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runwayrunway · 11 months

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I'm going to interrupt my normal posting schedule briefly to discuss naming airplanes. Don't worry, I'll post the regularly scheduled Friday review after this, but first I'm going to talk about naming airplanes.

When I say that I don't mean naming types of airplanes. I mean giving the airplanes names. A lot of airlines do it. Back in the day you had your Clipper This, Flagship That, Star of the Whatsit, so on. Lots of airlines name theirs after places. Aer Lingus names theirs after Irish saints. SAS names their Vikings. FedEx Express gives theirs human names, like Gabriel, Richard, JobEdokat, and Meredith.

The year is 2023 at time of writing. Clipper This, Flagship That, and Star of the Whatsit are now all relics of a distant past where a plane ticket cost more than some cars and airports sold life insurance at kiosks. That age is long past. Delta, United, American...all cowards, their airplanes long unnamed. Though the practice is alive and well elsewhere, for some reason it has largely gone dormant in the United States. There are few exceptions, but there are exceptions, and there is one in particular which stands out from the rest. Just one carrier on a mission and their 289 individually named flying machines.

I would like to present you with a curated selection of things which jetBlue has named their airplanes. There are many more - 289, to be specific. Take a look through them all if you care to. But this is a list of my favorites. Just a bit of appreciation for a true titan of aircraft-naming in an era where the art seems all but lost.

Roses Are Red, This Plane is Blue (N3104J)

Aruba, Jamaica, Blue I Wanna Take Ya (N2016J)

Blue's That Girl? (N997JL)

Don't Hate Me 'Cause I'm Bluetiful (N996JL)

Don't Mind If I Blue (N971JL)

Blue Kid On The Block (N913JB)

1. Fly JetBlue 2. Repeat Step 1 (N807JB)

Shantay, Blue Stay (N794JB)

#Follow @JetBlue (N334JB)

Enough about me...let's talk about blue (N712JB)

Big blue people seater (N705JB)

Bippity, Boppity, Blue (N565JB)

Blue-yah! (N187JB)

Badda Bing Badda Blue (N534JB)

FuhgeddaBlueDit (N3113J)

Boogie Woogie Bluegle Boy (N3062J)

My Other Ride is a JetBlue A320 (N329JB, an Embraer E190)

My Other Ride is a JetBlue E190 (N793JB, an Airbus A320)

And, my personal favorite:

How's My Flying? Call 1-800-JETBLUE (N715JB)

(Although if you can read that, you're probably too close. Incidentally, 'If You Can Read This, You're Blue Close' is an A320-200 with the registration N729JB.)

#stopovers #runwayrunway blueses it #jetblue

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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Boeing, Spirit and Jetblue, a monopoly horror-story

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables TONIGHT (Jan 22) at 8PM. Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

Last week, William Young, an 82 year old federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, blocked the merger of Spirit Airlines and Jetblue. It was a seismic event:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.254267/gov.uscourts.mad.254267.461.0_6.pdf

Seismic because the judge's opinion is full of rhetoric associated with the surging antitrust revival, sneeringly dismissed by corporate apologists as "hipster antitrust." Young called America's airlines and "oligopoly," a situation he blamed on out-of-control mergers. As Matt Stoller writes, this is the first airline merger to be blocked by the DOJ and DOT since deregulation in 1978:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-block-the-jetblue

The judge wasn't shy about why he was reviving a pre-Jimmy Carter theory of antitrust: "[the merger] does violence to the core principle of antitrust law, 'to protect] markets –- and its market participants — from anticompetitive harm."

The legal arguments the judge advances are fascinating and worthy of study:

https://twitter.com/johnmarknewman/status/1747343447227519122

But what really caught my eye was David Dayen's American Prospect article about the judge's commentary on the state of the aviation industry:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/01-19-2024-how-boeing-ruined-the-jetblue-spirit-merger/

Why, after all, have Spirit and Jetblue been so ardent in pursuing mergers? Jetblue has had two failed merger attempts with Virgin, and this is the third time they've failed in an attempt to merge with Spirit. Spirit, meanwhile, just lost a bid to merge with Frontier. Why are these two airlines so obsessed with combining with each other or any other airline that will have them?

