Once a day or Four Times a day?- A question of playing safe and or going with the vision.

Singapore Airlines has announced an increase in its London flights from 3 daily A380s to 4 by adding a 777-300ER service to its tally.

On the face of it this just brings SQ up to the same total as the combined BA/Qantas codeshared joint service operation. (The two share management, staff and facilities in Singapore and Bangkok).

The reality though is different.

Singapore Airlines and most other Oriental carriers have long seen life very clearly. They identify their challenges, design how best to deal with them and then go for it.  Right now their competition comes from the rising Middle East carriers, including Turkish, with large shiny new fleets, ever multiplying spokes and frequencies from their conveniently located home hubs and bold approach to investment.  The Orientals are less worried by the much less aggressive and focused European carriers who have much less market dominating thrust . Dealing with the Middle Eastern threat has to be top of their priorities .In the new world governments are not going to step in to protect their home carriers. There is far too much for countries to lose economically for them to do that. SQ and other Far East based airlines can't economically add as many nonstop spokes into European provincial points as the Middle Easterns can . The distances are too great.  Possibly the relatively small size and economics of the 787 will change that,- but that's not yet proven.  For now the airlines have to rack up the capacity and frequency to the major cities which they can serve well.  The next necessity is to spread these throughout the day.  Traditionally right back to the 1960s ,overnight flights between Asia and Europe have sold better than daylights. As result although airlines have since the earliest jets tended to dabble occasionally with the daylight flights westbound and early departures eastbound (giving morning rather than late afternoon arrivals) most stuck to the tried and tested formula of late nights westbound and afternoon through to late night departures eastbound.  When they have tried breaking away from this pattern they have very quickly abandoned the experiment in the face accountants scowls at lower margins or initial losses. They simply lost their nerve and didn't stick with the daylights long enough to get them established and make them work. Lufthansa in Hong Kong was an exception as were Finnair and SAS in other Asian cities.

In recent years the picture has begun to change and give passengers   between Asia and Europe a better choice. Business travellers in particular have welcomed the  greater flexibility to change plans and avoid wasting time if their meetings ended earlier than expected or something urgent cropped up back home. Getting on a plane quickly was better than kicking their heels in a hotel waiting for dark.

The change has been down to three main factors:

-Better aircraft utilisation of aircraft by avoiding the day long layovers at the European end.
-Slot availabity in Europe, particularly Heathrow.
-Genuine desire to gain market share by offering more choice.
-To counter the high quality Middle East based 6th Freedom carriers offering multiple departures in each direction, albeit via an intermediate change of flight.

Singapore, Cathay Pacific,Malaysia and Thai have all taken the frequency and choice approach. Cathay are now up to 4 daily well spaced London flights while Malaysia and Thai with two each offer midday and late evening departures westbound and overnight and daylight eastbound.

The BA/Qantas approach on the Singapore,Bangkok and Hong Kong routes is entirely different. It is traditional/conservative. The only exception has been this summer's short term toe- in- the- water thrice weekly 777  Hong Kong services .These are not shared with Qantas who have withdrawn from Hong Kong-London as well as Bangkok-London. (Back home Australians are beginning to get vociferous about what they see as a national icon of a brand in retreat).The BA/Qantas combine have stuck with the overnight formula avoiding a wide spread of eastbound timings and clumping all westbounds to within a very short late night timeframe. From the passengers'  point of view these simply merge together into one very high capacity flight offering around 1,400 seats.

As result of these different philosophies the competing products this summer before Singapore Airlines introduce their 4th service in October look like:

SINGAPORE AND LONDON ROUTE:

SQ:                Eastbound  : 1130/1830/2205. Longest gap 11hrs 25 m.
                      Westbound : 0905/1245/2230. Longest gap 10hrs 35 m.

BA/QF:         Eastbound   :  2025/2115/2130/2230. Gap: 21hrs 55 m.
                      Westbound  : 2255/2305/2325/2357. Gap: 22hrs 56 m.

Notes:  BA/QF Eastbound services all operate within a 2 hrs 5 mins band.
                         Westbound services all operate within a  1hr 1 min band.

            Singapore Airlines' additional service from October will depart at 0045 westbound and 1515 eastbound.

BANGKOK AND LONDON ROUTE:

Thai:              Eastbound:    1230/2130. Gap 14hrs 30 m.
                      Westbound:  1225/0025.  Gap 12 hrs.

