LaGuardia Airport Slots and Auctions

Hello and welcome to episode three hundred seventy three of Avalk. I am Ian Petchnik here once again, as always with Jason Irbinowitz. Last week must have been a week off, right? You wouldn't record without me, would you? Completely alone in a room I. did not hing last week. Just heavy breathing into a microphone Didn't know what to do. I was so beside myself . If you listen to the show last week, you know that we had a lot of fun last week and we alluded to Jason having a lot of fun last week. Jason, tell us I mentioned on the podcast last week that you saw a glider from a mountain. That's accurate. Believe it or not, I did listen to some or most of that episode. So I did hear that. That makes so you're like four for three hundred seventy three. Once we record this one and hit donees.. Y Well, you I' knowre not gonna listen to this one. Well, no, why would I do that? But yes, I was in Switzerland up in the mountains for about a week touring the entire country. I will never financially recover from this trip, doing it once, never gonna go back, but it was a lot of fun. And on multiple mountains, there were airplanes. I think the first time we saw was Aptly Unpelatus, the namesake of the airplane manuf acturer, and there were gliders both directly above and below where we were on the I guess the observation area of the mountain. One was actually still being towed by some sort of little cessna, I think, below us, like several thousand feet below us, which is pretty damn cool. And when we were on one of the viewpoints for the Matterhorn, I think we were way up top on the glacier like twelve thousand feet. And I swear I saw some sort of red airplane doing a very low pass around the mountain, but I barely saw it and it wasn't tracking on ADSB, but I swear it was there. I know I saw something. I mean the, Patoe Swiss show up every once in a while and all of a sudden there's a bunch of Swiss military aircraft flying past you at some thousand feet but eye level. I'm pretty sure that's what I saw. And it was fantastic seeing it through like the glass on one of the gondolas or something, but that was a lot of fun. Excellent, how did everything go otherwise, getting home, all that good fun stuff? Great, fantastic. Everything was on time or ahead of schedule, which these days I will take that win. Air Serbia was delightfully weird as expected and hoped for, would recommend it if the price is right . Lucked out with the flights in and out of JFK were on their had A three hundred and thirty. So the cabin interior was as it was delivered in I think like twenty eleven or twenty fifteen unchang ed, so it was basically like flying Eddie Had just with weird service, weird service. At the end of the day, it's still air service. It's not a five star four star airline. Everything's just well intentioned, but a little bit weird to keep you on your toes and interested. Like taking the meal order , there were three options in business class out of Serbia, out of Velgrid. I was in the middle of the cabin and the flight attendant asked me, What can I get you for dinner? I said, Well, have the steak. And they go, Oh, well, unfortunately we only have the salmon. So I'm thinking, well, there are three options on the menu. And if there's only one, why are you asking me what I want? And how are you out of all of the options already? This cabin's only half full, just things like that that keep you on your toes. Let remind you, you're still flying Air Serbia, even if the seat's really nice. But I would absolutely book it again. It was a really well timed flight out of New York. Everything was on time. And there's something to be said about connecting in Europe at a tiny little airport like Belgrade rather than Paris or Frankfurt or even Heathrow. It was just so easy. It was great. Yeah, I mean, it's it is having had a less than stellar connection experience in Copenhagen. Oh yes we need to talk about that for all intents and purposes a smaller airport I would not mind having that experience at Belgrade. My experience at Copenhagen was one of EES implementation , which has ranged from common story these days fine on the way in. I came through, we didn't talk about this much last week because I wanted to wait until this week to have the discussion having returned because I didn't want to say great things and somehow miss part of the plot. Good foreshadowing there. That was, I think, a wise decision on my part because coming into Shengen was fine, made it off the airplane , walked to passport control, took my picture, gave my fingerprints, and was through in thirty seconds. And then once I got through that line built. But I sort of wrote it off because that Sunday the twenty fourth was a national holiday in Denmark . So I didn't want to make any judgments or anything like that. I was just glad I didn't have to go through that line , but just in case I had an hour and forty five minute connection in Copenhagen on Saturday on the way back on the thirtieth . And got off the plane from Stockholm at the Agates , which I had never flown out of before and somehow flown out of them twice this trip. And so I walked from the AGT and I needed to go to the Egates. So basically from one side of the airport to the other and I just walked. I may have stopped to use the restroom, but other than that, I didn't dilly dally , I didn't do anything else besides walk from the gate to the passport control line, which started in the D gates. Ooh , that's not good. Not even the right concourse , not where you want to be. And I felt really bad because there were lot a of not a lot of people but there, were a bunch of people who breezed past that line thinking that couldn't possibly be the line that must be for the other concourse. That's not ours. Right, right, and then had to walk back to the end of the line. So that was a little bit disappointing. But the line thirty six minutes in total . So it was a long line, but it moved well. I will say that the airport staff, not the customs folks themselves, but the airport staff did a really good job of making sure that