick to what's happening right now where we have last week already, the Artemis II mission launched for the flyby of the moon. So a bunch of records, including the farthest humans have ever been from the Earth and the longest mission time around the moon and all sorts of good fun stuff. This week, now they're on their way back, they'll splash down off the coast of California on Friday. If everything goes to plan, it'll be about Friday evening local time off the coast of California. There was some pretty interesting aircraft tracking the departure. So not only was it the standard NASA WB 57 tracking the departure, but also there were a bunch of helicopters. And then there was the special US Air Force NT-43A. Jason, do you know which aircraft I'm talking about? I don't. I'm more familiar with the dozens of just regular old 70 year old GA aircraft flying around Florida. Those two. That typically happens watching the launch because what goes together more than spaceships and a 70 year old Piper aircraft. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. So this aircraft is often called RAT and it is the radar airborne test bed. It is a highly modified 737. Oh, just the one with the super long nose. Yes. And super long tail. It is a highly modified 737 that has a bulbous nose and a bulbous tail and it's normally used to test the radar cross signature of stealth aircraft. But in this case, being used to track better things. I love when military aircraft who are normally out there doing stuff that is involved in blowing other stuff up or tracking things and blow other stuff up, being used for scientific research and purposes of what could be better than tracking a spaceship. I keep calling this a spaceship, but it's not really a spaceship. It's a capsule. What do we call this thing? Spaceship of some kind. I'll go with it. Okay. Yeah. But we'll see what else is going to capture the landing. I assume we'll at least see one of the WB 57s up to capture the landing there and they always have some good footage. Is that the YouTube base? No, it's the Canberra. Ah, okay. Gotcha. We're pushing the limits of my military aircraft knowledge here, which is quite narrow. We'll get back to some commercial stuff in a minute. But the one thing I do want to mention here is that if you haven't seen the photos that have been posted, you should go do that. NASA is posting a lot of the photos taken by the aliens. The aliens don't make it to the public domain. And those are all available on NASA's Flickr. And the name of that account is NASA to Explorer. So NASA, the number two explorer. And some just incredible photos, the full eclipse, Earth set, Earth rise. And the beautiful photo that's reminiscent of the pale blue dot with some aurora, just some really fantastic stuff. And all of those images are being sent from the spacecraft back to Earth via a laser system. And Jason, I want you to tell me how they made sure that that laser system was going to work. So this all comes back. I think you just call an aircraft a rat. Well, what better way than to tie that back all together? Let's move things to cats because rats are afraid of cats. And cats are super cool. But there is a lot of super cool video. High def, actually, I think 4K UHD footage coming back from Artemis, which in obviously past space missions of this nature wasn't even a thing. But radio technology doesn't really allow for high bandwidth, high throughput applications like this. So NASA needed to develop something new, something better. And of course, space lasers is the answer to everything. But they developed something called O2O, or the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System, which I remembered from a few years ago. I said, huh, that sounds familiar. And all of a sudden, I remembered right NASA in 2023, only a couple of years ago, three years ago, tested that system for the first time. And what better way to prove deep space laser based communications than a video of a cat chasing a laser, a cat named Tatars, by the way. That's important to know. It is important. The old journalism adage, always get the dog's name, and you got the cat's name. And I appreciate the work that you put in there. I love this article from Scientific American published just a couple of days ago about this system. It does not mention Tatars the cat, but mentions that the O2O is about the size of a house cat. I'd like to believe there was some subliminal linkage of information there, because that's a very odd comparison. You don't normally compare things to the size of a house cat, but I would more appropriately tie it to the size of Tatars, the deep space laser cat. Deep space laser cat is the new name of this podcast, I think. It's a good band name. At least. All right. So we'll talk more about that next week if we get more images and the like. Let's move on to what we've been talking about for over a month now on a regular basis, which is the war in Iran. And as of right now, I don't even want to say today, but right now, Wednesday, April 8th at 2030 UTC, there is ostensibly a ceasefire in place. Earlier today, because of that announced ceasefire, Iraq reopened its airspace. No one's used it, but it's open. It's nice to know it's open, I guess. So I'm not sure why. I guess it was signaling that, hey, we believe in this ceasefire and we're opening the airspace. No one besides US military aircraft has used Iraqi airspace today. There was one Iraqi airways aircraft that powered up on the ground in Baghdad, but that's it. Kuwait, for its part, has