BA/QF:         Eastbound :   2205 only    Gap 24 hrs.
                      Westbound:  0025 only     Gap 24 hrs

KUALA LUMPUR AND LONDON ROUTE:

Malaysia:    Eastbound:    1200/2200     Gap 14 hrs.
                   Westbound:   1005/2340     Gap 13hrs 35 m.

BA/QF       No service since 1998.

HONG KONG AND LONDON ROUTE:

Cathay : Eastbound:  
              Westbound:  0035/1005/1440/2355

BA:         Eastbound:   *1200/1830/2200    Gap *14hrs or 20hrs 30m.
               Westbound:  * 0910/2315/2345   Gap  *14hrs 50 or 23hrs 30m.

Note: *=3 x weekly Currently Summer 2012 only.

The differences in approach could not be clearer........

Asian v British/ European. Investment/ innovation/ schedule choice v sticking with the proven recipe.

The short term financial pressures are clearly to go with the latter  up to the point where lines on a graph cross and then switch nimbly to the latter. Let other people try to generate an all-day market and watch and wait until you get to the point where aircraft utilisation savings cover any revenue gap.

Ultimately the longer term visionaries and innovators tend to benefit. For many years BA flew 3 Hong Kong flights a day,  closely bunched westbound though with better spreads eastbound. Cathay had the same frequency but with a better spread in both directions. Cathay are now up to four and BA's core schedule is down to two. An added factor was BA reducing its Economy class configurations to boost premium capacity. This meant spilling high volume low yield business to Cathay who have used it as bedrock revenue with which to underpin their frequency increase and in doing so make themselves more attractive to the premium market. Who is winning?

European airlines (and those include Qantas in ethos despite its unique and robust differences)  have in general been struggling on Oriental and Australasian routes. Their service , including catering (which indicates hospitality in eastern cultures) has been visibly thrifted and their crews have not been consistently good in their understanding of or attention to Oriental passengers. As result, coupled with the enormous investment in new and enlarged fleets by high quality eastern competitors  originally in Asia and now in the Gulf , they have mostly been outplayed although their immediate revenue/costs/profit ratios have probably been better than had they come out fighting. Their planners tend to struggle with finance people who take hard nosed but narrow short term views about where the best margins are to be obtained with existing equipment and other resources.  Talk about "Long term global strategy" and the westerners eyes tend to glaze over. Hence adding to existing successes,-eg long haul overnight services and London Heathrow ,- is almost always preferred over the speculative deployment of an aircraft to another route pattern, schedule or route. For example for BA another flight out of Heathrow will always win against one out of Manchester while Gatwick will always struggle to get the commitment and investment it has to have to thrive long term. Lufthansa decided several years ago to break out of that mindset and straitjacket and went for it in developing a second major hub in Munich. It's been expensive and they could have done better in the short term by sticking with just Frankfurt but in long term it will strengthen them. In fact they were thinking more like an Asian business.

Perhaps more western airlines should be asking themselves the question:"What would we do if we were Asian?" Come to think of it, some of their home country governments and other businesses would do well to ask the same thing.

"Malaysia Airlines brings joy to the nation......."

Today's Air Transport News brings this heartwarming headline to its readers. Malaysia has been showing off its brand new A380 and clearly winning hearts and minds.

In a statement attributed to the airline ATN goes on to explain how.

"Many others took the opportunity to capture themselves on Polaroid photographs with cabin crew members of Malaysia Airlines given away with the compliments of the national airline."

Wow, beat that Mr Branson.

IAG is Spanish-Forget BA being British and don't complain.

Forget BA Chairman Martin Broughton's pre-IAG cuddly assurances that despite the company's forthcoming absorbtion by its new owner BA would remain essentially British.  As far as ownership was concerned that was never going to be the case .

For any who believed otherwise,including former BA shareholders whose holdings came from a one-for-one swap from BA to IAG paper , the notice of IAG's first AGM to be held on 20th June sets the record straight once and for all.

It says "As IAG is a Spanish company the meeting is subject to Spanish legislation and will be held in Spanish in Madrid....There will also be a UK venue for ..(essentially UK) shareholders ...where the meeting can be followed by video link with simultaneous translation." A separate website confirms that attendees at the UK venue will not be able to either speak or vote there. They can only speak if they go to Madrid, although they can vote in advance by proxy if they wish.

