Tough times loom for Air Canada

What was supposed to be a routine Thursday night trip home for thousands of Canadians turned into an ordeal late last week, as Air Canada flights landed at Toronto Airport and were then unable to unload their passengers because the airline staff who open the doors and unload the bags had gone on a wildcat strike.

Those following on Twitter witnessed the drama live, as passengers turned on their wireless devices and began describing what was going on around them.

“Landed! An hour delayed not bad. Not like others who were delayed 5 hours or more,” CTV Toronto reporter Naomi Parness wrote on her Twitter account.

“Passengers just answered the phone at D36 since #AirCanada crew are absent,” passenger Lois Miller tweeted from a departure gate.

The wildcat strike culminated one of Air Canada’s most hellish weeks in years, coming seven days after Parliament passed a controversial bill meant to avert a strike at the nation’s largest airline. It also came four days after Aveos, formerly known as Air Canada Technical Services, abruptly went out of business, leaving several of Air Canada’s jets inoperable.

The incident that reportedly caused the strike: the suspension of several employees who sarcastically slow-clapped and called out mockingly to federal labour minister Lisa Raitt as she walked through Toronto Airport on Thursday. Raitt had guided the legislation through Parliament the preceding week which prevented airline workers from going on strike.

The legislation might not have been as helpful to Air Canada as it initially appeared.

The strike was “a direct result of the frustration the workers are feeling as a result of the government intervention in the free collective-bargaining process,” George Smith, Air Canada’s former employee relations director, told a reporter on Friday, adding that “it may harm the union’s agenda and certainly gives rise to people, who are anti-union to begin with, to say: ‘Just look what happens.’”

Indeed, the strike led some commentators to call for the disbanding of the airline’s unions and for foreign airlines to be allowed to fly domestic routes within Canada.

Others asked why Air Canada can’t be more like non-unionized WestJet, which has had little in the way of labour troubles.

Aside from the unionization issue, two huge barriers stand in the way of Air Canada becoming more like WestJet.

The first is that Air Canada lacks outside enemies — or at least any that employees and management can agree upon.

Yes, WestJet is taking market share away from Air Canada, but Air Canada employees are generally indifferent to or even respectful of WestJet’s accomplishments over the past 16 years.

Instead, many Air Canada employees see their own company’s management as the most ominous threat to their interests.

This sentiment can be seen in the comments left by Air Canada employees on RateMyEmployer.ca, a web site that encourages users to anonymously offer advice or warnings to would-be co-workers.

“I am a pilot at Air Canada. I love to fly, and it’s great when we’re ‘off campus’ on the other side of the world,” one commentator wrote. “The only time it is miserable is when you have to deal with management.”

“The worst managed company, just a bunch of greedy, money hungry bottem feeders trying to suck the very lifeblood out of us. Other then that, great guys to work for,” the unnamed pilot continued.

“Get out of there as soon as you can,” an anonymous former management employee advised those still working for the airline. “It is not worth the stress and things won’t get better no matter how long you wait. There is a much better world out of that place.”

“Horrible company, glad that I am laid off and can finally get on with my life,” a former Air Canada employee wrote. “Poisonous atmosphere, not organized at all, high stress, no feedback or direction from management.”

The last comment raises a disturbing question: Do employees feel trapped inside a company that is descending into corporate civil war, terrified on one hand of losing their income during a recession, yet not entirely averse to a catastrophe that would at least set them free to get on with their lives?

That brings us to the second barrier to Air Canada becoming more like WestJet: Air Canada employees are vulnerable to feeling trapped by their seniority.

Take a pilot or flight attendant as an example. Once hired by Air Canada, the new crew member starts at the bottom of the seniority list. The pay is poor, and the work schedule is unpredictable due to new hires being assigned to “reserve duty”, which means being on call to replace a more senior employee who can’t make a flight.

After several years, the hours and the pay start to get better.

But what do you do if you tire of the job at age 50?

By that age, a career change carries a heavier financial penalty than it would at ages 40 or 45, when there are still 20 years or more to fully recover prior to retirement.

The disgruntled employee could always go apply for a job at WestJet or Porter — and start over as a new hire, which is hardly a desirable thought.

In theory, the “seniority trap” should make for a pliant workforce. In practice, this trap is akin to outlawing divorce, allowing faltering or even abusive relationships to continue for too long after the love, trust or respect have run out.

Based on the reviews at RateMyEmployer.ca, WestJet appears to be going through morale problems of its own as it ages and no longer feels as threatened by Air Canada as it did in its early days, when WestJet’s survival seemed less certain.

WestJet employees, however, tend to be younger and are freer to walk away from the airline if things go sour. If the old saying that “the best social program is a job” is true, then the best promoter of workplace harmony is having another job to replace the existing one with.

Air Canada, in short, is as trapped as some of its employees. With no common enemy to unite staff and management, and too few escape routes from an increasingly toxic work environment, the country’s largest airline will struggle to prevent its internal turmoil from translating into dissatisfied customers who take their business to the competition. It may very well fail to do so.

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Now, if that just put you in a gloomy mood, here are a couple of YouTube finds that will cheer you up a little. The first is a particularly good compilation of TV news outtakes from various U.S. TV stations.

And finally, a call to Dorothy Dobbie’s gardening talk show on CJOB 680 that takes an unexpectedly hilarious turn. Have a listen.

Could an airline be soon cleared for landing at Brandon Airport?