if their flight was getting ready to leave, they pulled you up to the front of the line. They were doing a good job directing traffic . It was fantastic to watch them move folks around so that they could see the e gates , that they were there, that they were installed, that they were available, that they were not using them. So there were e gates, but they were just not in service. Correct. And then you get into the passport control line and the room and they do that. And it's so bizarre because I think the system itself is slower. It's slow. It's so slow . The actual time it takes to run this is very slow. And there seems to be a lot of typing involved too by the agent and I'm just perplexed like what are you doing? I think they're playing a game or something like that. On the side. Ah, solitaire. I knew it. Yeah, they're waiting for the system to spit something out. Because I had an entire conversation about architecture of all things with the passport control officer. She asked me if I liked the Scandinavian architecture and I was like, yeah, buildings are cool. It was clear that she was just like running through stuff to talk about. Got a checklist there and we've already talked about the weather, already talks about what'd you do here? I guess we'll talk about the architecture. We had an entire conversation , which I've never had before. Similar but different experience for me. I've had, seemingly, I've only done this a couple times now the EES for the EU Schengen Zone. I've run the gamut from extremely efficient in Spain of all places where you do the kiosk and then you go through egates and that's that. You don't see a human, you just keep walking to the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Hamburg, Germany, where we waited over an hour for the one customs agent to process an entire airport's worth of passengers. That sucked. At Zurich, it was strange in which they had you do the well you could choose your own adventure basically. Did you want to go to the old school wait in line and process at a booth? Or did you want to for some reason voluntarily go to a kiosk and then take a shortcut to the front of the line to then be processed manually. I of course took the shortcut, but confused why that was even an option. I thought everyone had to go through the automated kiosk and then see a real life person if there was n't an egate, but of all places Zurich, I wasn't expecting the staff to be hostile or confrontational , but the signage was non existent, the process was confusing and the staff made me feel like I was right back home at La Guardia, which is not a compliment and not a good thing. It was fast, at least it only took about ten minutes, but I don't think it was particularly busy. And then on exit, my flight was the only fight in the entire Concourse, which is a bit lonely, but for whatever reason that Sunday morning Air Servi was the only flight out of the Deconcourse at Zurich. So the two people they had working, the Boos were more than enough, but they did question us on saying they said, Where are you going? I said, New York via Belgrade. And she goes, Why are you going through Belgrade? I said, It was cheap. What do you want from me? I was on my way. I'm glad they let you leave. You can't argue with a deal. You cannot argue with a good deal. That's a perfect segue, Jason , because as we mentioned last week, we are partnering with Ela Berlin for this year's show to offer you a good deal on trade tickets. Well of a good deal. ten percent off trade tickets for this year's Elis show using code ILA twenty six underscore Flight Radar. Let me get that one right so that you guys can get your ten percent off your trade tickets. This year's show's going to be great . There's so much good stuff in the flying display. There's a few things that have never been shown before, including Leonardo's new aircraft, Airbus's racer will be there doing a demonstration flight. That's going to be cool. And Lufton's that bringing wide bodies back to Berlin again for the second time in a year. Yes, you should go and see that . This will never happen again . But if you want to go, you can use our code ILA two six underscore flight radar, no twenty four at the end, just flight radar to get ten percent off. Our colleague Sophia will be at the show if you spot her or track her down through social media. What you can do is probably snag yourself a Flighter twenty four K tag. So if you're going to be in Berlin or you say after all of this discussion about customs and border issues and the yes system, I want to try that for myself. You can do that and head to Berlin next week. The show runs the tenth through the fourteenth . Good luck. Jason . We talked about Copenhagen pretty extensively, so let's start there today. Okay , because after seventeen , SAS restarted flights to India. Did it though? Well, it restarted sightseeing flights to Copenhagen sort of Ouch. And apparently whatever went wrong, well, it's gonna take a while to f ix because looking at this flight ran our twenty four site, the flight for tomorrow is also canceled. What happened ? So we don't know exactly what happened because of course SAS doesn't want to point fingers if it wasn't their fault and they don't want to point fingers if it was their fault . But final approval for the flight was not granted by Indian authorities The flight took a four hour departure delay and then was in the air and SAS says they believed that the final clearances for the flight to Mumbai would be granted while the aircraft was in the air. Ooh, that's anyone who's ever had to get a visa or anything to go to India or get your paperwork in order, you know that's a risky gamble and so that gamble did not pay off and the aircraft turned over turned around over Azerbaijan and returned to Copenhagen for a round trip of eight hours. Door to door, Copenhagen to Copenhagen. Ouch , not great. Not great. Yeah, apparently, whatever the issue was is still not resolved since as I mentioned, that flight on the fourth is also canceled. Yeah, looks like the fifth will be the first to go, assuming all goes well