That is clear then. BA is Spanish owned, pure and simple. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that and nobody can complain about it. It's what BA's shareholders, who include many of its staff , had the opportunity to vote for and had the chance of rejecting. At the last BA AGM in 2010 there was barely a murmur about the merger, and certainly nothing hostile. The vast majority of floor time was taken up by cabin crew berating the management for trimming back some of the excesses of former terms and conditions. They obviously thought this was far more important. The unions similarly had nothing public to say. They can not therefore complain about the new ownership structure or nationality. When the opportunity was there, those few who didn't vote against the proposed demise of BA as a standalone British company were presumably either all for it or weren't interested.

UK: The Queens's Speech- No crumbs for transport.

The Queen's Speech, an occasion when the unfortunate monarch is obliged to dress up in her finest and make her way to place she would probably rather not visit (she tends to be fussy about the company she keeps) and read out "her" government's legislative programme for the next twelve months came as a huge disappointment to anyone who looks towards improvement to transport infrastructure as a way out of the current flatlining economy.

It also came over the same way to anybody interested in a dynamic "Let's do it" programme of building capacity for Britain's future. There was nothing whatever to indicate an exciting vision of a 21st century country.

The planned HS 2 Bill to clear the way for the London to Birmingham first stage of a high speed railway line from London to the midlands, north and ultimately Scotland has been deferred by a year. The only advantage of this is that it may now be possible to add in to it the separate Y shaped extensions to the north east and north west and thereby avoid the need for further legislation later to cover these. The immediate reason for delay was though a failure of courage in the face of Conservative opposition in the string of largely Chiltern constituencies along the line's preferred and most sensible route. The fact that listening too closely to these means ignoring the needs of the midlands, the north and Scotland has not been understood .The party is not strong on things north of Watford and many appear not too clear about where that actually is. The Lib Dems just don't seem too bothered. For many of them transport presents too many conflicts of idealism to be able to cope with. Whether the line is high, low speed or any other speed is irrelevant. After 130 or so years of relying on the Victorian's work and removing some of it, notably the last and best (European guage) built Great Central line, the need for new capacity via a new line is urgent and will only worsten with continued political procrastination.

There were no words of comfort either in the speech for any other measures to improve Britain's increasingly sclerotic transport system. The punitive levels of Air Passenger Duty have become too big a contributor to the exchequer to be reversed or abandoned without political screams about favouring the rich above the poor and are set to increase rather than diminish. The review of runway capacity in the South East is to consider anything but the most necessary, most obvious and easiest done building of the 3rd runway at Heathrow. Even Labour, the orginal promoter of the scheme has turned against it and its champion Lord Adonis on returning today to the shadow cabinet has been warned by his masters not to revisit the subject,-as he had in fact very recently done. Maybe the terms of his reinstatement include silence on the matter.

There are no plans to substantially improve the UK's road system either. No new motorways are planned and only tinkering at the fringes with some additional lanes and cheap conversions of hard shoulders into roadway is envisaged. A few bottlenecks here and there may be eased but essentially the policy is for no substantial growth. That is bad news to industry and to depressed coastal towns such as Hastings, Eastbourne, Gt Yarmouth, Skegness and others which are pretty much strangled by being at the end of what in effect are long, low capacity country lanes.

Ports remain largely only just about adequately served by road and rail. There have been recent guage and other enhancements on rail routes from both Southampton and Felixstowe to the midlands but also needed are increases in line capacity including the doubling of approximately 7 miles of track between Felixstowe and Ipswich (no big deal but no plans for it),the electrification of the Barking to Gospel Oak line in north London(thanks to nobody wanting to take responsibility for the cost) and further capacity enhancements for Felixstowe trains west of Ely. The re-doubling of the very restricted Leamington-Coventry link also needs to be brought forward. All are relatively minor in the scheme of railway expenditure but are surrounded by a lack of urgency.

As for getting the nation cycling, until it is accepted that bicycles need lanes entirely separate from roads rather than just a lethal narrow strips marked along the side of them, Britain is not serious about the idea. Improvements tend to be very piecemeal and are hindered when more than one local authority is involved.

Given big picture vision from politicians and planners, a "just do it " approach and freedom from inter departmental and inter local authoritity conflicts and other obstructive feet out and logs across the roads,railways and runways, much could be achieved quite quickly. Unfortunately ,while there is some talk, there is no sign of much action and certainly no sense of urgency and dynamism. The first requirement is strong political leadership and direction. The spring Budget and the Queens Speech have given none of this.

The joys of real air travel, - Andrew Woodrow at Luanda airport c2009

Luanda airport, c 2009, written while waiting. The balcony is sadly no more, subsumed by the modernisation project that has produced a much better airport, if one excludes the fact it lacks a good vantage point. The windows in the departure hall are at least large, but it’s not quite the same thing.