Porter Airlines Dash 8 Q400 cabin (© GrumpyDiver; click for source)

More than a decade has passed since Brandon Airport hosted a major Canadian airline, but that hasn’t killed western Manitoba’s hope of eventually landing something better than a once-a-day air taxi service to Winnipeg and the occasional charter flight.

Brandon’s latest brush with a major airline was in 2001, when WestJet briefly tested out the market during the busier summer months.

Since then, Brandon’s odds of supporting a major airline usually looked grim. Air routes typically follow business and government traffic, and that all pointed toward Winnipeg: so close by that flying would save little time or hassle. (Red Deer, a substantially larger city, suffers the same problem due to its proximity to both Calgary and Edmonton.)

Brandon’s ties to other cities were too tenuous to support airline service.  The business travelers who were willing to pay a premium to stick to a schedule — what the airlines refer to as high-yield traffic — were few and far between. The price-sensitive leisure travelers who buy their tickets during seat sales — known in the industry as low-yield traffic — would happily go to Winnipeg to catch their flights if it meant saving $100. So why bother flying to Brandon at all?

Alas, Brandon’s odds of landing a much-wanted airline might be getting better, thanks to the energy boom in western Manitoba.

As long as Brandon had few economic ties to any city other than Winnipeg, the dearth of premium-fare passengers killed hopes of sustaining airline service.

Western Manitoba’s growing energy-based economy, however, holds out the hope that Brandon might eventually support nonstop service to Calgary, Canada’s energy and resource extraction capital.

This hope is based on what happened across the border in June 2010, when United Express launched nonstop regional jet service from its Denver hub to Minot, N.D. based on demand for better service to the heart of North Dakota’s booming energy sector.

Mining, oil and gas extraction was the star performer of the Manitoba economy in 2010, its contribution to the provincial economy growing 11 percent over 2009 levels while most other industries grew at the more typical two to three percent.

There are two other reasons for Brandon to get its hopes up.

The first is the recent installation of an Instrument Landing System, which is an important selling point with airlines. An Instrument Landing System, or ILS for short, allows an airliner to follow a radio beam straight in to the runway. This allows for a successful landing in low-visibility conditions, where an aircraft might otherwise be forced to make an expensive diversion to another airfield until the weather improves.

The second is the development of the Canadian-built Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 turboprop. This relatively new aircraft, which typically carries 70 or 74 passengers, can fly 2,400 kilometres (1,500 miles) nonstop. That’s more than enough to fly from Brandon to Calgary, with enough fuel remaining to divert to Edmonton or Saskatoon if they can’t land in Calgary for some reason.

The Q400 burns so little fuel per mile that, with the right mix of business and leisure passengers, a flight can be profitable with 40 passengers aboard. A 70-seat regional jet flying the same route, by comparison, would almost certainly lose money with only 40 passengers aboard.

Air Canada Express started using Q400s on eastern routes in 2011, with the aircraft likely to start showing up in the western provinces as older equipment is retired. WestJet is said to be considering the Q400 for routes that cannot be served profitably by their Boeing 737s, which seat 119 to 166 passengers, depending on model.

Even if WestJet orders the Q400, service to Brandon is no sure bet. The city was not even mentioned by CEO Gregg Saretsky when he recently rattled off a list of cities – all in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta or B.C. — that WestJet might eventually serve.

Nevertheless, things are looking better for Brandon and its neighbouring communities than they have been in a long time.

$15 for a boarding pass? It could happen.

A long-fought battle between Canada’s airlines, airports, air navigation system and the federal government might finally be about to come to an end.

Its roots lie in the ’90s, when the federal government began privatizing Canada’s international airports and the air traffic control system, replacing a taxpayer-funded air travel system with a user-pay model.

In many ways, it was a progressive move. No longer would low-income earners who rarely used the system have to subsidize frequent Business Class travelers. Airports and air traffic control, meanwhile, were free to raise funds without having to be as sensitive to political considerations, as was the case in the days when a small regional airport’s careless use of the public’s money could turn into a big headache for the federal Minister of Transport.

But it was also controversial. Somebody would have to collect the money from travelers. Either it would have to be the airports, by charging admission to the departure area, or the airlines, by adding extra fees to the cost of each ticket.

Eventually, the airlines were given the job of collecting the funds and passing them along to others.

This, in turn, raised the ire of passengers, who resented the fact that the sweet $758 fare to Paris escalated to $1,281 after all the taxes, fees and surcharges were added on.

Fare, taxes and surcharges for a Delta Airlines Winnipeg-Paris round trip in April, 2012

After years of complaints, the federal government recently announced that new rules are on the way requiring airlines to show the combined fare, plus taxes and surcharges.

But here’s what will be missing: all the little extras that the airlines have started charging for.

In fact, by putting pressure on the airlines to show the lowest possible fare in their advertisements in order to stay competitive with cross-border rivals, Ottawa might be perversely encouraging airlines to be more ruthless in extracting dollars from other sources.

An extreme example of this is Ryanair, which has become one of the world’s most profitable airlines by charging extremely low up-front fares, such as London-Rome for £16 ($26 Cdn.), and then hitting passengers up for more money later on.*

Some examples from the Skytrax airline review site include:

• One passenger returning to the U.K. from Gran Canaria was asked by a gate agent to put his bag into a metal basket in order to check its size. When it didn’t fit, he was told that he would have to pay a 40 Euro ($54 Cdn.) penalty.

• Another British passenger en route to Spain reported spending £48 ($77 Cdn.) so that his family could have “priority boarding” privileges — only to find that other passengers who hadn’t purchased the priority boarding option were allowed to barge past them.

