JetBlue redux

Another week, another weather-related service disruption for JetBlue at its New York City hub. Monday's snowstorm required JetBlue to cancel almost 70 flights, but that was nothing compared to the havoc caused by the "Valentine's Day Massacre" of a couple of weeks ago, which was a public relations nightmare for the popular airline. Newsweek financial columnist Allan Sloan suggests that JetBlue's biggest obstacle in the wake of that meltdown is not its need to change its operational structure to better deal with such weather-related disruptions in the future, but the simple fact that it, as an airline, is part of a money-losing business:

Consider this: since 1947, the first year for which the Air Transport Association has profit-and-loss figures, the U.S. airline industry has lost a cumulative $14 billion. And that's after including the up to $3 billion the association estimates that airlines made last year.

"Grocery stores give you better returns [than airlines]," says the Boyd Group's Michael Boyd, a Colorado-based airline expert. "Airlines are a crummy business, and will always be a crummy business." When people ask about starting an airline, Boyd told me, "first, we say no. Then, if they still want to do it, we say, 'Only if you're using your ex-wife's money'."

Sloan, noting that JetBlue was forced to shut down service to places like Richmond, Virgina; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; and Portland, Maine, goes on to bring up this interesting point:

A final note: Amtrak runs trains from New York to Richmond, Raleigh and Portland. I should have asked JetBlue why it didn't put its passengers on trains, but even I—an Amtrak Select Plus customer, yet—never considered rail service as an option. The lesson: we think of government-owned Amtrak as money-losing socialism, but the money-losing airline industry as a bunch of noble capitalists. Maybe we should re-examine our national transportation policies the way JetBlue is rethinking its customer-service policies.

The nation's commercial airline industry is, like the nation's passenger rail network, federally subsidized. Both industries are net money losers. It's funny how we hear so much controversy about one form of transportation in regard to its economic health, but comparatively little controversy about the other.

A sad discovery

My aunt found her daughter dead in her College Station apartment Saturday morning.

I cannot say I was particularly close to Evelyn. She was the product of my aunt's first marriage, before she met my mother's brother, and I only met her on a few occasions over the course of my life. Ironically, the last time I saw her was rather recently, at Thanksgiving. This was right after she moved from Kansas to College Station, where my aunt lives.

My family and I are all shocked and saddened, but I don't think any of us are terribly surprised. Evelyn was not in good health; she suffered from a host of chronic physiological problems and was taking a variety of medications for her various ailments. We obviously won't know more until the autopsy and toxicology reports come back, and that will probably take a few weeks.

Right now my thoughts are with my aunt, my uncle and my cousins, who will miss Evelyn terribly. Memorial services will be this weekend.

JetBlue's reputation takes a hit

Last week, popular low-fare airline JetBlue suffered a huge setback after extreme weather conditions at JetBlue's hub at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City all but shut down the airline. Several planes were grounded on the JFK tarmac, with passengers inside them, for as long as ten or eleven hours. Tempers flared as passengers trapped inside the airplanes became restless, toilets overflowed and cabin crews ran out of food. Inside Terminal Six, events were also chaotic as flight after flight was canceled, leaving thousands of passengers stranded.

JetBlue has apologized for the disruptions, but repercussions from the storm haunted JetBlue all weekend as it struggled to resume normal operations. Flights to several cities, including Houston, were cancelled Sunday and Monday as the airline ferried its equipment to necessary locations and ensured that flight crews had the proper amount of rest, per FAA regulations, before taking to the skies once again. The airline reports that it has returned to operating normally as of today.

JetBlue, which has won fans in the past for its reluctance to cancel flights because of bad weather, is blaming the problems on its inability to cope with rescheduling so many flight crews.

“We had a weakness in our system,” said (JetBlue CEO David) Neeleman. “We were overwhelmed.”

Overwhelmed? That's a bit of an understatement. "Caught with your pants down" is probably more descriptive of what happened, as the incident exposed some serious flaws in the airline's operational philosophy:

When the bad weather struck Feb. 14, JetBlue didn’t have a system in place for many stranded flight crews to call in to be rerouted, something the airline is working to rectify, Neeleman said. The service breakdown “was absolutely painful to watch,” he said Monday.

One travel expert suggested the airline had brought the crisis on itself by trying too hard to accommodate its passengers.

“Most airlines don’t try to operate when there is an ice-storm problem — they’ve learned that it’s better to cancel all flights at the outset and then try to get back to
normal operations as quickly as possible,” said David Stempler, president of the Washington-based Air Travelers Association.