from here. These things happen . Paperwork not fully shuffled, not fully signed. Usually you might see the first flight cancelled outright or something, but it doesn't usually go beyond that first day, but here it is, and it might go on for two or three flights. I wonder if it's less of a paperwork issue now than an aircraft rotation issue. Yeah, somebody is going to get called into the principal's office. That stinks. A lot of compensation . Yeah, hopefully everything works out shortly so that they can begin those flights. That's a great new route to have or a great route to have back, to want to have back , to want to have back there . That's a good phrase Sticking with new things , this is an actual new thing , never been done before. The Airbus A three hundred and fifty one thousand ULR purposefully built for Quantas' Project Sunrise has made its first flight this week . This is of course, , the project by Quantas to operate non stop flights from Australia's east coast to London and New York . These flights will be the longest in the world and will be operated by these special A three hundred fifty one thousand ULRs that have fancy pants cabins and relaxation areas and all these special things. Like you said last week though, as the years go on, I am progressively less excited about this. Sure, I would like to join one time, like you said, but yeah, yeah, it's only kind of slightly incrementally longer than the already existing longest flights in the world. It's still nice that Quantas wants to do something a little special, a little different, but I have lost a lot of interest in this, but recognize it's still something for the Australian region to be able to get all the way to New York nonstop. I guess that would let them stop doing that tag route New Zealand to New York, I think and give that route back exclusively to their neighbors or not. Maybe not. Yeah. That's what interests me is will we still see these we don't have the aircraft to fly non stop routes? Well do, a lot of Cornthus' flights still go through Dubai or did they shift back to Singapore ? Yeah, they shifted back because of reasons . I see that we'll talk about actually in a couple minutes, but let's stick with Arbus for a mom ent because Bloomberg is reporting that Airbus is sitting on about five billion dollars worth of aircraft because China is slow rolling paperwork in a bid to press ure the European Union Aviation Safety Administration to approve the Komax C nine hundred and nine. That's playing hard ball , especially since the C nine hundred nine hasn't exactly taken off even domestically in China. It's still kind of a very niche aircraft . So what's the end game there? I think it's just a mark of approval. I mean, I think it's to say that the C nine hundred it's good enough for Yasa. Yeah, it's a little weird to hold your own airplanes hostage, your own Airbus airplanes hostage because I don't know, your airlines need those airplanes and the C nine hundred and one nine ain't gonna cut it to fill in all those gaps, but I know we've been talking about the nine hundred and nine getting EASA certification seemingly forever. At this rate, I would really don't ever expect it to get FAA certified. I guess it's more of just a rite of passage maybe for it to get EASA certification. I don't see any European airlines actually ordering it or putting it into service, but you never know history could repeat itself if the Sukoi superjet can get certified in Europe an actual airlines order and fly the thing for a little bit. Why not the nine hundred and nine? Why not? Maybe it'll happen. I just It doesn't seem likely . Yeah I mean I mean, airlines around the world haven't been exactly too pleased with Boeing or Airbus recently, whether it's talking about delivery delays, delivery quality, or the engine's simply not working. Maybe this is finally Ryan'sair ch ance to make good on their decades long standing threat to the industry to order a non Boeing non Airbus aircraft. Almost certainly not because then you actually have to act on your threat and that's a lot more difficult than making the threat , but got to love the opportunity. That would be incredible. That would be something, wouldn't it? Michael O'Leary has been going wrong about that for decades at this point. I'm gonna order Airbus. At Dairbus I,'m going or toder no you're not. Forget Airbus. He's been talking about Komak specifically for decades. Not gonna happen. I can't imagine Ryanair doing anything other than taking an endless supply of seven thirty seven backs dash eight,y two hundred or whate ver, but just the mere threat of it has been enough to keep Boeing on his toes. Is it though? I would love to we'll never get this unless somebody writes a book after O'Leary's long retired or something like that and somebody writes a book. But I would love to be on the Boeing side of that negotiation because you know there are conversations inside Boeing for the sales team where they're like, okay serious a face do we need to put on today? It depends what product they're talking about because I mean you would know that these threats , yeah, I get it. Yeah, you have to sort of take it seriously, but is he really going to turn around? You would have to really , really screw up the negotiation, like really bad. Yeah. And there are there are other options if they do end up one day maybe stretching the A two hundred twenty. Yeah, maybe that could finally be the aircraft for Ryanair. I didn't expect this podcast to go into a theoretical discussion about Ryanair's fleet replacement of the seven hundred thirty seven, but here we are. That's the beauty of this podcast. At some point, the seven hundred and thirty seven will not be a thing that gets produced anymore . DeeDee willing, hopefully that's sooner rather than later, but at some point they will have to make a decision to move on to something else because Boeing will not produce the seven hundred and thirty seven , I think I may have said seven hundred and eighty seven before. That'd be interesting, but it will come to a point where Ryan Air cannot order the seven hundred