Aviation News Today for April 4th, 2008

It's been awhile since I put a link to the excellent video podcast that the American Association of Airport Executives puts out for their members.  Fortunately for the rest of us, they also share it on youtube.com.   I support it as well through a link to the youtube.com public feed.

Its been a hard week in the airline business. Aloha Airlines as well as American Trans Air (ATA) and Skybus, all called it quits this week with various liquidation and bankruptcy filings.   The closure by Aloha particularly hurts the local Hawaiian economy by the loss of over 2000 jobs as well as a loss of inter island passenger and cargo services.   I have to say that even inserting the hyperlinks here to these airlines is painful because virtually all the home pages announce the death of these air carriers.  Aloha was an old school airline and ATA had been around a long time too. Skybus was a newbie that never really got established.

Also covered in this weeks podcast are allegations regarding the FAA and fines for Southwest Airlines for lax maintenance. Other sources have shown that this isn't just an issue at SWA. Other airlines such as Continental and United also have had maintenance issues on avionics that the FAA did not enforce authoritatively.

(Note: Some corporate proxy servers ban video from youtube.com.  If you see white space below...you may be on such a network.  Please revisit from home or a connection that does not go through your company VPN.)

Checking out the front page of Freightdawg.com, there has been a lot of airline coverage this week. A lot has been going on! Look for some diversity in the next week or so with information trucking and railroads.

Eric

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