moved from where closed don't bother us to more standard time-defined airspace closures. So the Kuwait FIR is still closed, but now they're moving to basically eight-hour blocks of time where they say we're closed until this period of time and then they'll issue a new notem that says we're close to this period of time. I'm not sure why they've decided all of a sudden to create more work for themselves, but that's where we're at at the moment. The airspace that borders Iraq that is in Saudi Arabia is still closed. Kuwait airspace is still closed. Iranian airspace is still closed. So I guess if you want to fly into or out of Iraq's open airspace, you'll need to do so through Syria. That presents a whole other host of problems. The Syrian airspace is closed except for arrivals and departures into Aleppo. So yeah, things are fluid right now. Things are very fluid by the time this podcast comes out in about a day and a half. I'm sure everything we're saying right now will be irrelevant because things are changing minute by minute, hour by hour, seemingly without any rhyme or reason. But dare we say things are trending in the correct direction for the first time in over a month? So that's not nothing. It is not nothing. As Jason said, we don't know where we're going to be in a few days' time. So anything we say today could be completely out the window by Friday. But hopefully these things hold and hopefully airlines begin to restart their operations as best they can. Though this is ostensibly only a two-week ceasefire, hopefully within that period a more firm and lasting agreement can be reached or peace can be found, dare I say. I'm not super hopeful that that'll be the case. But I think one of the worst case scenarios would be airlines restarting all these operations and then war resuming and airlines have to shut everything back down again, especially for the airlines that have been almost completely shut down or have had their home bases shut down completely. I would not like to see that at all. No. Speaking of which, just before we started recording, press release was issued by LL, Israel Airlines who hasn't been doing much of anything for the last month outside of some very, very limited flying and some cargo operations. It too is planning to operate full capacity flights to about 30 gateways. It says ramping up over the course of a month starting next week. But it's quite an interesting twist. I believe the flights start on April 12th to many of their gateways in Europe, Bangkok, Fouquette, Tokyo, New York, both JFK, Newark, LAX, and Miami. But it's not as simple as let's say just spin the flights back up and have people book. No, Ian, it's a little more complicated than that, isn't it? It seems so. We had to talk through this release a few times before we were comfortable enough with our understanding of it to be able to talk about it for the past couple of months. It took a couple of readings. Yeah. So what we understand at the moment is that if you had previously booked a flight with LL and they canceled that flight and you didn't then say, I want my money back or I'm not going to fly or do anything to let them know you were no longer interested in traveling. So if your ticket is still open with the airline and you're looking to travel either to or from Israel, do not contact them. They will contact you. Yes. They will have their people call your people. Exactly. They are going to check in with you to see if you still want to travel. Then they're going to figure out how to get you from wherever you are now rather than wherever you were six weeks ago. They will try and get you from wherever you are now or to wherever you want to go now because if you were in LA and now you're in Berlin or if you wanted to go to JFK but now you need to go to London, they'll figure all that out for you apparently. Once they have reassigned all of the existing customers, then they will open up tickets for sale. Apparently, they are rebooking people according to priority based on the original ticket date. So whoever has been waiting the longest to fly in or out with LL, they will be first now in or out. They say the priority given to exceptional humanitarian and medical cases and I guess only when and if they are done clearing their backlog of stranded passengers, they will make those flights available for sale to anyone else and I can only imagine they will be extraordinarily expensive. Yeah, that remains to be seen though I can't imagine that Jason is incorrect here given you everything that is happening. I'm gesturing widely in case anyone needed. And all of the things happening right now. Flipping that around from operating more flights to parking aircraft, Qatar Airways, which has been parking dozens of aircraft at both long term storage facilities in Spain as well as taxiways and hard stands at airports around the world. They are taking the A380 fleet out of service until at least June of this year. Didn't I just say this last week that the A380 seems like it's going to become a casualty of again, I'm gesturing with my hands around to everything. Now we have Qatar re-grounding its A380 fleet that it got grounded during COVID unexpectedly brought back and now is unexpectedly parking for maybe a few months, maybe forever again. Qatar just can't quit the A380 but hopefully we do see it come back because well they're not making any more of those and once they're gone, they're gone. There are no scheduled flights for the eight active Qatar Airways A380s. So they have 10 in the fleet, two of