• Multiple passengers noted that, if you don’t print off your boarding pass on your home or office printer, Ryanair will gladly print one for you — for   £40 ($64 Cdn.) per boarding pass.

Baggage allowance costs extra on Ryanair — ranging from £15 to £130 ($24 to $209 Cdn.) for the first bag, depending on where and when you fly and whether the fee is collected online or at the airport.

The excess baggage charges kick in, however, at just 15 kilograms (33 lbs.) Exceed this limit, and you’ll be charged an extra £20 per kilogram ($32).

Under Europe’s relatively tough consumer protection laws, it’s all perfectly legal.

Even U.S. and Australian airlines have taken to charging for extras that are still available at no extra charge on Canadian carriers in order to keep their up-front fares as low as possible.

Denver-based Frontier Airlines charges most passengers aside from frequent fliers $6 to activate the in-flight entertainment system, while Australia’s Jetstar charges $3 for a soft drink, another $3 for a chocolate bar, and $10-$15 to use their in-flight entertainment system.

Could Air Canada and WestJet go down that route?

It’s conceivable, if lowering or eliminating the free baggage allowance, free beverages, and free entertainment allowed them to show the consumer a lower up-front cost. After all, the new regulations would presumably only apply to fuel surcharges and fees that the airlines collect on others’ behalf — not to amenities and conveniences.

In fact, it might make sense for the airlines to do that. If someone buys a $500 suit at The Bay, will they throw in a cup of coffee at The Paddlewheel at no extra charge?

Not a chance. So, why should the airlines do so?

Ottawa needs a victory that will allow it to score points with consumers. Airlines need a low up-front fare to “hook” passengers — but still take in enough money to pay their bills. Eventually, something will have to give.

* – For more on Ryanair’s extra charges, see the following courtesy of the BBC’s Panorama documentary program.

Inside the New YWG

We were supposed to be passengers — but we acted like tourists.

I had the good fortune recently to receive an invitation to be one of more than 1,000 Winnipeggers to participate in Saturday’s dress rehearsal for the opening of the new Winnipeg airport terminal. After checking in on the lower level, I waited anxiously for my group — Wave 8, denoted by our blue folders — to be escorted into the new terminal building to assume our randomly assigned mock identities. My job was to play the role of “Pam McDavidtest”, departing for Thunder Bay on WestJet 4855 and returning on a flight from Toronto.

First stop was at the WestJet check-in kiosk to collect my boarding pass. Even though I’m usually fairly proficient with a check-in kiosk, a WestJet agent helped me with the task, clearly having as much fun as I was.

Unlike the old Winnipeg airport terminal, where each airline had dedicated desk space, the new terminal appears to offer much more flexibility to reassign counters from one airline to another as needs change, as indicated by the monitors above each check-in station. At the same time, each kiosk can be used to check in for any of the four major airlines serving Winnipeg — Air Canada, WestJet, Delta or United.

A couple of things stand out about this area. First, the washrooms are not particularly easy to find, as they are concealed behind the check-in counters and located at the far end of the hall. Second, Winnipeg has clearly learned from other airports the importance of placing the bulk of restaurants and amenities in the secure area of the airport (à la  Minneapolis/St. Paul). This will avoid the common complaint heard about many other airports of there being little in the way of food or beverage options post-security.

After checking in, it’s time to head off to the left and go through security. The security machines haven’t been set up yet, so the real test of how well the system works will be when the terminal opens for real on Oct. 30.

After clearing security, the one thing missing (or perhaps just not installed yet) are departure monitors if you want to reconfirm your flight’s gate or departure status. Turn left toward Gate 7 and check the monitors near there if you need to. Or if you need to put your belt back on and refill your pockets, there’s a little lounge area  you can retreat to, out of the way of other passengers.

Here we are — checked in, cleared through security and now at the gate. At the old Winnipeg airport, you almost expected to run into Dracula from time to time thanks to the ’60s-style Brutalist architecture which kept outside light to a minimum. By contrast, the new terminal has floor to ceiling windows, allowing in plenty of natural light.

Departure area amenities include a convenience store, a T.G.I. Friday’s, a Gondola Pizza and a Tim Horton’s outlet near Gate 9.

The carpeted floors might be a bit of a challenge over time, as carpets need more intensive maintenance to keep in good condition and to prevent bubbles from forming in places where the underlying glue has become ineffective.

One thing I was glad to see was that the departure lounge wasn’t littered with blaring TV sets. This will be a welcome change from the usual noise-polluted airport experience, and is reminiscent of the “quiet airport” policy enforced by some New Zealand airports.

Let’s take a quick look at the washroom while we’re here. No sign here of any mischievous family-values politicians giving new meaning to the phrase “making a connection”.

Let’s backtrack to the other end of the terminal, where we find a boarding area equipped with movable glass walls. Based on the closed corridor separating arriving and departing passengers, it appears as though this will be the boarding area for flights departing to the U.S. Like many other major Canadian airports, Winnipeg offers U.S. Customs and Border Patrol pre-clearance, permitting most flights from Canada to arrive at domestic gates in the U.S., freeing up the scarcer supply of international gates for other aircraft.

Alright, let’s go down to the baggage claim area with its distinctive polka-dot lights. Very nice indeed.

