One legacy of my time with Sun Microsystems, during which I did a lot of travelling, is a healthy balance in MileagePlus, the United frequent flier program. Obviously such an asset is valuable only if there are opportunities to redeem the miles for tickets, which in turn requires that United actually keeps flying where I want to go. So today’s reports from PlaneBuzz caught my attention. Among the likely moves:
- Culling the B737 fleet (94 airplanes) by Fall 2009.
- Selling off
76 B747s by Fall 2008. - 25 percent staff cuts by Fall 2008.
- Death to TED (quickly but painfully).
Obviously such changes will be accompanied by schedule and route cuts. Now one of the most frustrating things about the state of the US airline business is the grotesque inefficiency – in terms of fuel and airport slots – of flying so many segments with small planes. Twenty years ago, the SFO-BOS red-eye was a TWA L-1011, stopping in JFK. Today, there’s a swarm of 737s and A319s on the route. If the price of fuel isn’t sufficient, we need to find some regulatory or tariff-based mechanism to make it much more expensive to fly 300 people in three A319s than in one 777. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that if United is going to park the old 737s rather than its 757s and 767s, this might be good news. And hopefully there will still be enough 777s and 747s to let me use my miles in creative ways.