Stempler said the fast growth of airlines such as JetBlue can create demands that are beyond their capability, especially in crises.

“JetBlue tried to do their best — tried to keep the system rolling,” he said. “Their heart was in the right place, but their head was not.”

Neeleman, who has said he was “humiliated and mortified” by his airline's failures as a result of the storm, has promised to fix the problems revealed by last week's service outage, spending up to $30 million on new procedures for operations disruptions and introducing "bill of rights" for its customers.

While JetBlue as a corporation will likely recover from this incident, it remains to be seen how much damage has been done to JetBlue as a brand.

To be sure, massive weather-related disruptions and the accompanying distress placed on the flying public happen to airlines all the time; last December's blizzard-related shutdown of United's operations at Denver, or the recent incident wherein an American Airlines flight en route to Dallas/Fort Worth was stranded on the tarmac at Austin Bergstrom for many hours, are two such examples. But JetBlue takes pride in not being "another airline." It has won a loyal following and has become a popular airline due to its unique perks - in-flight DirecTV and blue potato chips, for example - and an incident such as this carries much more potential damage to an airline with a carefully-cultivated image, such as JetBlue, than it does to many other carriers - the bigger ones, especially - who don't have quite as positive a reputation.

It will be interesting to see if Neeleman's attempts to repair the airline's operational problems - and with it, its image - are successful over the coming months and the airline is able to retain its loyal customer base as well as its reputation as being a unique, passenger-friendly carrier. If not, JetBlue runs the risk of becoming "just another airline." And that, more than any economic damage caused by last week's fiasco, would be a disaster for JetBlue.

Why the new dollar coin won't work

Today, the United States Mint is unveiling a new dollar coin. The new coin, featuring the likeness of George Washington, will be the first in a series of dollar coins bearing images of the Presidents of the United States. Later this year coins for John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison will be released into circulation. This program, which follows in the footsteps of the current 50-state quarter program, will last until at least 2016. The Mint hopes that these new dollar coins will succeed where previous attempts at a dollar coin - the Susan B. Anthony and the Sacagawea - have failed.

I'm sure they'll be a hit with coin collectors. I'll probably collect them, just as I currently collect the 50 state quarters (can't wait to get my hands on that James A. Garfield coin!). But will the general public use the coins, instead of the venerable dollar bill, for day-to-day purchases? Don't get your hopes up.

Coin experts, however, questioned whether the rotating designs will be enough to allow the new presidential $1 coin to succeed where the Susan B. Anthony dollar, introduced in 1979, and the Sacagawea dollar, introduced in 2000, failed.

“I don’t know of any country that has successfully introduced the equivalent of a dollar coin without getting rid of the corresponding paper unit,” said Douglas Mudd, author of a new book on the history of money, “All the Money in the World.”

To be sure, by doing away with the dollar bill and requiring everybody to use coins, the federal government could save hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Metal coins, after all, last much longer than paper bills. Other central banks around the world have already done this; Great Britain phased out the one-pound note in favor of the £1 coin during the 1980s, Canada replaced their dollar note with the "loonie" in 1987, and the European Union uses coins instead of notes for its €1 and €2 denominiations.

However, here in the United States, an overwhelming majority of people (including some local bloggers) are opposed to phasing out the dollar note in favor of the dollar coin. Some people like dollar bills because they're lighter and easier to carry than dollar coins. Others like bills simply because they don't like messing with coinage. (An argument I hear amazingly often in favor for the dollar bill is that you can't stick dollar coins into the g-strings of the dancers at topless clubs!) Even if it makes economic sense to phase out the dollar bill in favor of a more durable coin, people have an emotional attachment to the greenback, and the Federal government is loathe to buck that public preference (that's also why the Mint still strikes pennies, even though they now cost more to make than they're worth).

As long as there is both a paper bill and a metal coin in circulation, people are naturally going to prefer using the bill. And that's why this latest incarnation of the dollar coin, as interesting as it might be, is likely destined to flop.

IAH - DXB nonstops begin December 3rd

Looks like the 8,181-mile journey is about to get a bit shorter, according to the Chronicle:

Emirates will kick off nonstop service between Houston and Dubai beginning in early December.

The new flight will be among the world's longest, but it will shorten travel times between Houston and Dubai, said Nigel Page, senior vice president for Emirates.

"We believe we will have the fastest service from Texas to the Gulf, to Dubai," Page said.