At about this point, I threw caution to the wind and slipped past a “Do Not Enter” sign and found myself in the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) secondary inspection area. A few of us checked out the inspection desks and the tiny interrogation rooms where you’ll end up if your inspection goes really badly.  But I don’t have any pictures to show you, unfortunately, as a CBSA officer walked in and pleasantly asked that we refrain from taking pictures in that particular area, even though it’s still very much under construction.

Though I’ll be the first to admit that the relationship between CBSA and the travelling public has been strained at times from both parties’ point of view, I still adhere to the idea that Rule #1 for any traveler should be Don’t screw around with Customs and Immigration. So, no photo.

Finally, it’s time to leave the terminal via the lower-level Arrivals hall. Hotel shuttle pickups are just outside the door — but there’s no sign yet of where Winnipeg Transit buses will stop. (Or will that be upstairs, at the departures level?)

Overall, an attractive and easy-to-navigate new terminal that will give travelers much of what they’ve come to expect from an airport.

Did Carlton St. shooting prompt Air Canada to remove crews from downtown Winnipeg?

An interesting post from “Longhauler”, seemingly an Air Canada crew member, on the Airliners.net Civil Aviation discussion forum. The shooting he is likely referring to is the Sept. 19th shooting on Carlton Street, about 350 metres from the Radisson Hotel.

Air Canada recently announced that its crews would no longer be staying at the hotel for security reasons.

No this decision came from the Corporate Security department of the airline. This large department is always doing “risk assessment” everywhere Air Canada flies. Not just for aircrew safety when away from base, but also for passengers and aircraft.

 For example, a few years back, there was concern about Tel Aviv. As a result, aircraft and crew were laying over in Cyprus, then shuttling back and forth to pick up and drop off passengers. These types of risk assessments are continually done everywhere worldwide Air Canada flies.

 In the case of Winnipeg, if I understand correctly, the final straw was a murder in the parking lot of the hotel during daylight hours. Combined with continued concern from police reports, the risk was considered too high.

Thus, the decision to pull crews from downtown Winnipeg likely wasn’t driven by the availability of a better deal at the Sandman Hotel or to make some kind of point on the eve of a provincial election — just by the desire to protect the airline from lawsuits and operational problems.

Love or hate Air Canada’s crews and onboard service, you have to at least applaud their safety-first mindset, without which the airline wouldn’t have gone 28 years without a fatal accident. (The most recent fatal accident: the June 2, 1983 DC-9 fire in Cincinnati.)

* – See also Jean Leloup’s thoughtful post on Winnipeg’s pros and cons from a Calgarian’s point of view.

D. B. Cooper and his forgotten, hapless imitators

FBI composite sketch of "D. B. Cooper"

“He seemed rather nice,” Northwest Orient flight attendant Tina Mucklow later recalled. “He was never cruel or nasty. He was thoughtful and calm.”

A rather odd way to describe the man who had hijacked her airliner and threatened to blow up the two of them, and everyone else on Northwest Orient Flight 305, on Nov. 24, 1971.

The drama had started in the mid-afternoon as the three-engined Boeing 727 was on the final leg of a milk run route from Minneapolis/St. Paul to Seattle, with stops en route in Great Falls, Missoula, Spokane and Portland. With only 36 passengers aboard, there was plenty of room for everyone to spread out.

Fellow flight attendant Florence Schaffner had been handed a note by a middle-aged man sitting alone in row 18, by all appearances a business traveler with his suit, tie and briefcase.

Being young, single and attractive — literally a job requirement at the time — Schaffner was used to being hit on. So she did what she usually did with such notes: she stuffed it in her pocket, intending to dispose of it later.

The man in row 18 was having none of it. “Miss, you should read that note I gave you,” he quietly told her minutes later. “I have a bomb in my briefcase.”

After he opened his briefcase and showed her a jumble of red canisters and wires, Schaffner sat next to him and took down his demands: $200,000 cash in $20 bills, and two sets of parachutes.

“No funny stuff, or I’ll do the job,” he warned her grimly.

After circling overhead under the pretense of a ground delay while the needed cash and parachutes were rounded up, Flight 305 finally landed in Seattle at 5:40 p.m., nearly three hours after leaving Portland.

It was only when they left the aircraft in a remote parking area and were met by FBI agents that many passengers realized that they had been hijacked. Few had taken much notice of the man sitting in row 18, who had boarded the flight in Portland using a one-way ticket made out to “Dan Cooper”.

Only Cooper, Mucklow and the three pilots were still aboard when the flight took off after 7 p.m. with instructions to fly to Reno, Nev. at a low airspeed and altitude.

After sitting next to the hijacker and showing him how to operate the rear airstairs, a built-in stairway under the tail which could be used to board and disembark passengers at small, poorly equipped airports, Mucklow was told to go to the cockpit and stay there.

Shortly after 8 p.m., while flying over southwestern Washington State, a warning light and sudden drop in cabin pressure told the crew that Cooper had successfully lowered the airstairs. At 8:13 p.m., an unsettling bounce caused by the airflow forcing the stairway to bounce back up as Cooper jumped clear of the aircraft indicated that the hijacker was gone.

Whatever happened to Dan Cooper — or D. B. Cooper, as he became known due to a misunderstanding in the confusion that followed — remains a mystery. None of the $200,000 has ever re-entered circulation, though some of it was later found, waterlogged and too damaged to be used, on the banks of the Columbia River in 1980.

An instruction card on how to operate the rear airstairs, confirmed to have come from a Northwest Orient Boeing 727, was found in the woods under Flight 305′s flight path in 1978, but further searches of the area yielded nothing.