them have been parked since COVID. They're likely not returning to service anytime soon. There were eight active, those are being parked, those are not in the schedule for April or May so it looks like June is when they could be back at the earliest. If you're an A380 lover, it's tough days again. It is tough days. The number of daily A380 flights has certainly dropped but it hasn't gone away and that's in large part to the fact that Emirates has kept up a lot of flying. Emirates has been able to do this according to reporting from the Financial Times because they're getting really cheap war risk premiums. Did they go to reallycheapwartimeinsurance.com or how did they do that? Yeah, sort of. Oh. Emirates has had to be paying a war risk premium of just $100,000 a week. And for its entire fleet. That's like a rounding error for an airline like Emirates. Fuel has gone up more than that for a single flight. Exactly. According to reporting from the Financial Times, Emirates war risk premium covers its entire fleet flying to and from Dubai. However, other airlines that are based outside the Gulf are being quoted $70,000 to $150,000 per flight. What? How? They have to congratulate Emirates here because that's astonishing but how? How did it do that? This is one of those things where it's a combination of purchasing power and knowledge and also a little home field advantage. So purchasing power, huge fleet, they can basically offer up volume discounts on the insurance. They have experience in the region. They also work very closely with the UAE authorities, the airport authority, air traffic control, the military, et cetera, and home field advantage. They're based there. I think that the insurers who have worked with Emirates and this bears out a little bit in the article, they were already pricing in some of this. And other airlines say Lufthansa or BA or Virgin, that's not priced into their operating agreement. And single flights coming in and out, they don't have that same level of experience and they just can't get the same insurance coverage. When you think you know a lot about this industry, suddenly you learn more about war risk premiums and the benefits of having higher war risk insurance coverage because one day you might just need it. It can cost a lot more if you don't already have it. So little on top of what they're already paying, really both shocking and impressive how little they've been charged. Some business aviation flights have seen $50,000 per flight to the region. So this is a rounding error as far as Emirates is concerned. $100,000, like I'm sure there are many cars in long term parking at DXB right now with higher value than that. They can just go pluck them out of the parking lot and sell them off and it'll be fine. One of those cars was probably made in Italy, Jason. And that's what it transitions. Jet fuel restrictions have gone into place at multiple Italian airports. These are airports that are currently served by Airbnb as the fuel servicer who at this point cannot guarantee the total availability of jet fuel. So airports Milan's Lanate, Venice, both airports and Bologna, those airports are being restricted. Restrictions in Milan include prioritization of hospital helicopters, air ambulance and medium and long haul flights longer than three hours. If you are operating a flight less than three hours, you are limited to 2,000 liters of fuel, which is not a lot. I had to look that up because 2,000 liters is not a lot. Your typical A320 has a capacity of 24,000 liters of fuel. So 2,000 is like topping off the tanks. It's not a whole lot. So this restriction basically says you can't have any fuel unless you need to take on a lot of fuel because you're operating a flight potentially to another continent. So there are flights I think seasonally, at least Delta has a flight to JFK, to Venice still right now and it is still operating. So those who need the most fuel can have it and those who only need a medium amount of fuel can't have any. Interesting time. So that is scheduled to be in place for the foreseeable future. We'll see when that changes, when the availability of fuel becomes more widespread or if it does. In different shifting ways of doing business, DHL is now using its Bahrain-based fleet in Europe. So DHL operates. We actually did a really interesting video about this game. We went and spent the night with the DHL folks at the Brussels hub. And one of the things that DHL does because of the patchwork of bilateral agreements for which aircraft registrations can operate with which countries in between the countries, over the countries without additional permits or restrictions or things like that, they operate a patchwork of different airlines all painted in DHL livery. But they're completely separate airlines. And so now because the Bahrain hub is unavailable to them, they have moved some of those aircraft into Europe to take on some of additional routes that are based in Europe. So I mean, rather than let those planes sit, they're being utilized now a little bit more than they otherwise would. They still have some aircraft that are being based out of Oman, but those are the short haul 737 aircraft. The other intercontinental flights, I guess, a way to term it is those are being used in Europe now. So more capacity in Europe because there's nothing for them to carry in Bahrain. Yeah, good video. If you haven't seen it, go watch Gabe pretend to be a box transported by DHL. He makes a fine box. He goes where the plane goes. And this one is not specifically