thirty seven anymore because Boeing will not be making the seven hundred and thirty seven anymore. And that I think is the pivotal moment where Michael O'Leary's got to put up or shut up, but that might be post retirement . Yeah, I think he's going to be retired if not deceased by the time Boeing stops making the se ven three seven . Yeah , hopefully not for us too, but at this rate, we might honestly at this rate, I mean, let's actually , that's a really good transition, Jason. Let's talk about what Boeing's doing with the se ven hundred thirty seven because Boeing says it's in the final stages of Max seven and Max ten certification. Heard that before the seven will come first. Well, no, hold on, you haven't heard this yet. The seven will come first, follow ed closely by the ten. This is a quote from Kelly Orkberg , CEO of Boeing , who last week said that there's quote clearly light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah, but for like ten years the light at the end of the tunnel has been a freight train heading in the opposite direction directly at them . So what kind of light is it here? That's fair. I mean, the light seems brighter and less smash y this time. Oh , Boeing is moving seven hundred and thirty seven max production rates to forty seven per month . They were previously capped by the FAA at thirty eight . That cap is being lifted because of the review conducted by the FAA of Boeing's work and how they've progressed, so things are looking up there . Boeing says that stability at rate forty seven will not occur for a few months as they figure out how to do all of that. And then eventually they will move in five aircraft per month stepped increments for a target of eventually building sixty three seven three seven max aircraft per month . I see. And do we know the status of the Everett production line for the seven hundred three or is that still just kind of a thing . I think it's still a thing , but I don't know if we know exactly when Boeing is going to implement that fully. I see all right, well , things are going well for Boeing seemingly, and I saw they also delivered their first increased max takeoff weight seven hundred and eighty seven to United the other day. So yeah, that project also took six years, but things seem to be going every time we say this, I don't want to finish that sentence because every time we say things seem to be going well for Boeing, something terrible happens to Boeing, but things seem to be going well for Boeing. I want to turn that phrase just a little bit . Yes Yes, things seem to be going well for Boeing, but or and it also seems like Boeing's doing the right things . Okay, that's half the battle. I think that makes a big difference in the fate and future of Boeing . Because maybe a year ago, eighteen months ago, twenty four months ago, especially, we could have said, things seem to be going well for Boeing . What we were really saying is that Boeing hasn't screwed up lately. That's a big difference. Yeah, and I feel like that's not at all what we're saying now. I think what we're saying now is that whatever Boeing did, whatever Kelly Goper came in has done and is doing seems to be writing the ship . And I'm really , really excited to see that because and I don't think that we ever explicitly made this clear or I explicitly made this clear in how we talked about Boeing , but I feel like we were really hard on Boeing, not because we dislike Boeing, but because we want to see or at least I want to see Boeing get to the point where it has its house in order enough to say, Okay , it's time to build airplanes again. It's time to design a new airplane and build a new airplane again. Yeah , we don't root against Boeing or the industry . Competition is good, and if Boeing stopped existing and it was just airbus out there making wide body aircraft, we would be in terrible shape. Then Ryanair would order the Comex E nine hundred and one nine. Right. Nobody wants that. And it's not really going to happen. But Boeing being a well oiled machine, I don't know if it will ever get back to that status of a well oiled machine, but that benefits everyone in the industry. There are a few things I think we'd all like to see finally happen. Chief among them, I think, would be to get the damn Air Force One replacements outdoor. Haven't heard anything about those in a long time , but yeah, just to be done with it. Just be I don't want to hear about it anymore, but things seem to be improving. Didn't mean to have this conversation again , but yeah, we'll see how things go at least with employee morale and employee relations which, has really been the biggest one of the biggest issues for Boeing , but things have been quiet, quite good , quiet for change. Yeah, no news is good news in this regard . Let's hope things continue on this trend . Trends we don't like are renewed actual hostilities in the Middle East. Overnight june second to june third, Kuwait airport took a direct strike from an Iranian missile or drone or combination thereof . That significantly damaged the terminal building in Kuwait , halted flights for some time, but by the middle of the day, flights were once again operating out of the airport. And that was what two days after the airport reopened for the first time in a while, I think. The airport had been open for a while , but it had kind of like fully reopened and they had announced that they were going to completely resume flights by the end of the second quarter. I don't know if they're going to be held to that now because Kuwait airspace has now been restricted to only Kuwait Airways and Jazir Airways flights. No other airlines are currently able to operate into and out of Kuwait. Yeah , that's rough. Not good news. No, I mean, we've seen other airports in the region hit by whatever, specifically DXB, but that's always been the apron or the tarmac or the fuel farm that one time , but never actually any sort of passenger or public facility of the airport. So this is quite a bit different. I believe someone did actually die in the terminal and many people were injured, which sucks. One