Various possible suspects were suggested over the years, including:

• Duane Weber, who was nominated by his widow on the basis of a supposed deathbed confession in 1995 but later cleared of suspicion by fingerprint and DNA testing
• Murderer John List, who bore a resemblance to the flight attendants’ description of Cooper, but is not considered a suspect
• Sex-change recipient Bobby/Barbara Dayton, who later claimed to be Cooper, only to recant
• Disgruntled Northwest Orient purser Ken Christiansen, suspected by his own brother but dismissed as a suspect due to lack of evidence and Christiansen’s relatively short stature, compared to the crew’s description of Cooper as being about six feet tall.

Now comes the latest nominee, an Oregon man named Lynn Cooper. Cooper, who died in 1999, is being named as a suspect by his niece, Marla Cooper.

Though it’s a possibility that’s being taken seriously, careful examination of the evidence against Lynn Cooper needs to be done before the book can be closed on the 40-year mystery of D. B. Cooper.

Forgotten in the story over the years was the rash of imitators who followed in D. B. Cooper’s footsteps, some of whom generated more snickering than mystery in their ham-handed efforts to get rich quick.

There was Richard McCoy, who hijacked and bailed out of a United Airlines Boeing 727 in April 1972. Unlike the “thoughtful and calm” Cooper, McCoy was somewhat absent-minded. He accidentally forgot a manila envelope containing his typewritten hijacking plans in the boarding area, which an airline employee helpfully brought aboard in search of its owner.

After takeoff, McCoy drew attention to himself by going into the washroom and emerging wearing a wig and sunglasses. A convict being transported by a police officer tried to point out the oddly behaving passenger, but was told to “forget about it”.

McCoy was soon arrested and imprisoned. He escaped, but was killed in a shootout in 1974. Rumours circulated for years that Cooper and McCoy were the same man, but have been dismissed as unsubstantiated.

Twenty-two year old Vietnam vet Robb Heady botched a June 1972 United Airlines hijacking by accidentally letting go of the bag containing the ransom money during his nighttime jump from a Boeing 727 over Nevada.

With no time to search for the loot which had plunged to earth without him, Heady went off instead in search of the car he had left parked in a remote area a few miles from where he touched down. Police had swarmed the area and found the car, however, and had put it under constant surveillance on suspicion that it might be the hijacker’s getaway car.

Heady was arrested as he approached the vehicle.

Then there was 49-year-old engineer Frederick Hahneman, who parachuted out of an Eastern Airlines Boeing 727 over Honduras in 1972 with a $303,000 ransom. Eastern offered a $25,000 reward for his capture — the equivalent of $129,000 in 2010 dollars, and a fortune by Honduran standards. Hahneman pondered his dilemma and came to the conclusion that he would be better off in American than Honduran hands. He turned himself in at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa.

Or how about Frank Sibley? Sporting a rifle and a ski mask, he pedaled a bicycle on to the airfield in Reno, Nev. on Aug. 18, 1972. He proceeded to haul his bicycle up the stairs into a United Airlines Boeing 727 preparing to depart for San Francisco, stormed the cockpit — and then became angry when he discovered that the passengers and flight attendants had all gotten off and returned to the terminal while he was busy dictating his demands to the pilots.

Sibley was able to get the remaining crew to fly him to Vancouver, however, where he ranted about the Vietnam War while being interviewed by a reporter from CJOR radio (a step down from his original demand of a full press conference). They were then off to Seattle, where he was shot and wounded by FBI agents posing as a United Airlines relief crew.

And perhaps most bizarre — and sad — was the July 1980 hijacking of a Northwest Orient Boeing 727 in Seattle by 17-year-old Glen Tripp, who started out with a demand for $100,000 and a parachute. By nighttime, the increasingly tired and hungry hijacker had reduced his demands to a rental car and some cheeseburgers.

After his arrest, it was learned that Tripp was mentally challenged.

Tripp tried to hijack another Northwest Orient flight while out on probation in 1983, only to be shot dead by an FBI agent when he made a threatening gesture with a shoe box in which he claimed to have a bomb. Investigators later discovered that the box contained nothing but paper.

The seemingly less bumbling Cooper, if he survived parachuting into rugged terrain on a cold, stormy November night in 1971, would be the only person to hijack a U.S. jetliner and get away with it.

Yet, if the now-deceased Lynn Cooper turns out to have been “D. B. Cooper”, don’t expect to hear much about it from Tina Mucklow Larson, the former Northwest flight attendant who sat next to Cooper on Flight 305 and showed him how to operate the airstairs after leaving Seattle for Reno.

Mucklow, now in her early sixties, does not do interviews. She has maintained a low profile over the years, reportedly not out of fear of Cooper, who would now be in his mid-eighties if still alive, but out of exasperation with reporters, writers and “Cooper buffs”. Since 1971, her single-minded focus has been on getting on with life.

This past weekend, a U.S. writer claims to have tracked the elusive Mucklow down at her home in an undisclosed location in Oregon, wondering if the passage of time might have made her more receptive to speaking publicly about her life since Nov. 24, 1971, if not about the hijacking itself.

He got his answer in the form of a door being slammed in his face.

A reminder that even though D. B. Cooper might have been a Robin Hood-style hero to some, others are still dealing with the consequences of his crime, 40 years later.

Related: Unsolved Mysteries re-enactment of the hijacking (1988, 17 mins.)

Toronto’s Pickering Problem

Hi, neighbour! (© Don McDougall / From Flickr)

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Toronto Pickering, where the current local time is 7:35 p.m. For your safety and comfort, please remain seated with your seatbelts fastened until the aircraft has arrived at the terminal building and the seatbelt signs have been switched off.”

