Winging It

US Airways has had success in using PHL as its main international hub, but all the routes go south or east, to the Caribbean, Latin America or Europe. Now the airline says it wants to do something completely different here: Nonstops to China. Read more about it: here

US Airways CEO Duog Parker was in Philadelphia yesterday, appearing at City Hall to formally announce, as we reported, that the airline wants PHL-to-China route authority. But the most interesting comment he made was that flights to Shanghai could also lead to US Airways flying nonstop to Tokyo, since the airline would need to buy or lease long-range jets. Read more here

If you're planning to fly US Airways from Sunday on next week, you may want to hold your breath for this: The airline this weekend switches to a single computer reservations system, integrating what have been separate US Airways and America West systems.The airline says it's been testing the new combined system for weeks, and it chose to do the switch on a weekend when the fewest number of passengers could be affected. Let's hope for the best, but US Airways warned in its weekly newsletter to employees today that "a migration from one reservations system to another, no matter how carefully planned and tested, is a complex task and may have hiccups."

US Airways warned Friday that there could be "hiccups" when it integrated the old America West and US Airways computer reservations systems into a single new one. Now it looks like it was more like loud belching and severe indigestion. An independent flight-data monitoring service, FlightStats, reported last night that just 14 percent of US Airways flights departed yesterday within 15 minutes of schedule, and two out of five flights left the gate more then 45 minutes late. US Airways said this morning that about half its flights arrived on time yesterday.
Travelers also reported difficulty accessing usairways.com but the Website appears to be working OK now. If you're traveling on US Airways, let us know about your experience. And we will update you later today.

US Airways computer system problems persist at PHL -- not as bad as yesterday but multiple flights are still departing and arriving late. In the last three hours, roughly half of the departures have left the gate at least 15 minutes behind schedule, and about a third of arrivals have docked late.. read more

The snow is blowing sideways around Philadelphia this morning, with one to three inches forecasted by nightfall. PHL is open but delays are running anywhere from a few minutes to two or three hours, according to the airports phl.org Website. We will update later today. In the meantime, as you languish in a lounge or airport club, please let us know how your trip is going.

See our most recent story full story about US Airways computer reservations system problems here

PHL has the experienced the usual delays a snow day brings. The airport has closed one runway at a time to clear snow, which always slows operations, but the runways have never been completely shut down. US Airways canceled nine mainline, large-jet flights, 6 percent of its schedule, and scrubbed 63 Express flights, about 22 percent of the total. Other carriers also have canceled flights. Most flights are arriving or departing from a few minutes to several hours late.

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But that doesn't mean it was a cheery morning for quite a few travelers. More than half of departures and arrivals were 15 or more minutes late before noon today, according to the flightstats.com Website. Schedules have gotten much better since noon, with just 15 percent of departures and 10 percent of arrivals running late, flightstats says. We're getting fewer reports of long lines at US Airways today than we did the last four days. Please keep us informed as you travel..You can find flightstats.com here

As you may have read in The Inquirer or other newspapers, some Delaware County residents and many of its political leaders are opposed to a plan the FAA is studying that's designed to reduce flgiht delays in and out of PHL. The FAA is expected later this spring to choose one of four alternatives for rerouting air traffic, or leaving flight paths as they are now. Read the most recent Inquirer story on the issue,

We're reporting today from US Airways annual media day at its Tempe, AZ, headquatrters, and one of the first words out of CEO Doug Parker's mouth were: "We're not running as good an airline as we'd like or thought we would be. The key to that is fixing Philadelphia." The day promises more briefings on just what the airline's senior executives are going to do to improve its PHL operations. Parker and president Scott Kirby also were out front on the messy switchover to an integrated US Airways-America West reservations system that caused so many long lines and delayed flights last week.

A cold rain, but no snow, is falling in the Philadelphia area this morning, with a mix of snow and rain forecast for tonight. Just before 9 a.m., about 65 percent of scheduled departures and arrivals so far today were on time, according to flightstats.com. Look for more delays and cancellations to the upper Midwest and the Northeast as the winter storm moves up the coast. Several airlines are making their usual offers allowing changes to tickets without penalty to those affected by the weather.

Speaking of forecasts, the FAA has issued a long-range estimate for growth in air traffic. No surprise, the increase is going to be large. Read more here

Conditions are getting worse at PHL, with the rain mixing with sleet and ice pellets. US Airways has canceled flights and delays are running as long as three or four hours. United and Southwest have cancelled most or all of their schedules for the day, an airport spokeswoman says. Elswhere, JetBlue Airways, still smarting from its big breakdown in service last month, preemptively cancelled most of its flights from JFK and Newark airports. Keep checking with your airline if you're flying. The phl.org Website's real-time flight arrival and departure service is working only intermittently.

It's been another bad day at PHL for airlines and their passengers trying to recover from the surprisingly nasty winter storm. This morning's Inquirer news story about what happened yesterday can still be found on philly.com. We said in the story there were no "immediate" reports of long strandings on airplanes. Now there are. See the comment from Kevin sent last night but just posted. We will continue reporting on how the airlines and the airport handled the situation.

