Thanks. I guess you can look at it as the removal of four seats for an increase of two, which sounded extremely stupid, or you can look at it, more correctly, as the removal of four to add six. That's not a stupid move: it's a decision based on facts Yield Management people have, and I don't. If they squeeze more money out of the tube by changing the proportion of First/Coach... they're doing their job correctly.

Now, this does bring up a different topic, from our perspective, which is that management can add seats to an airframe, and we get paid the same. And they can add capacity without increasing headcount. It's annoying to us, but it's not stupid on their part...

I just watched the "Numbers After Pushback" video that's on the Flight Ops page.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the way they are going to have us do it, we'll be tying up a lot of ramp space as we sit there, entering numbers and running checklists after they disconnect us after the push.

fNWA guys, I know you would get numbers after the push. How/when/where did you guys do it?

That would be true if First/Business is reduced in favor of expanding coach.
It is my understanding that the new lie-flat B/E will take the same space, but reduce seats from 65 to 48. That will give paying business class customer more of what they pay for, but also reduce the option for overbooking coach with relatively high Y, B or M fares.
Unless the business class fare goes up, it could lead to a loss of revenue.

We used flip cards that didn't require any FMS entry. Took about 15 seconds to verify the ACARS delivered weight data, then open the appropriate cards and set your bugs. It all happened on the fly.

Gnewt

We did it when we got them. Most of the time this was when we were taxing out somewhere between the ramp and the runway. Sometimes, very rarely, we would have to pull over to the side of the runway and wait for them.

What the heck is spygate?

Hi
 

Hi Everyone, I heard about this thread over on the DALPA forums. So, I thought I would stop by and check it out.

By the way here is a link to my latest airline venture:

Amish Airlines on Vimeo

Enjoy!

AP

Keeping in mind I'm not fully endorsing the changes, because I don't have all the info, here are a couple of thoughts:

The higher fare Coach pax are getting on no matter what. The only people getting squeezed out are the lower fares. Granted, those represent incremental revenue. And granted, a lot of this is about shoe-horning more into the airframe. But then again, a lot of this maybe about shoe-horning the right kind of things on the aircraft.

So maybe the problem is different on an A320 than a B747. On the Airbus, the First cabin is somehwat competitive with domestic offerings, so maybe this is just a question of tweaking the proportion of each cabin. When you create space by reducing one class, with no galley in the way, you can simply fill the void with the next class and shift the divider.

Maybe on the 747, it's a question of offering a competitive product. Maybe you don't have the option of keeping the same density in B/E, because you can't offer lie-flats without spreading out. So you have to trade a lower number of lie-flats, for a higher number of traditional B/E seats. You can't backfill with Coach seats, because there is no net gain of space, as you said. But maybe what you've done is stop yield erosion across your current B/E cabin. I would speculate that if we continue to carry those 65 seats around, and ANA, UAL, and JAL fly people in lie-flats, we would eventully lose a lot of business. Or yields.

Also, I wonder if there is a weight implication. Maybe there is a net gain in payload, and maybe yields on cargo are better.

I also wonder if there might be a staffing implication: would this change drop on required F/A?

Either way, it's a lot of speculation on my part. But based on the fact we often put people in B/E or First that don't pay for the product, and because the economy seems to have changed booking patterns, I'm not opposed to management working the yield. If they were to do so intelligently, and it led to more money to fight them over, it would be a refreshing change.

I think there's only 386 seats total. 338 coach and 48 lie flats.

Your math is wrong, the press release clearly states after reconfiguration, the 747s will accommodate 386 customers with 48 BusinessElite seats and 338 Economy class seats. This is a loss of 17 BusinessElite seats, but holding economy class the same size. Those pax in economy do get 1.5 inches of personal space with the new slimline seats, rather than reducing pitch. BusinessElite will have 12.4% of seats with this new configuration.

When the 763ER gets reconfigured, I'd like to see two seating arrangements: the GE-powered birds with 28 BusinessElite seats flying high-yield routes and the PW-powered birds with 20 BusinessElite seats flying low-yield long haul routes like MSP - HNL.