Huh? Toronto Pickering?

Indeed, those are the words you might hear someday on arrival in Toronto, now that there’s talk of reviving the long-dormant Toronto Pickering Airport project.

Plans for an airport on government-owned land between Markham and Pickering, about 50 kilometres (30 miles) by car northeast of downtown Toronto, dates back to the early ’70s when the Trudeau government expropriated land to build a second airport serving Canada’s largest city.

Local opposition, and the refusal of Bill Davis’s Progressive Conservative provincial government to build the infrastructure needed to service a new airport, forced the feds to back down in 1975.

The Pickering idea wasn’t dead, however. Just dormant.

Thirty-six years later, there’s talk that Trudeau’s controversial airport plan might be revived by, of all people, Stephen Harper.

With Metro Toronto’s population expected to surpass 8 million by the 2030s, it’s not surprising to see renewed pressure to build another airport.

It will meet resistance, however, from area residents and environmentalists who would sooner not have airplanes circling above and an airport’s various wastes, from de-icing fluid to jet fuel, seeping into the ground below.

Frequent fliers will balk at the fact that the new airport, 50 kilometres from downtown Toronto, will be one of North America’s most far-flung — considerably further from downtown than even today’s most notoriously distant airports, such as Edmonton (34 kms.), Dallas (37 kms.) or Denver (40 kms.)

Imagine if Winnipeg Airport were to be relocated to Ste. Anne, and you’ll get an idea of the distance involved.

Then there are the airlines.

Unless the old Pearson airport is closed, who will want to fly to and from Pickering? Given a free choice, the airlines would sooner use Pearson, which is about 23 kilometres (14 miles) closer to downtown Toronto than the proposed Pickering site.

There are several ways this could unfold:

Use Pickering for international flights, Pearson for domestic flights. The Trudeau government tried this in the ’70s when it opened Mirabel Airport as Montreal’s international long-haul airport, and kept the closer-in Dorval Airport open as the city’s domestic and U.S. airport. The effect was to gravely undermine Montreal’s viability as an airline hub.

Imagine flying from Winnipeg to Montreal Dorval, collecting your bags, and taking a shuttle bus dozens of kilometres out into the Quebec countryside to check in again for your international flights. Now you’ll understand why virtually no one wanted to connect between domestic and international flights in Montreal for many years until all flights were eventually consolidated again at Dorval (ironically re-named Montreal Trudeau in recent years, after the prime minister who undermined its viability as a hub 30 years earlier).

The passengers are mostly gone now, with Mirabel continuing to operate as a base for cargo and medevac flights — a role not likely envisaged for an expensive new Toronto airport.

Restrict Pearson to short-haul flights. This would be similar to what the U.S. has done in other two-airport markets such as Dallas and Washington, D.C. When the enormous Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) opened in the mid-’70s, a small upstart discount carrier called Southwest Airlines was allowed to continue using Dallas’s old airport, Love Field, only for flights within Texas and its neighbouring states. This worked for a while, though there was continuing pressure to either close Love Field and consolidate everything at DFW or let Love Field compete head-on with DFW.

Such a policy in Toronto would be controversial, and would not be compatible with either Air Canada’s global network or WestJet’s growing number of alliances with foreign carriers, such as KLM and Air France.

Develop Pickering as an upscale, business-friendly airport and turn Pearson into a discounts-and-charters airport. This would be similar to what has taken place in London, where the difference between Heathrow’s, Gatwick’s and Stansted’s clienteles is something like the difference between The Bay, Zellers and Dollarama. This is probably the most realistic plan for Toronto to emulate if it builds a second big airport.

It still faces a challenge, however: Britain has a strong discount airline culture thanks to its proximity to a multitude of diverse European neighbours and generous labour laws that provide workers with four weeks’ paid holiday every year. Canadians have to travel twice as far to get half the diversity, and are only assured of a mere two weeks’ paid holiday per year, so there isn’t as much room for discount carriers to grow here and fill the gates with aircraft.

It is interesting, though, to speculate on what you could do with a totally new, business-oriented Toronto airport. A train station in the basement that would whisk arriving passengers to downtown Toronto in 40 minutes? A secure transit lounge which would allow passengers to fly from the U.S. and Latin America to Europe via Toronto, and vice-versa, without having to clear Canadian border formalities?  A hotel within the secure area of the airport for the benefit of flight crews and long-stopover passengers?

Have just one airport. If the Dutch really use just one big airport in Amsterdam to serve a country of 16 million, and Hong Kong just needs one airport to serve a population of 7 million, is a second Toronto airport really that necessary? Why not just upgrade Pearson, or do what Denver did: build a new airport way out in the countryside and shut down Pearson?

Since new airports take years to plan and build, and are welcome virtually nowhere, watch for this to become a controversial issue for years to come in Toronto, Ontario and federal politics.

Winnipeg/Grand Forks airport battle less important than it looks

Luggage in the bins will sure as hell have shifted during this steep 1986 departure from Washington, D.C. (© Robert M. Campbell/Airliners.net)

There’s been much ado recently about the growing numbers of Winnipeg travelers who are making the 240-kilometre trip to Grand Forks International Airport to catch their flights because of the lower fares available from south of the border.

Who can blame them? Some of the deals from Grand Forks are quite attractive. Avoid the sneaky Airport Shuttle add-on, and you can fly from Grand Forks to Las Vegas for the Victoria Day long weekend on Allegiant Air – if you’re able to make a Thursday departure and Sunday return — for a base fare of $401.