The flight time from Houston to Dubai will be 15 hours and 10 minutes, Page said. That compares to a total of 18 hours and 25 minutes for a flight on British Airways connecting in London, which is one of the shorter flights now.

This new service would compare even more favorably to the 23-hour treks I've taken on KLM via Amsterdam, or on JetBlue and Emirates via JFK. I think I've said before that I've noticed that a good number of the people on KLM flights from Houston to Amsterdam also seem to appear on the flights from Amsterdam to Dubai, and vice versa, which indicates that there is a steady stream of people flying from the two cities. The folks at Emirates obviously believe this, as well, especially given Houston's large Indian and Pakistani communities:

The head of Emirates said in a prepared statement that there is a growing demand for convenient air travel connections between the U.S. and cities in the Middle East and Indian subcontinent.

Houston will be the second gateway city for Emirates, which has three daily flights to Dubai from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.

I knew that this route was under consideration, along with routes from Dubai to Chicago and Los Angeles, but I honestly didn't think nonstop service from Houston to Dubai was going to happen this quickly. I am pleasantly surprised.

It's hard to say when, or even if, I'll be sent back to Dubai again. But regardless of how often I'll get to use this service, this is good news for the entire city of Houston.

UPDATE: Ben Mutzabaugh's entry about this new service is here. He links to Emirates' press release. Dubai Informer's story on this new service is here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: According to the Emirates press release, the initial flight numbers and schedule for this new service will be as follows (all times local):

EK211: Departs Dubai (DXB) at 9:05 am on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and arrives in Houston (IAH) at 4:10 pm

EK212: Departs Houston at 6:25 pm on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and arrives in Dubai at 7:35 pm the next day

If college football writers covered world news...

...this is what the front page would look like:

May 8, 1945

Berlin -- In the end, its capitol lay in ruins. In the end, the "master race" wasn't. In the end, it wasn't even close.

A conflict that started with the hope of world domination for the once top-ranked army on the planet ended in a rout as the Allies defeated Germany yesterday, ending World War II on the European continent. The loss dropped Germany to 0-2 this century in world wars and left its people asking themselves how a plan to rule the world had once again gone so terribly wrong.

[...]

Even before their second crushing defeat in less than 50 years, support was building among the German people to oust their mercurial leader as secret underground printing presses were already beginning to crank out FireAdolfHitler.com and "You can't spell Adolf Hitler without two 'Ls'" newsletters. But, in the waning days of the war, Hitler made the point moot, abandoning the once-proud program by committing suicide in his Berlin bunker.

The Allied victory was especially sweet for United States President Harry "The Buck Stops Here" Truman who was following in the footsteps of legendary President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who died mere days before the U.S.-led victory.

"This one was for FDR!" shouted Truman before being drenched with Gatorade by his war cabinet. "And I think this ends once and for the debate all about which country is tougher."

But Truman added that there was still work to be done. "I'm going to tell my staff, my generals, my soldiers and the American people to enjoy this one for 24 hours.
But then let's turn out attention to the Japanese."

(Hat tip: Patrick McLeod)

Staying home

As it turns out, I'm not going to be making any trips back to the Middle East this spring after all. My company's Dubai office has finally worked out its staffing needs for the next few months, and they dod not include me. There is a possibility, as always, that my presence there could be required there later on this year as more projects over there get underway.

On one hand, it's probably for the best that I not travel over there right now. Being away from home for weeks at a time puts a tremendous amount of stress on Lori, and given her current situation this would probably be an especially bad time to leave her alone with Kirby. Besides, I've already "done my time" over there, so to speak, having cumulatively spent over two months in Dubai last year. Traveling overseas is a hassle.

On the other hand, I can't help but feel at least somwhat annoyed and frustrated. I was told before the holidays to expect to return to Dubai sometime soon, I mentally prepared myself (and Lori) to be away from home for awhile, and I even had ideas about bringing Lori out there for a week so she could see Dubai for herself. A few weeks ago, when I was asked to re-arrange my schedule to make room to travel over there, it looked like my departure was all but certain. To then be told "oh, never mind, we don't need you after all" is a bit of a let-down. It also elicits a bit of paranoia on my part: "why don't they need me after all? Did I not do a good job last time I was there?"

Oh, well, such is my work life. Now comes the fun part: working with my boss to re-arrange my schedule once more and find billable hours for all that time I was supposed to be overseas.

Get a blowjob, go to prison

This espn.com story about 20-year-old Georgia inmate Genarlow Wilson, whose promising future as an collegiate athlete ended after he received consensual oral sex from a schoolmate, is very long but is worth a read.