person died and dozens were injured. Yeah, it looks like more than five dozen people were injured. Yeah, that's obviously terrible. I hope this ends immediately, but it doesn't seem likely. I wish it would stop already. But if any of the Middle Eastern airlines, this is really, really tough because how do you convince passengers to come back and say ',s sa Itfe? Book with us, your connection will be fine or whatever, getting harder and harder every day that this goes on for these airlines to put that message through because if an airport even as far away as Kuwait, not that Kuwait's not close to Iran, but it hasn't really been as impacted as let's say Doha or Dubai specifically, even the smaller airports are just to me a complete no go for the foreseeable future and that's a damn shame . Yeah . Other countries, other airlines, other air navigation service providers are dealing with the continued uncertainty in different ways. I don't know if this is necessarily good news . It's not good news why it's happening, but it's interesting that it is because we think about airspace restrictions , we think about where planes can fly, where they can't, and then we think about how much it costs an airline to overfly a certain country . And for well, the better part of two decades , overflights have been avoiding Syria. Completely. I don't think they were avoiding. I think it was strictly forbidden, right? Well, yes, yeah, avoiding because they wanted to or avoiding because they had to. They were. Now , because Syria for the first time in a long time is safer airspace than elsewhere in the region , more than ten thousand flights have overflown Syria, more than doubling the pre war figures. So Reuters reporting that overflights in May were about three hundred seventy five percent higher than in the same month last . Yeah , and apparently they get a flat fee of four hundred and ninety nine dollars per flight . That was a fee introduced by the Syria's new government. Really strange number four ninety nine. It's not like you're pitching this to consumers where you don't want to quite say five hundred, you're going to say four ninety nine dollars ninety nine cents. Okay, whatever. But apparently that could have generated as much as nearly six million dollars in overflight revenue , which for a country like the U. S. or any EU country, that's who cares? But for a country like Syria, that's a big freaking deal, almost six million dollars . This was after apparently last year T,urkey poured a whole bunch of money in there, put in some modern infrastructure for flight tracking and other airport infrastructure. So this is good news for a country that I don't think in our lifetime has really had any good news. So not exactly a good reason to have the good news, but you got to take it where you can get it. This is true. And they seem to be doing exactly that . So we've talked about this in the past where we've looked at the shifting traffic it was june twenty twenty five where there were strikes in Iran and strikes by Iran. And so airlines decided, okay, we're going to fly through Afghanistan and then looking at how much Afghanistan was making, but who were they paying? Which was a big question or did they need to pay at all because it was mostly just a year on your own? So this is, I mean, an ongoing story of who benefits from the changing landscape of overflights. Yep. There's always a winner. There's always a loser. Well, and it's okay, let's talk about losers now because India has approved a billion dollar fund help Indian airlines make it through the rising cost of jet fuel. Basically what they've done is set aside a billion dollars to provide interest free ans to oil companies to cover the undermarketing of jet fuel prices. That was an interesting twist to me that it wasn't just here's a check to you indigo and Air India to cover the costs of increased fuel, but to give it to the oil marketing companies instead to offset the increased fuel. I'm sure there's some sort of legal reason they had to do this. It just seemed really strange to me. So what happens is the oil there's the wholesale rate, right that these companies are paying for the Jet fuel. And then they go and sell it to the airlines at whatever negotiated price they're at . But because the price has risen so high , they're not able to recruit close to what they're actually paying compared to the negotiated rate. This is covering that spread. Interesting. Yeah , I haven't heard of many other countries or territories doing something like this to offset the cost here in the U. S. That's certainly not the case. We saw what happened in the case of Spirit. They just stopped being an airline. We haven't really seen any conversation about a bailout or loans or financing to the airlines to cover the cost of increased fuel really anywhere else. So very interesting that India would have had to do this for its domestic airlines, but I guess the cost of fuel in some areas is dramatically more than in others. And I think India does happen to be one of those places. Exactly. And we talked about the cuts that were coming to Indian Airlines or Air India specifically a few episod es ago where they're slashing a lot of their international flying, their long haul flying. But now , even in the face of these, you know, jet fuel recoveries kind of billion dollar jet fuel fund. Air India is cutting twenty two percent of its domestic flights in the summer months. Air Indigo is cutting between seven percent and ten percent of its domestic flight s . So we're starting to see not only long haul cuts, but domestic cuts as well . The long haul services were things like Delhi, Paris, Toronto , Singapore was a big change, and then Shanghai and Chicago were cut entirely . So dealing with high fuel prices and then falling demand because of the rising ticket prices . So Air India Express is also trimming schedules the budget airline. They're trimming domestic schedules beginning this month by about ten percent . So a combination of fewer flights, higher ticket prices, higher fuel prices not looking great . As part of that, Indigo