AirTraffic Worldwide

If the last post bored you maybe you will at least like this cool video of how busy our world air traffic is during the course of a day.  If you pay attention you will see the the United States smashes the competition as the busiest airspace in the entire world.

Airlines 3rd Quarter 2010

The results are in for the 3rd quarter.  Just in case you are wondering about my credibility with all of this airline blabber I invite you to check out this post.  That was about 2.5 years ago when our airline industry was on life support.  Have you seen all of the mergers in the past 2.5 years?  Delta and Northwest, United and Continental, Southwest and Airtran, Frontier and Midwest, and a few others that have gone unnoticed.  Capacity has also been reduced (flights cut back) a lot in order to increase load factor.  Ticket prices have also gone up a bit but the more noticeable increase has been in fees such as checked bags.  Thankfully oil has stabilized but not at a very good number (about $80 per barrel).  And unfortunately thousands of airlines employees were laid off.

All of this has led to the airlines finally making some money!  So please please please don't complain about airlines getting greedy when the media starts talking about big profits!  You have to understand how much money these companies have lost.  Pilots still have not gotten back the huge paycuts (around 40%) taken in 2002 and probably never will.  It is a breath of fresh air to see some black numbers for two consecutive quarters.  The airlines are finally figuring out how to make money... for now.  This is a very fragile situation.  All it would take is another spike in oil and it would fall clear back into the red.  So let us aviation empolyees enjoy, at least for the moment, the feeling that most of you other professionals get (or don't even worry about) of making a profit for a year.  Here are the numbers for our largest airlines this quarter:

Delta - $363 million
United - $473 million
Continental - $367 million (soon to just be United)
American - $143 million
U.S. Airways - $240 million
Southwest - $205 million
Jetblue - $59 million
Alaska - $118 million

It's nice to see everyone in the black.  It's been awhile.  My company's results (Skywest) won't be in for a couple more weeks but I expect a profit of around $25 million.

Valuable Things Learned

If you got my facebook update a few days ago you would know that I was stuck up in Canada for an extra day due to an engine problem. The captain I had been flying with married a Chinese lady about three years ago and still doesn't speak much Chinese.  He had expressed that during his time flying he had really enjoyed the LDS pilots for a number of reasons but was especially impressed with our ability to learn languages on our missions.  While in Canada we also had another crew with us who had a pilot that had served a mission in Japan.  The captain again expressed how impressive it was that this pilot had learned Japanese so quickly.  He asked us how the MTC taught us to learn our languages so quickly.  You know the answer...It's not one that is easily explained.  We told him about the training and all that we believed.  There are some other valuable things I learned on my mission.  I would like to share one in particular. 

Feast your eyes upon this treat.

I ate this marvelous meal many times on my mission and I would like to share with you how to make it.

Ingredients:
- Ramen
- Eggs
- Hot Dogs

Instructions:
Step 1:  Boil Water
Step 2: Insert packets of Ramen
Step 3: Crack 2 eggs and insert into water
Step 4: Insert Hot Dogs
Step 5: Drain water after it looks good
Step 6: Consume

The math on the cost of this meal adds up to about 68 cents.  This is why it was popular among missionaries.  I have been eating this meal ever since and I love it.  I don't care what you say.  People have given me a hard time about eating this and they think it would be gross but it is awesome.  It is a very valuable thing I learned on my mission that I still use today.  Go try it out.

BYU Who?

Oh Man!  Did USU really just beat BYU in football!!!  This game wasn't even as close as the score looks.  USU got up 31-3 before BYU started scoring.  Luckily we didn't have to worry about Utah State's trend of sucking too much in the 4th quarter thanks to the lead they had built up.  This win was a combination of an "okay" Utah State team and a really bad BYU team.  Nevertheless, it is awesome to finally beat the cougars in football after 17 years.

When people ask if I bleed blue or red here in Utah I always say blue, but not the blue they are thinking of.  I am a USU fan and will always want them to beat any team.  But, if it's between UofU and BYU I am a cougar.  I wish the Aggies would play Utah this year but no such luck although they do play Boise State the last game of the season in Boise.  One of the few things Aggie football fans have to look forward to is the chance of playing spoiler.  At 2-3 and with an awesome Nevada team and Boise St. the odds of us winning the conference are to slim to get our hopes up.  But ruining somebody elses season is always fun too!