Blog Archives
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Keep Calm And Carry On
By Steve Smith - Tuesday May 29, 2012
Our headline comes from a poster hung up around Britain at the beginning of World War II to bolster morale. In other words, keep a stiff upper lip. The Nazis might be dropping bombs on London every night, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find the time to have a cup of tea. The phrase became popular again in 2000 and can be found on any number of items, ranging from doormats to baby bibs – although you have to figure that last item is more for the parents than the one adorned. So I wonder if any of these posters are hanging up at Heathrow Airport. Although we’ve written about this before, a real Olympian task during the Summer Games will be done by Heathrow’s baggage crews. During a dry run last Wednesday, baggage handlers... -
Safety Initiatives In The News
By Steve Smith - Tuesday May 22, 2012
While I searched for news this morning for our weekly GSW e-newsletter, I read about the death of a ramp worker at Pearson Airport. Apparently, the Swissport employee got caught between a baggage loader and the plane he was servicing. I also read about a cargo loader at an airport in India who died after a 660-pound container fell on him. I included the Swissport news, but not this one if only because it happened at the beginning of this month but just reached our newsfeeds service today. Accidents at airports seem to be either deadly to person or damaging to aircraft and ground equipment. A couple of news items we’ve also read about lately show that safety on the ramp is taking center stage. IATA, for example, announced the... -
More On Delta’s Oil Deal
By Steve Smith - Tuesday May 15, 2012
Old story, I know. Back on April 30, Delta Air Lines announced that a subsidiary, Monroe Energy LLC, would buy a Pennsylvania oil refinery for $150 million. After investing another $100 million to squeeze every last drop of jet fuel from production, Delta says the refinery will help reduce its fuel expense by $300 million annually. As Delta’s CEO put it: “What we’re tackling here today is the jet crack spread, which you cannot hedge in the market place effectively. It’s the fastest single growing cost at Delta.” There’s more to “jet crack spread,” but I think it’s safe to consider them akin to profit margins. I didn’t pay much attention to an oil refinery for sale until rumors of Delta’s kicking the tires put it on... -
In Praise Of Baggage Fees
By Steve Smith - Tuesday May 8, 2012
I’ve only flown Spirit Airlines once and hated everything about it. I didn’t know too much about the ala carte airline so I was surprised to be charged for my carry-on and then see the beverage “service” be anything but. Had to take a red eye back home, too. The only good thing I can say is that someone else paid for my ticket. So it did seem like divine retribution when Spirit hit the headlines twice last week – once for its new $100 charge to bring a carry-on past the gate – rather than pay $35 online or $50 at the counter – and again for its bone-headed decision not to refund the ticket of a dying veteran. What part of "dying" and "veteran" are we not supposed to understand? After a good pillorying in the press and a... -
GSW LinkedIn Group Responds To Seat Belts
By Steve Smith - Tuesday May 1, 2012
We posted last week’s blog on Delta’s recent agreement with OSHA to install seat belts in 6,000 pieces of GSE at 90 U.S. airports to our LinkedIn group site. We received plenty of comments from our members – in fact, I received a few more as I typed these words. The comments were much like this: “I've seen seat belts on forklifts and GSE that were tied in knots behind the seat or wadded up under it. I stress the importance of using installed belts to ensure benefits in case of accident or injury! Like anything it will be the Supervisor that that will have to enforce it and he MUST have support from the company.” A few wondered what the speed limit was on the ramp and wondered if Atlanta-based Delta was employing... -
Delta’s Seat Belt Order
By Steve Smith - Tuesday April 24, 2012
The news that Delta Air Lines agreed last week to install seat belts on 6,000 pieces of GSE at 90 airports seems to be greeted with a ho-hum shrug of the shoulders. I haven’t read much more elsewhere about the implications this might have for our industry. The most interest I saw came from litigation lawyers' web sites that were more than happy to share this good news. Delta cut the deal with OSHA following the August 2010 death of a baggage tractor driver who was not wearing a seat belt and was ejected from his vehicle. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution , the home town paper for the airline, had more details about a memo Delta sent to employees after the agreement. The memo said many of its vehicles do not have seat belts. That might... -
Eliminate Baggage Fees
By Steve Smith - Tuesday April 17, 2012
Air travel would be safer if we allowed knives, lighters and liquids, according to Kip Hawley, who was in charge of the Transportation Security Administration during George W. Bush’s second term, in a Wall Street Journal essay published last Saturday. “Preventing terrorist attacks on air travel demands flexibility and the constant reassessment of threats,” he writes, describing a system made too brittle by enforcing regulations rather than managing risks. “It also demands strong public support, which the current system has plainly failed to achieve.” Hawley proposes a few baggage-related changes that he believes would make the system better and certainly provide the agency with some sorely needed public buy-in... -
Unthinkable
By Steve Smith - Tuesday April 10, 2012We've been reading much about last week's UTair crash in Siberia. Most of the recent headlines indicate investigators are blaming a failure to deice the plane before departure as the likely cause of the crash. The plane slammed into the ground shortly after taking off and killed 31 people. That possible failure for a procedure we'd think routine is bad enough. But we also picked up a report last week from a Russian news agency, Russica Izvetia Information, that featured an anonymous "air navigation official" saying that the deicing fluid could have been stolen and sold as car windshield deicer. The agency is a bona-fide news service and publishes a long-running newspaper that dates back to the beginnings of the Soviet era. ("Izvetia... -
Finally, Some Good News (We Think)
- Tuesday April 3, 2012Airlines provided customers with the best service in at least 22 years, according to the Airline Quality Rating study released yesterday. The rate of mishandled bags, for example, dropped to 3.35 per 1,000. AirTran had the best baggage handling rate – 1.63 mishandled bags per 1,000 passengers – and American Eagle had the worst baggage handling rate – 7.32 mishandled bags per 1,000 passengers. The study measures three other major categories – on-time performance; involuntary denied boardings; and customer complaints – and found improvement across the board. The data, drawn from the U.S. Department of Transportation's monthly Air Travel Consumer Report, measures 15 carriers. Of this lot, 10 airlines improved, four declined and... -
Section 511
By Steve Smith - Monday March 26, 2012I should have known that lurking somewhere in a 145-page document entitled "FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement" would be a nugget of interesting news glossed over by most, but also little understood by even the aviation pros it is designed to assist. And, sure enough, there it is on page 97 – Section 511, "Pilot Program for Zero-Emissions Airport Vehicles." While most of the legislation that finally reauthorized the FAA earlier this year talks primarily about aircraft and airports, this section may be of great interest to the GSE community. Basically, Section 511 sounds like an added incentive to use federal funds for investing in electric GSE. Section 511 outlines a pilot program for the "acquisition and...
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