has cancelled its Manchesterv Siceer and is returning the Norse seven hundred and eighty seven that they have leased back to Norse , which doesn't want it because they changed their business model to say, hey, we're going to lease out half our fleet to other airlines . And that's before they cancelled a bunch of routes or scaled back. I think LAX to London is gone and a bunch of other routes as well. So taking back aircraft you have no need for and still have to pay for. That's the kind of thing that tips the scale in the direction of really not good for North. Yeah . Yeah. So we're going to continue to keep an eye on that North says it's sticking with its new business model or recently said that, that it's sticking with its new business model, even as it looks for, as we discussed a few episodes ago, looks for someone to buy the airline . So Jason, if you've got some money later on, maybe you can think about that. I don't. Fair. Yeah, that's right because you were in Switzerland last week. So you have no money. Ah, yeah, I told you I will never financially recover from that. Not going to happen. That's fair. Other not great signals about where we are. Sibo Pacific is cutting executive salaries and offering voluntary furloughs to employees and Qatar Airways says that it will not be off ering its nearly sixty thousand staff bonuses this year as it looks for ways to preserve cash in the face of continued uncertainty , which is a phrase that I really want to stop saying. Yeah, really don't want to be returning to the COVID era of uncertainty being the only word you heard on TV. Yeah . Well, after an uncertain future , the MD eleven is slowly returning to service. Last week, the only other airline that still operates the MD eleven, Western Global Airlines, aside from FedEx, returned its first of four MD eleven's to flying service . So that is now back in action. The other three have shown no signs of life though. So it'll be interesting to see and Fedax is still flying just I think two or three of them . So obviously inspections and repairs and sign offs take a while, but it'll be interesting to see exactly how many of these aircraft really return to service or whether we're just looking at we got a couple flying and now we're not good enough not doing that anymore. You never know with Western Global. They are one of the world's most mysterious weird airlines. So they 're just gonna do what they do. This is true. They're an enigma wrapped in a puzzle, wrapped in a who knows what? Jason, shall we head to New York? Ah, I'm already there . Okay , then tell me what's going on at Lagardia. And what can I buy at auction? Well, first of all, talking about Laguardia, before we get to the auction, there are delays right now of up to an hour due to Hole Patrol, Ian, did you know about the Laguardia Hole Patrol? You know what? Did we not talk about that? Or we talked about it, did we? I think we did , but there was a sinkhole just off runway four hundred and twenty two at Laguardia a couple weeks ago , but apparently is shaky enough repair that they have to periodically close the runway for inspection every couple of hours. And that's creating some issues here because of hole patrol. But beside that , we talked about this a while ago, what happened to Spirit's extremely valuable twenty two slots at Laguardia? For the uninitiated, Laguardia is a special snowflake of an airport along with JFK and DCA where you need a slot , you need a government mandated slot or purchase slot from someone else to be able to fly into Lugardia because it's a very congested airport and Spirit went bankrupt with twenty two of those. But now we know come July , I believe, the FAA is just going to auction those off . But there's a bit of an interesting twist here in that the FAA says it would prefer to go to another low cost carrier of which there aren't really all that many out there. But at the same time, the bankruptcy proceedings for Spirit, well they have a fiduciary duty to get the most amount of money possible out of its whatever spirit has left to get rid of. And this is probably one of the more valuable assets outside of the aircraft and I don't know that the Dell p Insiron computers they had at the headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, but it's going to be very interesting to see what ends up happening with these slots, how much revenue they generate for the bankruptcy proceedings , then what airline would be interested if they go to wholesale to one airline or to a whole bunch of different airlines ? It's got to be Cape Air . I mean, they do operate the JFK, that could be interesting, but it could be let's say maybe Porter expanding its operation. Oh , it's only got three fights, maybe they want more than three to compete with Air Canada. Jet Blue, almost certainly not, since it's been withdrawing from Loguardia for quite a while . Frontier, they'd have to move out of the central terminal into terminal A, probably to make that work. But I'm really struggling to think of what low cost carrier could want to operate in Laguard ia, is there a universe in which these slots because Bedford's , I guess, other preferred option is that no one gets them and there's just less congestion at L a Guardia . Yeah , I would think the port authority of New York and New Jersey would have a couple things to say about that because planes landing equals more revenue. But at the same time , it already has plans to close and renovate terminal A , which is where spirit resided. And that's a whole lot easier if there is no spirit at terminal A since you don't have to shuffle anyone around and place them somewhere else. So yeah, maybe for the time being those slots just don't get reallocated . I don't know. I'm not sure if the twenty two slots is kind of more than a drop in the bucket or the ocean in terms of Laguarti delays because when things go sideways , they go really sideways and it's not the fault of having one or two more flights per hour. Doesn't help, but probably not what's really tipping the scales and breaking Laguardia. I'm just struggling to think what