Luanda has one of Africa’s finest plane-spotting airports – not from the departure lounge, where narrow windows, thick concrete and blinds obscure the view, but from the small café on the first floor, accessible only before immigration. You check-in, assure your agent that you can manage on your own, and pass back through the passenger check and up the stairs. Agents generally do not like this as they are instructed to ensure you have gone through immigration and therefore, barring delays, have left their area of responsibility. This probably explains why there are relatively few foreigners amongst the coke-sipping Angolans out on the terrace.20 or so tables are arranged outside, with umbrellas against the sun and potted palms around the edge, and there is a clear view over a low railing across the apron. To the left, the international airlines – today a pair of TAAG 777s, a TAAG 747 preparing to leave for Rio, and the Air France 777. I too will be on AF later, but from Johannesburg, 1500 miles to the south – booked out flights to and from Angola mean the 12 hour deviation via South Africa is often the only way to get in or out.

Ahead is the taxiway to the 2 runways, reasonably busy with helicopters heading offshore – ‘Super Puma’ 18-seaters and smaller Dauphins. To the right are the domestic airlines, beyond that the military aircraft, and in the distance the hulks of ageing aircraft in various states of disrepair. Domestic airlines in Angola are many and varied, – and include the not overwhelmingly popular 737s of the national carrier, TAAG, Sonair’s yellow-tailed fleet of Embraer 120s, Fokker 50s, 727s and 737s mixes with the orange logo’d Embraers of Air 26. Those two are my preferred Angolan carriers; Diexim is similar with Embraer 120s. Air Gemini with colourful MD80s in yellow and red with a pair of elephants on the forward fuselage, ‘Airjet,’ which appears to have abandoned its jets in favour of turboprops, ‘Heli Malongo,’ Chevron’s own chartered Dash-8s in a smart red and grey, assorted 727s with various paint jobs that look more-or-less operational; a lone ‘Afrik-Trans’ 727 that looks decidedly un-operational.

Beyond them, the heavy-lift aircraft, both military and civilian and largely Russian-built Antonovs or Ilyshyns. Every now and then one lumbers out to the runway, puts on the brakes and cranks up the engines, to lurch forward once under full power and roar slowly forward and skyward with thick smoky trails in their wake. Almost as noisy are the smaller propeller-driven transports, their huge engines on top of the high, anhedral wings with a parachute ramp at the back. Dotted in and around these are various museum-pieces, many covered in a thick layer of dust.

The only problem is that immigration in Luanda can take an hour to work through, so it is necessary to leave the balcony well in advance – even before my South African 747 has arrived – to join the queue to be stamped out of Angola, x-rayed, searched and checked for Angolan currency, to join the majority of travelers who either do not know about the balcony or have been herded through security by their agent who wants to see the back of them and go home. Many are quite happy to do that, thinking they need assistance like an ‘Unaccompanied Minor’ to negotiate their passage through the airport. But as when I was an Unaccompanied Minor, I’d rather get rid of my escort, sit on the balcony, and take my chances in the scrum downstairs. It may be Luanda, but getting on a plane at the end of the day is not so different to anywhere else.

Why do it?- Etihad's investment in Aer Lingus-and Air Seychelles.

Many found Etihad's commitment of up to $80 million in Air Seychelles difficult to square with an easily understandable strategy. The same people may well be reacting the same way to today's revelation that the company is taking a nearly 3% stake in Aer Lingus. Again, the question is why do it? There doesn't appear to be an obvious need. Not even a defensive one.

Despite being off the eastern coast of Africa, Seychelles isn't well placed as a hub and anyway Etihad is building its own portfolio of destinations direct from Abu Dhabi. Air Seychelles, with its limited operation, was no competitive problem for the airline and it doesn't go on to anywhere particularly useful. Nor even with reinvigoration and new investment is it likely to. Etihad's own flights into Seychelles were doing well in any case on the back of traffic hoovered up from multiple sixth freedom cities so why bother to part with $80 million?

The same question now arises with Aer Lingus.The big Gulf trio, Etihad, Emirates and Qatar are all doing well in both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. Not a lot of their business is actually to and from their home airports. It is heading on to points south and east. The big attraction in Ireland is to bypass the much disliked Heathrow with its scattered terminals and laborious, time consuming security proceedures. This sentiment provides a ready market to anyone whose favoured view of the airport is the one from directly above it while heading somewhere else. Aer Lingus can do little to add to the flow. Talk of Etihad possibly flowing Europe destined traffic over Dublin defies a quick look at an atlas. The city is too far west to attract more than a trickle of backtrackers and anyway Ethihad itself flies to most major and some secondary European cities.