All I can say is that it is unbelieveable that bullshit like this still happens in our country in this day and age. I was especially blown away by this tidbit:

At the same time this trial was under way, a local high school teacher, a white female, was found guilty of having a sexual relationship with a student -- a true case of child molestation. The teacher received 90 days. Wilson received 3,650 days.

Ten years. For a hummer. Wow.

Certainly, he and his friends used poor judgement. Teenagers will be teenagers. But the punishment this young man is receiving is draconian. His life is being ruined, and nobody seems to care.

One wonders what his sentence might have been if he were white instead of black.

Absolutely disgusting. The people who put this young man behind bars should be ashamed of themselves.

The University of Houston wants a medical school

The University of Houston is considering partnering with The Methodist Hospital and Cornell University to start a new medical school at the Texas Medical Center.

The idea of a new medical school makes sense, as UH President Jay Gouge explains: "We would be remiss if we didn't explore the possibility... When you're sitting next to the world's largest medical center, in a state that's 41st out of 50th in physicians per capita, it would be almost unconscionable not to do due diligence."

However, I think the odds of this happening anytime soon sit somewhere between slim and none. The Chronicle article on this story explains further:

A UH medical school would face an uphill battle, and not just because there already are two medical schools in Houston — as well as schools in Galveston and College Station. In 2002, a Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board report identified El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley as preferred sites for any new school.

The University of Texas-Austin also is interested in starting a medical school, and state Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, is pushing for a medical school affiliated with Prairie View A&M.

"It would be my preference that Prairie View gets a medical school before UH or UT," said Coleman, UH's representative.

Yeah, when a State Representative who lives three blocks from your school's main campus disses you, you know your school has an uphill battle to climb.

Besides, does anybody really think that Texas and Texas A&M, as arrogant and as selfish as those two institutions are, are ever going to be eager to allow the University of Houston to have its own medical school? Especially after the University of Houston successfully prevented Texas A&M from affiliating itself with downtown's South Texas College of Law a few years back? Keep in mind that the members of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board are appointed by the Governor, and the blow-dried twit that currently occupies said office is an Aggie.

University of Houston leaders clearly realized that the idea of a UH-affiliated medical school would generate controversy and therefore have kept quiet about the proposal up until now; the Chronicle broke the story after filing a Freedom of Information request that UH administrators initially tried to appeal. But now that the cougar's out of the bag now, so to speak, what are the next steps to be taken?

Emphasizing that UH is in the early stages of exploring a medical school, Gogue said he expects a recommendation from Provost Don Foss in the next three to six months. If the recommendation is in favor of a medical school, Gogue said the next step would be to begin discussions with UH's board of regents and contact the Coordinating Board, which approves new programs. Gogue said the earliest a proposal would go to the Legislature would be 2009.

All I can say to Dr. Gogue and the University of Houston is "good luck." They're going to need it.

New coaches at Rice and North Texas

Last week, Rice University hired David Baliff as its new head football coach. Baliff was formerly the head football coach at Texas State, where he led the Bobcats to a 21-15 record over three seasons, including the 2005 season in which the Bobcats won their first Southland Conference championship and reached the Division I-AA semifinals.

Rice football has its second coach in as many years due to previous coach Todd Graham's decision to climb aboard the coaching carousel that began when the NFL's Atlanta Falcons decided to hire Louisville Cardinals head coach Bobby Petrino to take over their franchise. Louisville then lured away Tulsa Golden Hurricane head coach Steve Kragthorpe to be their new top guy. That left a coaching vacancy at Tulsa. Graham, who was from the area and who had previously served as Tulsa's defensive coordinator, decided to take the job.

Never mind that Graham was only at Rice for one year. Nor mind the fact that Graham decided to change jobs just two days after agreeing to a contract extension through 2012 at Rice, or that he did it three weeks before signing day, or that Tulsa, being another private school in the same conference as Rice, can't be considered anything other than a lateral move on Graham's part. But money talks, and the reported $1.1 million/year Graham will receive from Tulsa was simply too much for him to turn down.

It's true that college football is a business, and that coaches have to do what's best for themselves. Contracts don't mean anything and loyalty to a certain institution doesn't even come into play; when another school with a larger pocketbook comes calling, coaches will do what most of us would probably do if presented with the same choice: take the money. It might make football fans angry - the furor regarding Nick Saban's decision to leave the NFL's Miami Dolphins to become the head coach at the University of Alabama is one of the more notable coaching controversies of the last few weeks - but it's just part of the sport. While it is indeed regretful that the same coaches that preach to their players about "integrity," "character," "dedication" or "commitment" simply don't practice it themselves, it's not something that's ever going to change.