LC could possibly want more La Guardia slots. And so we know that the cost per passenger is like ninety eight dollars per passenger at La Guardia and that's really hard to make back as a low cost carrier is why you don't really see much of that there. You're not going to see a velo coming. You're not going to see breeze coming. It's just too expensive, but I don't know, it's probably going to end up going to United Delta American not, to be all that interesting Okay , I personally would not mind if we return to the days of eight daily flights from Laguardia to Dulles just so I can have some more options. But that's probably not the most practical use. Yeah, not practical, economical, environmentally friendly, anything, really. Helpful for me personally . Well, in all other cases, a terrible , terrible idea. I feel like I feel like you need to write a letter to the DOT. So I understand that this doesn't work in any way, shape or form, on any level, except it benefits me personally United's got this one route and it's really bad. So does this become the chairman's route? Is this like the new version of the chairman's route? If I'm a chairman sure I did look in the schedule and I think United did go back up to those eight daily flights way out in the schedule, which I think is just a placeholder, but man, I would not mind if those came back for real because Amtrak's not working so well these days Well, we'll figure something out. Maybe you can get an A two hundred twenty one hundred out of the deal and just go with an A like CJ two hundred and twenty. I mean, none of it's being parted out , you can reassemble the parts. The good news is one of the two is an airplane I've already personally flown, so I am familiar with it. I know where the pieces go I can put it back together I've sat in it once. I and Jeremy Dwarling we can put it back together because Swiss we have seen stories of airlines removing from service and in some cases parting out young aircraft . And that's exactly what it's doing with two of its nine A two twenty one hundreds that's already been taken out of service for quite a while to provide engines in other parts for its A two thousand three hundred fleet for higher capacity flights. But in this case, HB JBD and JBC have been starting to lose since January, according to Aviation Week, and they will not be getting unstored . They will be disassembled, parted out specifically for components for the rest of their fleet. And HBJBC was actually the first A two hundred twenty at the time, bombardiac series that I had ever flown with Jeremy, we did, that was a real early podcast episode like episode two where Jeremy and I flew, I think, from Amsterdam to Z urich to London City back to Amsterdam on the same day and one of those flights happened to be on a Swiss A two hundred twenty or sorry C series after so long training my brain to say A two twenty instead of Ceries and now it's really unnatural to go back and say C series, but that was my first fight on A two twenty slash C series and sad to see it being parted out already. Sound young. Yeah . Well, I guess ten year old aircraft. So we've certainly seen younger aircraft specifically spirit aircraft, like two year old A three hundred and twenty Neos getting parted out, but this one I've gotten a personal attachment to this specific aircraft and hate to see it. All right, let's play a game, Jason. Oh no, that was episode sixteen . Wow . It aired in October of twenty seventeen. Wow. What else do we talk about in that episode? October twenty seventeen. Always safe to assume something happened with Boeing, that the seven three max did something or no seven eight did something . What else did we talk about? There was bad royal news and I don't know you know how to make this one a thing. There was an uncontinented engine fail ure. Oh, oh, monarch demise . Uh huh. Yeah, you're reading Monarch Demise . Yeah, not the Royal Family but the airline monarch. Exactly. We have to go that far back. Yes. Blo , I assume that means the balloons Google used to have for their high altitude internet thing that never worked. Air Berlin was still a thing. Wow. This apparently was a light episode . We only had like six bullet points. But it was not a light episode because we had a lot to talk about because that was we got the preliminary report from the Air Fr A three hundred and eighty uncontained engine failure over Greenland. Oh, is that the one that dropped engine parts over Greenland? Yeah . Yeah . And then they had to spend I think the next , I remember covering that when I was in Stockholm, so a few months till December when they had to find all of those pieces using it was like a heat gun sn,ow mobile teams , lasers, it was like a whole big thing. This should be a thing that we do. We should go back and look at our list of old episodes for obviously only Ian and I know this, but we have been using the same Google Doc our show rundown since episode one in a document called what's the title of this? It is Things That would be good to talk about in a podcast. It is a three hundred thirty eight page Google Doc the very first thing that is in this is a picture of a Virgin Atlantic A three hundred four thousand six hundred. You're welcome John Walton. But we can refer back to any episode just by scrolling back far enough. We were really diligent for episode eleven, apparently, where we talked about the Paris Air show, but we should just scroll randomly to a random episode and see if we remember literally anything that we talked about. In episode forty nine, the triple seven X's engines were mounted for the first time . I'm sure that program will go just fine. Wow. That aircraft has been certified and in service for years now. Definitely. Episode let's just scroll randomly. Episode seventy. I was going to Madrid for some reason , show the notes say, Pickles , no context there, and L retired at seven hundred forty seven fleet. So this is a fun exercise. All right. I can't remember if we talked about No, we didn't because we skipped it to come back to later because I didn't want to bring it up as part of