It's really amazing when you think of it how short sighted and poorly thought out some of these decisions are.
So they think they will save $10M? Is that in fuel due to weight or savings on film rentals?
Would 500 lb save enough fuel to justify the labor time and down time to remove the systems? Or will they add yet more seats?
The US Airways management continues to nickel-and-dime customers, and remove amenities from aircraft, allegedly in the interest of offsetting high fuel costs.
Then, they try to intimidate their most experienced captains who won't accept a fuel load with which they are less than comfortable flying across the Atlantic Ocean. At night. Again, in the interest of saving fuel costs.
So, allow me to ask this question of this suddenly fuel conscious management:
Who is the Rhodes Scholar who decided to run a complete,
full Shuttle schedule on the Fourth of July holiday, when practically
nobody -- especially high-yield business travelers -- were flying?
That's right; BOS-LGA-DCA on the hour, every hour, with a full-sized A319, all day. (The only ones that didn't operate were due to mechanical problems; an almost daily occurrence lately on the Shuttle.)
Did you not look at the bookings for that day? Did you not look at the bookings for July 4th
last year? And the year before that? Did you bother to ask anybody at the Shuttle stations how that holiday usually runs as far as number of passengers? Why would you not run a reduced schedule, like you do on Saturdays?
Sources close to the operation reported that agents at one station didn't board enough Shuttle passengers in an entire shift to even fill
one airplane.
One flight departed a Shuttle station with
one revenue passenger, and two air marshals. Another departed with
one revenue passenger, and an off-line jumpseater.
Let's just take those two above-mentioned flights: The average Shuttle flight burns around 5,000 pounds of fuel. That's about 735 gallons. At the July 3 US Daily reported jet fuel price of $4.23, that's $3110. So, US Airways spent $6220 in
fuel alone to move
two revenue passengers (who probably paid $69 on the Internet for their tickets).
And that doesn't even take into account the dozens of other Shuttle flights that day that carried 11, 15, or 30 passengers.
The only consolation is, those US Airways flights didn't burn a lot of fuel getting in and out of the Shuttle cities that day, even on a Friday afternoon when there are usually huge delays, and 45-minute taxi times.
Why?
Because there were hardly any
other airplanes operating at those airports that day. Every
other airline had the foresight to run a reduced schedule as a result of the light holiday travel demand.