Glad I could fill you in on some details.

And no disagreements from me about the boredom. But here is another big advantage of the Airbus: the convenient slide-out laptop/meal shelf. Not nearly as easy to type away in a Boeing cockpit.

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Where would you want to swim ?

Ah...so you all work up there on computers while flying?

My hat is off to you folks though...As a kid I wanted to be a pilot, but seeing what you all go through...trekking through airports, waiting in line to take off, and now with the industry in an uproar..I'm glad my path went elsewhere.

Spank you veddy much, Thomas. Me being a Northwest manager, I'll pass this along to corporate. I've also had us look at becoming a travel provider for the U.S. teams for the various world championships :-)

I had the opportunity to be one of the test riders last year for the new A-330 (we flew DTW to Amsterdam a bunch of times, played with the seats, moved around.....basically tried to break stuff ;-). It was a nice ride.

We're trying, buddy. We're sitting on 2.8 billion of unrestricted cash, and our labor talks are coming along and with a lot less acrimony than you see at the other airlines, too.

I'll be sending you some more promotional stuff, btw.

Tony

Sweet. I've got alot of NWA frequent flier miles and was worried if they'd go bad. I'm sitting on alot of USAir miles that I need to unload quickly.

Your miles are more than good. We're looking at some promotional stuff that'd benefit our Elite-level flyers and the miles that they're sitting on. We're also getting set to run seasonal service from Anchorage to Maui and on to Honolulu and back to Anchorage, and probably a Portland, OR to Maui to Honolulu back to Portland.

We code share out here in Honolulu with Hawaiian Airlines. This works great for athletes coming out to do Kona or the new Honu 1/2 IM next year. I also have to say that I've got the best employees in the system. We're way in the lead for what we call "Gateway of the Year", and the agents and ramp personnel are easily the most dedicated that I've worked with. Prior to coming out here, I was a manager at our Detroit hub (which is a huge bear of an operation, I must admit), and the difference in attitude is night and day :-)

As a management group, we're getting ready to "step over the cliff" with the pilots in terms of pay cuts and whatnot. It's our hope that the rest of the labor groups will see that we're going to take the pain along with them, and that we'll come out at the end a much stronger airline. We also are going to be offering a ton more "point-to-point" (flying directly from one city to another without going through a hub) flights. Indianapolis is going from 6 flights a day up past 18 or more. We'll also have a number of other cities using that model. Basically, we'll have two major "fortress hubs" (Detroit and Minneapolis), one smaller hub (Memphis) and 6 to 8 point-to-point cities (Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Phoenix etc.). This is an attempt to marry the best characteristics of a hub-and-spoke network with a point-to-point network such as is flown by Southwest and Jet Blue.

I think we'll be okay. I'm an optimist at heart, though :-)

Tony

Out of all of them NWA probably appears to be the most efficient. I'll do the Richmond/Detroit Minneapolis gig quite a few times in their ERJ's then get on the big suckers for the rest of my travels. Pleasant people and a no hassle system. Their hubs are well laid out.

When I fly I honestly don't expect alot of amenities. I want on time service (within the control of the airline), pleasant people, and reasonable schedules. Plus some extra "perks" as a gold elite customer. As a business traveler I sometimes have to fly within the 21 day window with no Sat. stay. Those tickets can run $2k for a European trip. My most recent experience with an International flight with United will guarantee that I will do anything but give them my business. Rudest crew on the return I have ever experienced on what had to be the oldest non functional 767 in the fleet. Nothing worked and no one cared.

I love your airline, and the new livery is growing on me. I like the red and grey, but the new colors/design is pretty sweet.

I also loved the irony/double entendre when I was on NWA flight 187 the other day... Classic.

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"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell

Thank you very much Tony. And you guys did do a fine job, from check in to picking up my baggage back at DTW.

Considering how difficult the industry is, and in comparison to other airlines, I was very impressed with Northwest.

Five stars. *****

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Tom Demerly
The Tri Shop.com

We've been doing a lot of experimenting with productivity by all of our labor groups. Sadly, it has meant doing a lot more with a lot fewer people. As an example, we do more city-pairs (say, a Detroit-Boston) than any other domestic airline with a lot less staffing. Currently, we're running with about 37,000 total employees, post 9/11.