the Boeing block, but here we go. United is getting its first A three hundred and twenty one XLR as we speak. That's probably on the ground right now. It's still going , right? It just landed. It has done the XLR thing . What was the route? Yes, it is the certainly it went like mobile to like Dulles, right? Mobile to Dulles. So the A three hundred and twenty one XLR those are built in Europe, so it flew from Hamburg to Tampa, where United is inducting it into service. It'll go through some more United specific fit and fixture stuff before it eventually enters service with the airline on a route that is probably never going to be as long as the delivery flight. Yeah , it did so in disguise as a seven hundred and twenty seven, of course. Yes, it did. Someone's got to get a new image of that aircraft. I can almost guarantee that a new image will be up very shortly. Momentarily as folks see that land in tamp, I'm sure we'll get one up on Jeffot Posh right quick . Good route though, good route . Yeah . So Jason, let's end the show with a question that we often ask ourselves when these sort of things happen. Who wants to buy an MD eighty three Western Global Airlines . Maybe. In this particular case, it's a decrepit elderly been sitting in the same spot for years . Old , old , old . Fat MD eighty three. Is that the Taiwanese airline? It is . So this is far eastern air transport. Why do I have that in my brain? Why do I know that far eastern transport was from Taipei? I don't know how to help you with that , but the airline , this is one of those started stop, started stop,ped airlines. So they started way back in the fifties and had a really good run and stopped in two thousand eight for the first time as part of the global financial crisis. Then they got restarted back in twenty eleven and lasted just eight years before completely stopping flights in the end of twenty nineteen . There have been a number MD eighty two hundred eighty three aircraft that belonged to the airline that had been sitting around. And Taiwan has this really cool bureau whose entire job it is to recover money for the state from stuff that has been left unattended. And they put it up for auction. So not only can you buy an MD eighty three or bid on an MD eighty three, Jason , you can also bid on a screw size measuring and appearance defect automatic inspection machine. Sure, I'll take five. There you go. Sometimes all you have to do is bid over the reserve price. And other times it's a lot more complicated where you have to be over the reserve price by fifty percent, but above any other bidders, but more than five percent above any of the other bidders. And if you're not, it goes back. It's almost like they just don't want my money for this plane. Yeah , you know what? You've flown on the plane. I have a picture of the plane. The last time I was in Taipei, I took a picture of a bunch of these far east Tpransort MD eighty two's on the ramp at not your normal Taipei airport, but the other airport Song Shan where I flew out of, there's a bunch of them on the ramp. I'm trying to find out if I got a picture this exact one B zero one is registered? Yes, I did. Because of course I did. Of course you did. They're just out there on the ramp. But do you have a picture of the screw size measuring appearance defect automatic inspection machine? I think not. I don't, I don't have that. But if you have five point one two million new Taiwanese dollars, which turns out to be one hundred sixty thousand seven hundred ninety two dollars and ninety two cents , you can be the proud owner of future beer cans. I mean that actually doesn't sound like a bad deal. I like beer can. What's the price of aluminum these days? Yay . Buy and hold, baby , buy and hold. Jason , yes. Today is Wednesday, june third. If you say so, next week's podcast will be a normal podcast. Great, looking forward to it. Then the week after that. You alluded to this last wee k. While next week's podcast comes out, while next week's podcast comes out, we'll be doing something very fun. Do we talk about what it is? Because even I barely know any of the details, other than you book me aed flight to Cleveland. What the hell? Why am I going to Cleveland? I booked you a flight to Cleveland. I'm gonna come pick you up at the airport from JFK Airport in Cleveland because next week, Jason , Gabe and myself will be visiting the good , wonderful and very funny folks at Goodyear to learn all there is to know about their fantastic semi rigid airship that they have down in Akron, also known as the Goodyear Blimp. The Goodyear Blimp. So we are going to learn everything there is to know. We're going to become Goodyear Blimp Experts and we're going to have a special episode of the podcast in a couple weeks that covers everything we learned as well as a video report from Ohio as well . So next week, completely normal episode, but know that we'll have gone blimping. Send us blimp questions. What do you want to know about blimps? How do they work? I don't know. I'm going to find out. What do you want to know about blimps? There's so much to know. Send us your questions. How fast do they go? How do you land a blimp? How do you fly a blimp? How do you get the blimp over the sports thing that is nowhere near Cleveland , Ohio. These are the questions I want to ask, but what do you want to know? Because turns out even I don't know a whole lot about Blimps. We don't really get them much here in New York. That's a shame that's a real shame, Jason. It is a shame. Maybe after we visit there, you'll be able to convince them to bring the Goodyear Blimp to New York Morrow. Cancel my American flight back to JFK. We're taking that blimp to New York. You're taking the blim . All right . And on that note, if you do have questions about the Goodyear Blimp, or blimps in general or semi rigid air shapes, or zeppelines, or whatever, that we can ask the good folks at Goodyear, email us podcast at FR two four dot com and we will happily get those answers. This has been episode three hundred and seventy three of AvTalk. I am Ian Petnik here as always with listening