If you’re looking for a Friday night departure/Monday return, you can pay a bit more to take United from Fargo ($429) or Delta from Grand Forks ($486),  Bemidji ($509) or Thief River Falls ($616) and still pay less than the best currently available fare from Winnipeg for those dates and times ($727 on Delta).

Is this competition from south of the border hurting Winnipeg Airport?

Yes, says the Winnipeg Airports Authority. Winnipeggers boarding their flights in Grand Forks instead of Winnipeg make it more difficult for Winnipeg Airport to attract new carriers and maintain direct flight options, they told the Free Press recently.

Yet, research from Europe suggests that such competition from low-cost carriers and secondary airports “[generates] additional travel, rather than merely substituting for flights with legacy carriers”, while research of the U.S. market by a Japanese researcher concludes that “the gain in social welfare due to [low-cost carriers entering markets] is substantial” as a result of the benefits to consumers and the profits generated by these airlines.

Research from Monash University in Australia also concluded that “competition [between airports] can lead to better allocation of traffic to airports, and to pressure on inefficient airports to perform better”, though cautioning that “inefficiencies in allocation of traffic can come about when prices do not reflect costs, when major airports set prices above marginal costs to recover costs, or when prices at secondary airports are kept low by subsidies.”

And, as The Cranky Flier, one of the web’s top aviation-related blogs, pointed out in February, more distant airports are only competitive on certain longer routes:

“Those who are traveling on shorter flights are less willing to drive to airports that are further away. So people that live in the heavily-populated area around Long Beach will drive to LAX if they’re going to New York, but they’re less likely to do it if it’s just a jaunt to Vegas or San Francisco… Low fares are good, but it’s the convenience of the airport that makes it work best.”

Thus, Winnipeg’s airport is unlikely to suffer much harm from a little healthy competition from Grand Forks. For the business travelers who keep the traditional airlines in business, it will always be more convenient to use an airport a mere 20 minutes from downtown Winnipeg than one located three hours away.

The benefits to consumers and the effect of low-cost carriers in opening up travel to those who otherwise wouldn’t bother traveling at all are also important to keep in mind.

A bit of cross-border competition — Winnipeg vs. Grand Forks, Vancouver vs. Bellingham, Montreal vs. Plattsburgh and Toronto vs. Buffalo — could also open the door to a reconsideration of how the infrastructure that supports air travel is paid for in both Canada and the United States, though there are no easy solutions there: Do we stick with the status quo of requiring the airlines to collect a variety of surcharges over which they have no control, but take the flak for? Do we abandon the user-pay principle and revert to direct government ownership and taxpayer subsidy of airports, as is the case in much of the U.S.? Do we adopt the model recently abandoned by New Zealand, where international passengers had to line up to pay a separate ”admission fee” before going through passport control and security?

So, shop around. And if you can get a better deal out of Grand Forks, go for it.

Airline industry grows up

One day in 1958, someone in the sales department of SAS, the state airline jointly owned by the governments of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, came up with what he thought would be a clever line to attract more high-fare business travelers to the airline.

“On our planes you won’t find rubbery indigestibles wrapped in cellophane,” the unknown author wrote in reference to SAS’s supposedly tastier sandwiches in a sales letter to prospective clients.

Eventually a copy of the letter ended up in the hands of Trans World Airlines (TWA), a major U.S.-based competitor of SAS’s on the North Atlantic routes — and it was SAS that ended up with a very expensive case of indigestion.

Trans World complained to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the global regulatory body for the world’s airlines, about SAS’s boastful letter. IATA regulated not just where airlines could fly to and how much they could charge; they even regulated in-flight service.

The dispute between SAS and TWA, and complaints from Pan American about the large sandwiches being served by four of its European rivals, are now remembered as the “Great Sandwich War” — and still sometimes recalled by historians as one of the absurdities of the airline industry’s pre-deregulation era.

The result was a two-day IATA conference in London that deemed that member airlines’ Economy Class sandwiches must be cold, made largely of bread, unadorned, self-contained and not filled with anything too fancy, such as lobster or caviar.

And SAS, was slapped with a $20,000 fine for slurring its competitors — equivalent to more than $150,000 in 2010 dollars.

It was TWA’s turn to be the aggressor in the 1965 Movie War, when other airlines complained that the U.S. airline’s expensive new in-flight movie system gave it an unfair advantage. After a short ban on movies, the dispute was resolved in 1966 when IATA ruled that in-flight movies were acceptable as long as passengers had to pay $2.50 U.S. (equivalent to nearly $17 today) to rent the required headsets.

The industry’s childish antics would continue for more than a decade more. By the late ’70s, however, it was time for a change.

Governments that had been flush with cash during the post-war booms of the ’50s and ’60s found themselves forced on to austerity budgets in the ’70s by weak economic growth and soaring inflation. The cash infusions required to help government-owned airlines replace the Boeing 707s and DC-8s that were nearing the end of their service lives, and to subsidize unprofitable routes for political reasons, were unwelcome expenses that governments were eager to be rid of.

On top of that, the public was clamouring for lower fares.

That set the stage for governments to get out of the airline business by deregulating the industry, privatizing government-owned airlines and signing ”open skies” treaties with other governments. Once the U.S. deregulated its airline industry in 1978, it was only a matter of time before Canada followed course — which we did in the ’80s.