tied to the availability of jet fuel, but more so a combination of the availability, the cost of jet fuel. Again, we're just waving our hands around at the general price. Yeah, exactly. So we finally have a good look at how Thai airlines are beginning to deal with some of these things because it is countries in Asia that are most directly impacted by the rising price and lack of availability of jet fuel because most of their jet fuel, if not all of it, comes from the Middle East and comes through the Strait of Hormose. So Thai Lion Air, Noc Air and Thai Air Asia have all suspended multiple routes amid high fuel prices and lack of availability. Thai Lion Air has suspended at least one route. Noc Air has suspended at least one route. And some of those are just for the month of April. Some of those are through the Ayatna summer season, so all the way to October. And then Thai Air Asia has suspended five routes through the entire summer season. And they have also increased prices 15% to 30% on the flights that they are continuing to operate. Get those fuel sar charges, everyone. If they're not increasing the fares, they're increasing the fuel sar charges or they're increasing something else we'll talk about in a minute. But yeah, if you have or are planning again, we'll reiterate traveling later this year into the summer, later into the year at all. Book now before things get a little wacky because you really don't want to book when prices potentially go up 30%, 50%, 60% and then things maybe potentially normalize and go back to some normal sea. And then fares go lower and you're caught holding the bag on a flight that costs 60% more than it should have. Really difficult times right now, especially for these regions in parts of Asia where they might run out of fuel, they might not. How do you plan for this? This is awful for these airlines. I honestly don't know how you plan for running out of jet fuel. You need jet fuel to operate. It's an undeniable part of the industry. It's even given me a bit of pause a number of times this week as someone who works in the industry and relies on airlines continuing to be airlines and having money to pay people. Thankfully, there's somewhat good news this week or today, but who knows later this week. It's difficult. We talked about this last week, but not all airlines are going to come out of this cleanly and some airlines might not come out of it at all, which is another thing we'll get to in a minute, won't we? Yeah. Jason, you mentioned talking about booking now. I've done that once already today. Right. I think that was one of the interesting things that was part of the subtext of Delta Airlines' first quarter financial results because one of the things that they mentioned, among many things in talking about fuel prices and where they're reducing capacity growth and things like that, Delta says they're about to meaningfully reduce its capacity growth plans in the near term thanks to soaring fuel costs. They've already spent $2 billion more in fuel this quarter because of the cost spikes. One of the things that they also said to CEO Ed Beshtenset is that they have not seen customers pull back in their travel, especially folks who are purchasing at the higher end of things. Part of me is positing that this is an effect of booking now before everyone's understood rise in prices really kicks in. Exactly. Getting in while they're getting still good because realistically, there hasn't been a ton of day-to-day impacts in the US market. Aside from a few things like the price of gas going up, there hasn't been much other real impact on us. People still have, I guess, as much disposable income as they did three, four, six months ago, so they're going to continue to book. It's not surprising that they haven't seen a meaningful drop in any forward bookings, but that could change at the drop of a hat. We've seen it before. We've seen it with COVID. We've seen it during other world events. But Delta, among some other US airlines, they're in a particularly good place to ride this out, even though they're spending $2 billion more in fuel. They're still expected to rake in plenty of money to counteract that, but not all airlines are as healthy financially as Delta or, let's say, United who really stake their profits on premium travelers and business travelers, which really, for the most part, hasn't seen much of a cutback. More price-sensitive customers flying price-sensitive airlines like Frontier, things might get weird with them sooner rather than later. I think we're going to see a bit more guidance this week as other airlines begin to report their first quarter earnings. Delta was first. I think we'll have a bit more to say about what airlines are thinking and how they're feeling about these things as the next few weeks roll on and more airlines report their earnings. We've also seen from a couple times today that it's open season for airline mergers here, at least in the US market again. I think even there was an interview with Sean Duffy, the DOT secretary here in the US said, yeah, there's room for airline mergers here. Not that I put much stock into anything Sean Duffy has to say, but I believe, I believe that Bastion, the CEO of Delta, also said the same thing today. I have to go back and read the notes to make sure he actually said that, but I think no one would disagree with that. There's definitely, especially with this administration, there is definitely appetite and room for some additional mergers. Lots of, I think we talked about