An illustration out here in Honolulu is that we service and "turn" a 757-300 ETOPS aircraft with 3 to 4 ground service personnel, and 3 to 4 aircraft cleaners, where our friends next door at another airline use twice that number to turn a 767, which really should require less ground service personnel to park, unload, reload and pushback. The difference is that a 767 has cargo stowed into LD3 "cans" and can be auto unloaded with one loader operator and a couple of drivers. Our 757-300s require a person in the cargo bin to unload each bag or piece of freight onto a beltloader and whatnot. We do have a so-called "magic carpet" in the belly (a movable belt that brings cargo forward or backwards further in the bin as needed), but still.....you'd think that we'd have more people doing the work. It's really about motivation and empowering our guys and gals to do the work more efficiently, and then recognizing and rewarding them when they perform to high standards. I'm big on that aspect of taking care of our people :-)

It's quite often that my aircraft cleaner group will work shorthanded in order to save us having to spend any of our overtime allotment. And they have the highest cleaning scores (gained via random audits by corporate inspectors) of any station in the system. Commonly, aircraft inspected for safety and cleanliness and "through the customer's eyes" (the gate agent personnel inspection program) audits are in the 99 to 100 percent range. Right now, the cleaners are working 3 people short, because they know that even though the headcount is authorized, it could probably be better utilized elsewhere in our network. They know this because I have daily and weekly briefings with them about our status. Same goes for the ground service people. They meet with me daily and we review our goals and objectives and everyone is solicited for ideas on improving our practices.

ETOPS: "Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim"? ;-)

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"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell

Very interesting piece concerning aircraft turn-around Tony. That is an aspect of airline ops that I am not familiar with. I do know however that the time to load and unload a full pax count on a B-757-300 has got to be around 20 minutes each way. Ours are configured to 222 seats. If I am seated in one of the last rows in coach, I can count on 20 minutes into the jetway. It's tough to get that many people down a single aisle airplane with all their carry-ons expeditiously. But lowered seat mile costs are the name of the game now. I know.

Conrad

Amazing how many airline people are on this forum.

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Tom Demerly
The Tri Shop.com

I may have been the mechanic you mentioned, but I doubt an Airbus could ever overtake a 747 in cruise, and the 'Bus is always on autopilot after the power levers are put in "drive" during take-off roll.

Glad you had a good trip, and if you had responded to e-mail you could have had a tour/walk-around of the 330 before your trip.

CASM (cost per available seat mile) is the name of the game for us, for sure. On our Seattle to Honolulu to Seattle flight, we used to run an older DC-10, which took on a lot more fuel to fly the same distance as the 757-300.

You're also right about boarding passengers upstairs. We try to give the gate agents at least 45 minutes to get a full 757 flight boarded and closed-up, ready for pushback. In the ideal situation, the ground service personnel can always beat the upstairs agents when it comes to who's done with their assignments first.

The narrowness of a single aisle aircraft like the 757 definitely contributes to the pile-up in the jetbridge. We try to utilize different boarding schemes, like boarding all window seat passengers first, then middle seat, then aisle seat and whatnot.

What's really funny, though, is that we can board a fully sold out 747-400 flying our internation routes (either Honolulu-Tokyo Narita or Honolulu-Osaka) in 20 minutes. The passengers are almost exclusively Japanese, and man.....they listen to when to board and what seats are boarding, then they file into the plane with almost military precision :-)) Just the Japanese character, I guess.

Tony

Yeah.....ETOPS: "Engines Turn, or Passengers Swim" :-)) We still get anxious queries from some passengers about what our flight crew would do if one of the engines went belly up. We've had a few occasions where people have literally gotten off the aircraft right at pushback because they were too worried about it to fly. In our business, we see every kind of behavior, as I'm sure that "justamechanic" could tell you.

Tony

Asian character. Amazing to see the efficient boarding in NRT and other Pacific NWA stations.

For those who don't know, ETOPS means "Extended Twin Operations." It has to do with how long/far a twin-engine plane can travel on one engine. (E.g., if one engine stops turning...) ETOPS planes' perfomance allows them to fly waaaaay out over the water.

Big K and other experts: I'm not sure about the 757 and 767, but won't a 777 fly just as far and just as fast on one engine as it will on two? Craziness.

I work near downtown San Diego, and my office has a close-up eye-level view of the planes on final approach into SAN. BA used to fly a 747 into Lindbergh Field, and then switched to a 777. (A daily route from Gatwick, I think.) Those are beautiful aircraft...

I agree with Tom though: the A330 takes the cake when talking about aesthetic perfection.

http://www.airliners.net/open.file/678824/M/

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"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell

Relative to thrust and altitude, it takes less energy to keep a body in motion traveling at the same velocity. I'm sure the engineers and aircraft mechanics here can explain it better than I, though. But, a good portion of the thrust-to-weight ratio is calculated on total aircraft weight plus passengers, fuel, cargo etc., from which you'd derive weight and balance calculations, which also affects the kind of power you'd need for successful rotation (flight). We pay excrutiatingly particular attention to the weight loaded onto an aircraft, and the distribution of that weight throughout the airframe.

Bottom line, once you've got the plane moving, it's easier to keep it moving at the same velocity with not as much engine power. Kind of like a bicycle that you can keep moving forward at 20 miles per hour with not as much effort as it took you to get it up to 20 miles per hour.

Tony