That set loose a 30-year hurricane of changes — mergers, fare wars, start-ups, bankruptcies, new job opportunities at some times and massive layoffs at others.

The toll could be seen by looking at the names of the airlines that served Winnipeg in 1978, the year that deregulation began in the U.S.: Air Canada, CP Air, Transair, Wardair, North Central Airlines, Northwest Orient and Frontier Airlines.

By 1990, all but Air Canada and Northwest had disappeared through merger or bankruptcy.

There were years of chaos left to go. Various newly formed airlines came and went at Winnipeg International Airport throughout the ’90s and 2000s: Royal Airlines, Greyhound Air, Vistajet, Canada 3000, Jetsgo and Zoom, just to name a few.

Fifteen years ago this month, on Feb. 29, 1996, a quirky Calgary-based startup called WestJet took to the skies over Winnipeg for the first time. Many (myself included) figured that it too would eventually fall victim to industry carnage.

Despite a rocky start, WestJet proved us doubters wrong through a combination of skillful management and good luck. By 2010, it was approximately the same size as the former Canadian Airlines International in terms of the number of passenger-miles flown and the size of its fleet.

As WestJet’s 15th anniversary approaches, a strange sense of normalcy has settled in at Winnipeg Airport.

WestJet itself has shed many of the quirky attributes of its early days, such as the singing flight attendants and the pass-the-toilet-paper-roll games, though the flight attendants’ name tags still have smiley faces on them. Now it does more “middle-aged airline” things, such as signing interline and code-sharing agreements with Delta and Air France. (Will membership in the SkyTeam alliance be next?)

Air Canada will always get its share of barbs as the country’s biggest airline. But it is a profitable airline, as its 2010 net income of $107 million suggests, and has had some success in convincing U.S. travelers to connect through Canada instead of through U.S. hubs on their way to international destinations, as the Winnipeg Free Press reported a few days ago.

And despite ongoing economic trouble in the U.S., both Delta and United-Continental announced today that they were profitable in 2010 and would be paying out profit-sharing bonuses to their employees.

After 30 years of post-deregulation turmoil, which followed 30 years of pre-deregulation bunfights over trivial issues like sandwich toppings, the airline industry seems to have finally found some degree of stability. It has finally grown up.

The trick now will be to make the stability last.

Was airline deregulation good or bad in your opinion? Share your thoughts below.

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On a different note, most of us born-and-bred Manitobans were quite pleased to see headlines such as “Warm weekend weather” in the Winnipeg Sun and “A few more days of warmer weather in store‎” in the Winnipeg Free Press. But our pleasant mid-winter respite from the usual brutal cold can be a newcomer’s shocking introduction to what we consider “warm” around here, as I learned this weekend.

“Please tell me they are joking when they say this is a warm day in Winnipeg,” a friendly recent newcomer from the U.K. begged me this weekend. I reassured him that it wasn’t actually warm, but still very mild for this time of year, hoping that it would ease his shock at learning that what would be called “extreme cold” in his homeland is sometimes called “warm” here.

So, if there are any meteorologists or other weatherpeople reading this, now you know: be careful how you use the word “warm” at this time of year, as it’s giving some of our new neighbours from abroad a dreadful fright.

 

Winnipeg’s mayoral race suddenly gets attention in N.Y., D.C. and L.A.

If  an unusually large number of people in Boston, New York, Washington, L.A. and San Francisco have been logging on to Google Maps today in search of some mysterious place called Winnipeg (“Is that near Toronto?” “Is that close to the mountains?”), an article in The Week might be the reason why.

The weekly U.S. politics and current affairs magazine introduced its audience today to the Sam vs. Judy contest with an article titled Dirty politics: Canadian mayor ‘kicks children in the face’.

The online version of the article comes complete with an embedded video of a mock attack-ad on Mayor Sam Katz that portrays his misplaced kick at an August photo op as being something more sinister.

In addition to The Week and its estimated half-million readers, this little fiasco has also been reported on by The New Republic and The New York Times.

While The Week describes the video as being “disturbingly hilarious” and Robert Mackey of the New York Times calls it “the work of a comedian”, The New Republic‘s Jonathan Chait seems disappointed, noting that “You’d expect the Canadians to be more polite”.

The most interesting comment, however, comes from Chris Spags of guyism.com, as quoted in The Week:

“I would totally vote for [Katz] if he kicked everyone else’s kids in the face… that’s change I can believe in.”

Though the misplaced kick is not a serious issue in the Winnipeg mayoral race, one wonders if it’s a worry to the other Sam Katz who is being courted to run for Mayor of Philadelphia by opponents of the unfortunately-named incumbent, Mayor Nutter. After all, rumours get started easily and then spread like wildfire, especially when they pertain to a political candidate…

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On a completely unrelated note, if you thought your last flight was an unpleasant or tedious experience, check out this video taken aboard a United Airlines flight in January 2008. First, their flight from Brazil to the United States was canceled because of mechanical problems. Twenty-four hours later, they board what they think is a repaired Boeing 767, only to be still stuck at the gate four hours later.

Tensions are mounting in the cabin, and when a flight attendant shoves a passenger, all hell breaks loose: passengers begin rioting and Brazilian police board the aircraft to arrest not the passengers, but the flight attendant.

Once in the air, their ordeal is not over: an engine fire forces the jet to return to the airport where, unable to handle the pressure of a fuel-heavy long-haul jet meeting the runway at somewhere over 150 m.p.h., the tires blow out.

Gone are the days when international air travel was sexy and glamourous…