Welcome to the holiday episode of the PointsHoarder Podcast, so named mostly because we decided to mock the operational challenges American Airlines faced this past week with a bit of a jingle. You can enjoy that in the opening few seconds of the show.
Beyond that, we talked about a bunch of random and vaguely topical events/stories this week. Among them:
- American and US Airways finalized their merger. That means not much right now (other than US/UA codeshares are no longer for sale) but many changes will be coming in the next 4 months or so. Keep tuned in for more details as they happen.
- American also had a whole bunch of problems thanks to an ice storm in Dallas compounded by failures in some of their technology platforms over the past week or so. Fozz and Rolo got caught in the mess. Whoopsie.
- Virgin America has some slots at LGA now and no one knows what they’ll be used for.
- Aerolineas Argentinas is an unreliable abomination of an operation. Or something like that. Rolo has all the details.
- Air Force One needs to be a 4-engine plane but there aren’t many options available on that front and the weak 747-8 sales might cause the feds some issues. My suggestion of using the DC-10s being retired from Biman didn’t go over so well.
- The resale value of A340-500s is tanking; that might cause Airbus to take a $1-2bn hit. Ouch.
All that and more inside. And I promise we won’t sing again for a while.
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