So why do these tie-ups? They look like a distraction from Etihad's core business and possibly its recent slowing down of growth. We may be missing something but despite some similarities between the two recent ventures, the hard financial or strategic logic is difficult to discern. Enlightenment and being proved wrong would be welcome but in the meantime we can't see any alarm bells being set off elsewhere.

Heathrow Immigration,- What's REALLY going on?

Suddenly over the past few weeks inbound immigration queues (The UK unusually in the world has no outbound imigration checks) at London's Heathrow, and Terminal 5 in particular, have gone from generally reasonable for the volumes of traffic into a country with immigration problems, to unacceptable. Queues once well contained within the large hall now run to and even beyond its extremeties. This is hardly the welcome people,including its own nationals, should expect in a country so high in the world's economies.

What's gone wrong and what's really going on?

Consider this scenario. The root causes are very simple.

The major factor is an inevitable and utterly predicatable pincer movement between the UK Borders Agency cutting back on staff as part of the UK's overall austerity measures on the one hand and the stiffening of pasport checks on the other. Throw in unspoken hostility to the spending cuts by both management and unions, each for its own reasons and and there's more of the picture. add to that almost contempt for a the way Brodie Clark, the former head of the UK Border Agency was forced out of office when relaxations of checks last year were discovered to have let a few undesirables in and there is a toxic politician-led mix.

Taking the Mr Clark's departure first, there were obvious risks in allowing staff to relax checks for most passengers so that the inbound flow worked well and staff had more time to use their well hned skill and intuition in identifying and weeding out those the UK did not welcome. The upside though was an increased rejection rate and staff feeling empowered to get on with the job and use their experience positively.It was too good to last though.

Inevitably the baying media will from time to time discover that a few who should have been kept out slipped through. That will happen with any system. 100% success and border integrity will never happen in a democratic non police state and politicians just have to stand firm and say so and make no apologies.

That unfortunately is not how politicians work almost anywhere in the world.

Faced with hysteria in the press, instead of correctly telling them their fortune and supporting both the policy and the Border Agency management and staff who have the near impossible daily task of minimising mishaps, Theresa May at a flick of a switch went into auto-politician mode, ducked the flak, and left the unfortunate Mr Brodie to take it. As result he is now spending more time with his family.

Next came the kneejerk stiffening of entry requirements. Nobody was to be cheerily waved through. Everyone from small children to returning supervised school parties and war veterans back from trips to Normandy had to be checked against the list of terrorists and other undesirables. Even with all the staff goodwill in the world that would have meant more staff or much slower throughput rates. The former was unacceptable under the sledgehammer type approach that every department must take its share of the pain equally and that there can be no distinction between the good, the bad and the ugly spenders. The UK, like any country, needs to welcome 99% of its visitors and returning nationals. With a small minority of exceptions they contribute to the economy and are good for everyone.

In this sad saga ,the management and staff goodwill factor was already absent when further manpower reductions took place through the winter. There was a feeling that before long the chickens would come to roost without any need to talk about active industrial action. All people had to do was to stand with arms folded and wait. The " We told you so " day would surely come. And so it has. The continued exits of often long serving skilled staff with good noses for who's who and who's up to what amongst the lines before their desks have now converged with the seasonal increases in passenger numbers and the inevitable has happened and will continue happening until the crescendo of horror stories from the waiting queues and their unacceptability as the Royal Jubilee and the Olympics become terminal for the Home Secretry or even her superiors. Followers of UK politics will know that the Government needs something to be going right just now and this certainly isn't.

Minster Theresa May is therefore reaping the results of her own lack of courage last autumn, a lesson politicians everywhere need to learn although few actually do. She has played into the hands of the unions (the last thing she or the Government would ever have wanted) and got herself into a hole from which only two things,- and maybe both,-can extract her. She can either bring back selective checking ideally based on random but unpredictable staff intuition . Alternatively she can quickly ramp up staff numbers again while trying to avoid a return to old inefficient inefficient working practics. The likelihood is that, faced with Olympic Rage, she will have to do both and then have to go back to start sorting it all out again from a worse position than the one she started with as she has lost the confidence of all the people who could be helping her get it right.

The industry meanwhile is saying just one thing: "Do something". Politicians often find that difficult. Most aren't used to jobs involving hands-on "Doing something" and accepting real accountability for it.