this in prior episodes, but lots of chatter about something with JetBlue. Who knows at this point, but I think it's more realistic now than it was just a couple of weeks ago that the current landscape, at least in the US, is not going to stay stable. We're going to see some sort of merger or hostile takeover come sooner rather than later. Can spirit keep doing what it's doing? If fuel doubles and triples, is a third bankruptcy? No. In the cards? I don't know. The answer to the first question is no. The answer to the second question is maybe not chapter 11. Yeah, that's the twist. There might not be a way out of it for them this time. Let's talk about JetBlue and United and Delta and Southwest because all of those airlines within the past week have said, you know what, it's time to raise checked bag fees. Yeah, checked bag fees are the new change and cancel fees. Since all the US airlines stop charging for change and cancel outside of basic economy, so they can't raise those anymore because they don't exist. The new change and cancel fee is bag fees. Man, are they expensive now? I think spirit charges $70 for a checked bag. I think everyone else has upped it from 40 or 45 to 50. If you pay in advance, it's even more if you do it at the airport. It's almost worth it in a bunch of these cases to just open up a new airline credit card, which gives you free check bags. I think it pays for itself after like one and a half trips. That's how expensive checked bag fees have gotten on these airlines. You as a person with a family of multiple children, you probably feel that more than I do because I couldn't care less about checked bag fees. I can't remember the last time I've checked a bag, but this probably is the more than this. Well, my kids don't fit in the suitcases anymore, so no, I don't care as much. Oh, that's not what you meant. It's not. We should cut that part. I mean, having duly played the credit card and loyalty game and things like that, this affects me slightly less and also being a religious pack as small as possible person, generally speaking. But I do think that it shows the big... I mean, it's still bizarre to me, genetically bizarre to me that we're talking about Southwest Airlines raising bag fees. Well, raising them everywhere except for one destination in particular, which I think is quite interesting. So once you process and the fact that Southwest is charging not just for two bags, but for one bag, they recently, I believe, introduced service to Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, California. They sure did. Where they brought back free checked bag, but only kinda sorta, it's wine country and they have a new program called Sippin Ship, which allows customers to bring a case of wine for free. And I'm quoting here from select West Coast locations, apparently including Santa Rosa, Sonoma County. They didn't mention what other airports on the West Coast, so that's open to interpretation, but bags fly free at Southwest only if they're drunk. I don't think that's how it works, but that's not how that works at all. But also in the same release, apparently Southwest started flying to St. Martin, SXM as well. They did, which is just as a gistery. Pretty cool, yeah, as of the other day, which is great. So another thing to spot down there at SXM, well, I guess I gotta go back now because I also saw that Air France is swapping out, it's extremely loud A330s for A350s at SXM. So I gotta go back and see that too. Big changes. Yeah. So in the Southwest, I had to go back and double check because I was looking to see what the frequency was going to be of the flights. And that is their first new international destination since 2021. Wow. And one of the first, I think, that they didn't just inherit from Airtran, but they did it right because they put someone out at Maho Beach to document the first arrival of a Southwest 737 at SXM and they even drew their little heart in the sand as the aircraft flew overhead. Somebody at Southwest did it right. And I have to applaud that because they understand the Avgeek nature of St. Martin. They also had some. So St. Martin is one of the airports where we have our new automated live stream. So we talked about this a few weeks ago, but worth mentioning again because we've got a relatively new one at Lanzarote as well now. But the camera uses ADSB data to follow the aircraft automatically from the time it picks it up automatically from the time it picks it up till the time it decides that it's not really worth looking at anymore and switches to a different aircraft. Not worth looking at anymore. You know, parks or, you know, taxi. I'm done with you on to the next one. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And there was a Southwest employee standing. The one at St. Martin has ambient audio at part of the camera. And there was a Southwest employee standing near enough to the camera that you could hear them, their side of a conversation that they were having with someone who was also waiting for the aircraft to arrive, which I thought was really funny to listen to. Probably only positive and happy things to say. Yeah, no, it was good. It was fun to hear them chat to somebody who was asking like, what are you doing here and what is all this about? Kudos to Southwest for doing it right. Let's go to India where two CEOs within two weeks are soon to be gone. This week, Air India's CEO, Campbell Wilson, resigned from the airline as it continues to deal with financial losses and as it continues to build back after the 787 