After last weekend's problems with weather and US Airways computer problems at PHL, you may not want to take another flight for awhile. But why not dream a little, and think about what it would be like to ride on a 600-passenger jet. Check out today's print and online story about the first U.S. flight of the Airbus 380 jet here

Many of you have posted comments here, sent us e-mail or called regarding the last four days at PHL and US Airways performance. At about 2 p.m. today, there were still about 1,000 misplaced bags (we counted) in US Airways B-C bag-claim area. There are scattered reports of piles of bags in other airports also, waiting to be reunited with their owners. We spoke yesterday to a local leader of the customer-service agents' union, for a print and online story. Read what she says the problem is. here.

One way business journalists learn what airlines are doing is listening to Webcasts of their presentations to industry analysts. You can listen to one of these by US Airways earlier today by clicking here. It may take a few hours for the sponsor, JP Morgan, to get the US Airways presentation up on the site.

These kind of presentations to investment companies are archived on the "investor relations" portion of the US Airways Website, allowing you to listen at your convenience. Other major airlines also are presenting at the JP Morgan conference, and you can usually find their executives' remarks in the same way, by going to the investor relations portions of their Websites.

PHL gest a bad rap whenever the weather disrupts normal operations, and many of you believe it deserves it. No doubt, the grounding of all flights during last Friday's sleet caused as much pain and suffering to travelers as any storm has recently. The local media was out in force to report on how passengers were affected. Sleeping in an airport is no fun -- there's no way to minimize how grim that can be.

But most of what happened to travelers was beyond the airport's control. The airlines were required by the FAA to stop flying while ice was falling -- they had no choice about cancellatioins.The response of US Airways was another matter that has been written and talked about and some of you have vented about it (Please, keep it up.) .The airline has a new computer system that employees say doesn't work properly and that only made the dismal experience of waiting to rebook even worse. But the airport staff didn't take the weekend off. Many employees made a serious effort to do what they could to help. If you want to know more about how the airport's managers view the way they responded, read a news release the airport issued this afternoon here

International aviation agreements aren't a topic most travelers think much about. Indeed, reading them can put you to sleep. But they affect what we pay for overseas airline service and our choices of airlines. The U.S. and EU governments are moving steadily toward what the Europeans call "liberalization" (liberalisation in European English) of the transatlantic market, with the promise of greater competitition bringing lower fares. Read the most recent action taken by the EU here

Read today's update on plans to redesign the airspace in the Northeast to try to reduce flight delays here.

In the early 1990s, the U.S. Department of Transportation identified a phenomenon it called "the Southwest effect," to show what happens when the airline starts service in a new city: fares drop and traffic goes up. Today, there's no better example of the effect than traffic at Philadelphia International. Read details in our report on PHL traffic in 2006 here

Delta Air Lines plans to be out of Chapter 11 by April 30. For the full story click here.

Too often, we neglect the airlines serving PHL that don't have large market shares, even when they are based in our region and seem to have happy customers. We're talking about USA 3000, which the readers of Travel + Lesure magazine this month ranked as the third-best domestic airline, based on providing good value for your money. USA 3000 is an affiliate of Apple Vacations, based in Newtown Square, Delaware County, and one of the world's largest sellers of air-and-hotel package vacations. Travel + Leisure's affluent well-traveled readers found the best value in airlines to be JetBlue, followed by Southwest and USA 3000. The survey was conducted about a year ago. You can find the whole article here

The airline ranking is a big surprise -- at least to us. Look at the list of best hotels or cruise lines, which, again, were rated on the basis of value: It includes some of the classiest and most expensive hotels and cruise lines in the world. JetBlue has a well-deserved reputation for quality service, even after the operational problems of Valentine's Day, but it also has low fares. Southwest and to some extent USA 3000 are known more for low fares but also for reliable service .So it turns out that an airline doesn't necessarily have to fly around the world or have first-class sleeper seats to keep demanding customers happy. Providing good service at a fair price looks to us to be way to go. Tell us what you think by posting a comment.

In the early 1990s, a new PHL director, Mary Rose Loney, was dismayed that there was nothing distinctive about the restaurants, bars and retail outlets at the airport, nothing that said 'Philly" when you got off an airplane that helped you know where you were. The offerings have been upgraded significantly since then, making them comparable to some of the best airport retail outlets in the country, and there are some familiar local names in several locations. Today the airport and Marketplace/Redwood, the airport retail developer, announced that Chickie & Pete's, a popular Philadelphia-based chain of crabhouses, will open in three locations in the airport by the end of this year. Look for them in Terminals A-West, C and E.

Responding to a recent comment from Matt to the post on "Now that's a jumbo jet," his guess is accurate. There are no plans by an airline to fly the A380 to PHL. Runways and gates would need upgrades, and there are no plans to do that at this time. More important, no U.S. airline has ordered the plane. The 380 is designed for long, very heavily traveled routes -- think Los Angeles to Singapore. US Airways says it's looking at other Boeing or Airbus models if it gets the PHL-Shanghai route.

Don't be surprised if US Airways' employee unions have some comment next week on a document the airline filed late today with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Form 8-K, which can be found on the investor relations portion of usairways.com, outlines the company's executive compensation plan. Once you plow through the verbiage, you see what the bosses get if the company meets certain financial performance targets. This is a normal exercise in corporate America, including at companies where the employees have taken pay cuts while they were operating in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Happy reading!