That didn't make Rice fans feel any better about Graham's sudden departure. Most of the commenters on the Chronicle's Owl Sports Blog entry about his departure clearly felt used and betrayed. Chronicle columnist John Lopez had some harsh words to say about Graham, as well.

My question is, why did Tulsa allegedly offer $1.1 million / year for this guy? That's a huge contract by Conference USA standards, especially coming from a small private school like Tulsa. Given that Graham only has one year of head coaching experience, is he really worth that kind of money?

At first glance, maybe so. After Graham came to Rice, he raised some money, got new fieldturf and a new scoreboard installed at Rice Stadium, and made Rice fans excited about their moribund football program again. He was able to coach the team back from a 1-5 record, as well as the devastating death of freshman tailback Dale Lloyd, to acheive a 7-5 record (a six-game improvement on Rice's 1-10 2005 campaign). Graham led the Owls to their first bowl game in 45 years, and was named C-USA's Coach of the Year.

But dig a little deeper, and Graham's success at Rice becomes a bit less clear. Rice's bowl drought, quite frankly, should have been broken five or ten years ago; Ken Hatfield's 1996 (7-4) and 2001 (8-4) Rice teams were arguably better than Graham's 2006 squad. Those teams didn't go to bowls because the Western Athletic Conference, of which Rice was a member at the time, didn't have very many bowl tie-ins. Furthermore, there weren't a record 32 bowl games, as there are now, which ensured that every team with a winning record last season went to a bowl. Moreover - and there's no way to put this nicely - Graham and his team were utterly embarrassed by Troy in the New Orleans Bowl, 41-17. While Troy is not exactly a bad program - they were Sunbelt Conference champions, for what it's worth - they're not going to be confused with Texas or Florida State, which were the only other two schools that put such lopsided beatdowns on the Owls during the season. Rice simply had no answer for the Trojans, and Graham's helpless frustration - he always seemed to be cursing into his headset when the ESPN cameras zoomed in on him during the New Orleans Bowl - was evident.

Then there's Graham's management style, which apparently rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. After Graham came in, he essentially cleaned out the athletics department, firing a lot of longtime department staffers, assistants, and trainers (he kept the receptionist because, as the ESPN sportscasters said during the New Orleans Bowl, she reminded him of his mother). He destroyed the sense of continuity and community within Rice's athletics department, and Graham's departure created the sense, expressed by John Lopez in the above-referenced column - that he actually made things worse at Rice in the long term by his actions.

I don't know if I'd go that far in criticizing Graham, and if Rice was not where he wanted to be - and it's obvious that it wasn't - it's probably better for the program that he left sooner rather than later, even if "sooner" only meant one season. And, in the end, it's all over now. Rice has a new guy at the helm that hopes to pick up where Graham left off, and reaction to his hiring seems to be generally positive. As somebody who normally roots for Rice when they aren't playing Houston, I wish him the best of luck.

Needless to say, this fall's matchup between Rice and Tulsa is going to be interesting to watch.

Up in Denton, another coaching controversy has also been put to rest. Although there was some dissention - much of it coming from a Houston furniture magnate - over the University of North Texas's decision to fire head coach Darrell Dickey before the 2006 season had ended, there generally seems to be support for UNT's decision to hire former Southlake Carroll head coach Todd Dodge to take over the helm of the Mean Green. Southlake Carroll was a high school powerhouse under Dodge's leadership, winning four Class 5A state championships and amassing an overall record of 98-11 since Dodge's tenure there began in 2000. Dodge has some familiarity with college football as well as UNT, as he served as offensive coordinator for the Mean Green during the 1992 and 1993 seasons. North Texas obviously hopes to enjoy the success that Houston has had with Art Briles, who was a very successful coach at Stephenville High School before moving up to the college ranks.

Finally, I can't help but notice that former UH head coach Kim Helton is now the offensive coordinator at the University of Alabama-Birmigham. Helton will work under head coach Neil Callaway, who, ironically, was Helton's offensive coordinator for a few seasons in Houston. More recently, Callaway was the offensive coordinator for the Georgia Bulldogs. UAB's search for a new head coach, which met with interference from the University of Alabama's Board of Trustees, was another coaching controversy.

I hope Blazer fans like draw plays, because they'll probably be seeing a lot of them...