crash last year that killed 260 people. Wilson was set to end his term as CEO in 2027. However, he will be leaving a bit earlier than that. During Wilson's tenure, he came in after the Tata Group's takeover of Air India with a remit to turn the airline around. And as part of that, they began buying new aircraft, refurbishing aircraft interiors, and reworking the airline's culture from top to bottom. It didn't quite go as well as they wanted to. And so now it seems like he'll be on the way out and the board is going to look for someone else to come in and take over. Yeah, so this is surprising to me. Things, dare I say, for Air India were going pretty okay. Sure, its plan for turnaround privatization was ambitious, but I don't think anyone legitimately thought the timeline they put out, including themselves, was practical given supply chain constraints that made it practically impossible to refurbish the fleet at the pace that they set forward. But in that time, they took delivery of some nice aircraft, either from Delta or Aeroflot A350s that it couldn't, that Aeroflot couldn't take delivery of, and has actually started to refurbish its legacy fleet. So things are getting better. Of course, there was the extremely unfortunate and sad crash of one of their 787s, but I don't think you can blame the CEO at this point for that right now. So I'm a little surprised to see him resign or be resigned at this point. I guess things were trending in the right direction, and I'm not sure who they're going to find to take up that position or what difference someone else could possibly make because turning around, a deeply troubled and unprofitable airline and turning it private is not an easy task for the faint of heart. And their current trajectory wasn't good enough. I can't imagine someone else is going to come around and wave a magic wand and make it all better. It doesn't work that way. Maybe Willie Walsh can be CEO of both airlines at the same time. A super merger. One airline to rule them all in India. What could possibly go wrong there? So many things. Jason, a few weeks ago, you and a large collection of the aviation journalism community visited United in Los Angeles, where they talked about some really incredible things. That's true. It was a really happy event, and it was great. There was no bad news. Everything was good for both the airline and passengers. Everyone was happy. Where are you going with this? Well, we already talked about the fact that they're raising bag fees, though that's kind of a whatever. We get it. Everyone's going to do that. But now they're also coming out with a stratification of the premium cabin. That's PR speak for introducing basic business and basic premium economy to match basic economy. So weird how they didn't announce that at the happy event where all things are good and positive and amazing. Literally the very next week, United announced to some surprise basic fares for the premium economy and business fares. So basic economy is nothing new. We've been dealing with that as the general public for about a decade now. And the concept of basic business is nothing new. That's been done by European, Middle East, and Asian Airlines for also a very long time. And in fact, US Airlines have been talking about this for a long time. Delta has been talking about basic business for years now. But what we didn't expect was for United to just come out and do it without talking about it. Almost. They announced it. But as far as I can tell, it is not actually out there for consumption yet. It's going to be phased in. But I think what's happening here is that they've kind of advanced the announcement of it because of again waving my hands around at the everything going on. They need more money to offset the rising fuel costs. And this is a way that they had already planned to, let's be honest, it's not about creating more choice or Jason, this can't possibly be about revenue. This has to be about providing choice to the consumer. No, that's not how this works. We have a baseline for this. We know from basic economy that it's a bunch of crap that the basic fare does not get cheaper. It just means you have to pay more to get everything back that you used to have. They're not going to lower the cost of the introductory basic business fare to lower than the floor of what it is today. No, they're going to take away things that you are used to today. So in United's case specifically is quite interesting. Basic business and basic premium economy, you will not have free change. You will not have free cancel. You will not have seat assignment. You will have to pay for a seat, which can come at a pretty substantial cost, depending on which airline you're talking about here. We don't know what United is planning on doing. But they are also restricting access to the Polaris Lounge, even if you book Polaris business class and shepherding those passengers to the United Club. So it's interesting that they're not saying no lounge for you at all because that's how some of the Middle Eastern and European airlines have done it. They are saying you can have a lounge, but it's just going to be the other lounge down the hallway that's probably too busy to let anyone else in, which helps overcrowding at the Polaris Lounge, I guess. But what's interesting here is that there's no pricing being announced, no, at least as far as I've seen, timeline on when it's going to happen. But United beat Delta to the punch, even though they've been talking about this for years and then Americans probably just they're going, huh, what's going on? Because we haven't heard anything out of them. But it's disappointing because it's a de facto price hike for anyone who wants flexibility. I guess the nice lounge and seat assignment. So as Jason, I think succinctly put it, this is a price hike on the same things you get now. And if you want to pay less or if you want to pay the same, you get less. Yeah. If premium economy or basic economy is any indication, it's not going to be an inconsequential amount of money to upgrade here as typically the Delta between economy and basic economy is anywhere in the range of 70 to $100. And that's just for economy for their more price sensitive customers. So for premium cabins, I can imagine it's not going to be cheap. And United has specifically said, we don't want people buying the base fare. Right. That's exactly how basic economy works. That is only there for the super price sensitive passengers. They don't want you booking that. They want you converting to the higher tier, to the not basic to regular, in this case, regular Polaris business or regular standard, standard, short standard, because they have called it as such a basic is not basic. It's base. It's base. Regular is standard and that flexible remains flexible. I don't know who books flex, flex fares, but people must do it if they still offer it. But as someone who enjoys booking flights and then changing them around or canceling them or rebooking when the price goes down, this is a de facto pretty consequential price hike for a lot of people, which I don't love, but it was inevitable. But the current economic situation, yeah, they will enjoy it. But the current economic situation demands that it happens sooner rather than later. And we're going to get to the point where this is just the case at all airlines, just as long as they're not like BA. And even if you're not booking a basic fare charging you what, $200 for seat assignment in business class, that's outrageous, but yeah, they probably will. It'll come eventually. Speaking of BA, sort of, IAG has dropped out of the bidding for a privatized TAP Air Portugal. Lufthansa Group and Air France KLM did in fact submit bids for the airline of which they can purchase up to, I believe it's 44.9%. The government of Portugal will continue to hold 50% plus one of the airline for the time being. There is a 5% carve out for employees as well. And the airline groups can take more shares if the employee allotment isn't fully subscribed. So that could be very interesting. The privatization does require that TAP remains TAP, the brand stays there, and the Lisbon hub remains as well. Lufthansa Group and Air France KLM have both said, absolutely, of course, we're going to make it bigger, better, so on and so forth. So that remains to be seen. But IAG says now we're done. They didn't want to deal with some of the restrictions that came with possibly owning TAP. All of these stories of previously state-owned airlines turning private, getting gobbled up by some large group. We're going to run out of those eventually. Eventually. Yes. But not today. Not today. Jason, you flagged this one and the airplane's nicer, but sort of not nicer for the passenger? Tell me more. Well, Jetstar was a pretty early, long haul 787 operator, which operated, it's a low-cost carrier, but it was kind of a middle-of-the-road experience on board. Had seatback screens, power and all that. But no, its first refurb of a 787 has come out of the hangar without seatback screens. And Ian, I hear it provides passengers with more choice. Would you believe that? I feel like if an airline says more choice, we should stop them right there. Just stop them there. What they have done in this case, they've introduced, well, paid Wi-Fi that should be able to stream your own entertainment. But we know how that goes. It often goes poorly, more often than not when you try that. Certainly not all 325 passengers on board this aircraft. Actually, that's an interesting twist. Drop down from 335 to 325 seats on board. But 325 people cannot stream entertainment to their own device at the same time. It's just not going to work on any system. But I believe this is one of the first cases where we've seen seatback screens ripped out of a long-haul aircraft that hasn't been handed down from a mainline airline to some other low-cost operator. So this is an interesting test to see. Really if passengers that are price sensitive flying an airline like Jetstar, did they really care about the seatback screens? Because it's an interesting twist. And they actually weren't free. I think you actually have to swipe your credit card. One of the very, very rare cases in 2026 where an airline still charges for entertainment. But those screens are gone. So you don't have to worry about that anymore. And they say, for customers, this new experience on our 787 just means they can enjoy low fares, great choice, and they can fly to more destinations. Well, they're probably not going to be able to do that if they don't have fuel to put in their airplane. So give a little, get a little, but maybe not in this case. We'll see how it goes. Sticking in the region, let's talk about gate 82. Nothing good happens at gate 82. Nothing good happens at gate 82. This comes from an ATSB safety report about Brisbane Airport's gate 82 jet bridge. Because that particular jet bridge collided with not one, but two separate 737s. Two separate occasions. Yeah, apparently it smashed in the windshields of a Qantas 738 and a Fiji Airways 738 mirror days apart. Apparently June 18th and July 26th of 2025. No injuries either. But the ATSB report indicates that this jet bridge is able to handle both wide body and narrow body aircraft. And apparently when a narrow body aircraft is at the gate and it's resetting from a wide body aircraft, they can't see the little tiny 737 and on two occasions they just slammed the jet bridge right into it. At least if you're going to smash a jet bridge at any part of the airplane, I guess the windshield is a good one because you can easily replace that. It's not like probably not a lot of fuselage damage, but man, that's just, that's crazy that the same thing happened twice just a couple of weeks apart from each other like that. Before you ask, no, it wasn't the same person. It was employees of each respective ground handler. The jet bridge here, as Jason mentioned, it can serve both wide bodies and narrow bodies. And so the jet bridge needs to be moved further from the terminal to service the narrow body aircraft because they are shorter and you need to keep the jet bridge pitch at a certain level so people aren't walking up a massive hill to get back to the terminal. So it has to extend much further. And because of that, the 737 parks much further away than say an A330 or 777. And because of that, when they turned the jet bridge a certain way to make it move, you can't see, basically can't see where you're going and they bumped into the windshields. Well, yeah, a couple interesting factors here that apparently the jet bridge didn't have side viewing windows that some other jet bridges have, limiting the visibility of narrow body aircraft along the docking path, summarizing here from an Australian aviation article that summarizes the ATSB report that it was just accepted practice for operators to extend the jet bridge before the aircraft was visible because how else are you going to do it? You have to move it. And then they quote the report saying, during the collision events, each air bridge operator moved the joystick to a three o'clock position after rotating the cab left unaware that this orientation would change the arrow bridges direction of travel. Consequently, airplanes smashy smashy, which is not good. And I hope in our lifetime, we'll get to the point where jet bridges are automated because the technology is there. The concept has been proven it is possible. It can be done with money. But how many times have we read stories like this where a jet bridge plows into an aircraft, takes out an engine, smashes a windshield, does something. It's usually in Chicago, but this has got to be a lifetime. Now, you're sorry. You're not in our lifetime. These things have got to be automated, right? It's just so ridiculous that a human has to drive this and can smash an airplane twice in a month and a half. I think we should turn airports into drive-thrus. That'd be fun. You just don't even don't even stop. Just keep going. Everyone can get out. Exactly. Problem solved. That's why people come to listen to this podcast for hard hitting engineering solutions to aviation problems. And one last topic. We skipped over Lufthansa, who did a pretty cool thing the other day. They did. They did. So you closed the show. We did. We were on board. So this is actually fun. I like how Jason has noted this in the show notes. It's Lufthansa. It doesn't say Lufthansa celebrated its the 100th anniversary of its first flights by operating a pair of flights that followed the original routes. That's not what Jason's headline. No, it's not. Jason's headline says Lufthansa remembers that Berlin can have big airplanes for one day. For one day only. Which is also true because Lufthansa does not currently operate any wide-body aircraft. No, Berlin never heard of her. Never heard of her. But this was pretty cool. Yeah. What they did do is they took the 100th anniversary livery 787 and the 100th anniversary A350 and flew them from Berlin on the first routes that Lufthansa flights operated on April 6th, 1926. So the 787 departed Berlin and flew to Zurich and the A350 departed after what I believe was a photo pass over the city, which I really want to see. They flew on over to Cologne. In the release that Lufthansa put out, they noted some interesting things about how long it took. There were multiple stops on the first flight to Zurich and they followed along. They didn't actually stop, but they passed over where the original flight stopped. But the best thing to me in the release was that they noted on the flight to Cologne, they carried on the not on this week, but 100 years ago, they carried one passenger. That's it. That's it on that first flight from Berlin to Cologne, one passenger. That's I guess airplanes are still pretty unproven and scary back then. So also one brave person, one brave and probably very wealthy person. Yes. And Lufthansa is going to celebrate this momentous event with a cabin crew strike because of course they are. I guess it's that time of year again already. But we just can't have too much good news about Lufthansa. We have to have some bad in there again. But Lufthansa's cabin crew at Lufthansa Prime and also City Line, which I think is winding down and not even going to be a thing anymore. But they're holding a one day strike on Friday the day this podcast comes out. So yay. Some good news, some bad news. Mix it all together and you get a good podcast. Hey, and that's where we end. This has been episode 365 of Abtok. I, Emmy Impetchnik here as always with Jason Rabinowitz. Thanks for listening.