As Dayen explains, it's because US aviation has been consumed by monopoly, hollowed out to the point of near collapse, thanks to neoliberal policies at every part of the aviation supply-chain. For one thing, there's just not enough pilots, nor enough air-traffic controllers (recall that Reagan's first major act in office was to destroy the air traffic controller's union).

But even more importantly, there are no more planes. Boeing's waitlist for airplane delivery stretches to 2029. And Boeing is about to deliver a lot fewer planes, thanks to its disastrous corner-cutting, which grounded a vast global fleet of 737 Max aircraft (again):

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-01-09-boeing-737-max-financial-mindset/

The 737 disaster(s) epitomize the problems of inbred, merger-obsessed capitalism. As Luke Goldstein wrote, the rampant defects in Boeing's products can be traced to the decision to approve Boeing's 1997 merger with McDonnell-Douglas, a company helmed by Jack Welch proteges, notorious for cost-cutting at the expense of reliability:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-01-09-boeing-737-max-financial-mindset/

Boeing veterans describe the merger as the victory of the bean-counters, which led to a company that chases short-term profits over safety and even the viability of its business:

https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=213075

After all, the merger turned Boeing into the single largest exporter in America, a company far too big to fail, teeing up tens of billions from Uncle Sucker, who also account for 40% of Boeing's income:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-nationalize-and-then

The US government is full of ex-Boeing execs, just as Boeing's executive row is full of ex-US federal aviation regulators. Bill Clinton's administration oversaw the creation of Boeing's monopoly in the 1990s, but it was the GOP that rescued Boeing the first time the 737 Maxes started dropping out of the sky.

Boeing's biggest competitor is the state-owned Airbus, a joint venture whose major partners are the governments of France, Spain and Germany – governments that are at least theoretically capable of thinking about the public good, not short-term profits. Boeing's largest equity stakes are held by the Vanguard Group, Vanguard Group subfiler, Newport Trust Company, and State Street Corporation:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-01-18-airbus-advantage/

As Matt Stoller says, America has an airline that the public bails out, protects, and subsidizes but has no say over. Boeing has all the costs of public ownership and none of the advantages. It's the epitome of privatized gains and socialized losses.

This is Reagan's other legacy, besides the disastrous shortage of air-traffic controllers. The religious belief in deregulation – especially deregulation of antitrust enforcement – leads to a deregulated market. It leads to a market that is regulated by monopolists who secretly deliberate, behind closed board-room doors, and are accountable only to their shareholders. These private regulators are unlike government regulators, who are at least nominally bound by obligations to transparency and public accountability. But they share on thing in common with those public regulators: when they fuck up, the public has to pay for their mistakes.

It's a good thing Boeing's executives are too big to fail, because they fail constantly. Boeing execs who are warned by subcontractors of dangerous defects in their planes order those subcontractors to lie, or lose their contracts:

https://www.levernews.com/boeing-supplier-ignored-warnings-of-excessive-amount-of-defects-former-employees-allege/

As a result of Boeing's mismanagement, America's only aircraft supplier steadily has lost ground to Airbus, which today enjoys a 2:1 advantage over Boeing. But it's not just Boeing that's the weak link aviation. US aviation is a chain entirely composed of weak links.

Take jet engines: Pratt & Whitney are Spirit's major engine supplier, but these engines suck as much as Boeing's fuselages. Much of Spirit's fleet is chronically grounded because the engines don't run. The reason Spirit buys its engines from those loveable goofballs at Pratt & Whitney? The Big Four airlines have bought all the engines for sale from other suppliers, leaving smaller airlines to buy their engines from fat-fingered incompetents.

This is why – as Dayen notes – smaller US airlines are so horny for intermarriage. They can't grow by adding routes, because there are no pilots. Even if they could get pilots, there'd be no slots because there are no air traffic controllers. But even if they could get pilots and slots, there are no planes, because Boeing sucks and Airbus can't make planes fast enough to supply the airlines that don't trust Boeing. And even if they could get aircraft, there are no engines because the Big Four aviation cartel cornered the market on working jet engines.

Part of Jetblue and Spirit's pitch was that they hand off the routes that they'd cut after their merger to other small airlines, like Frontier and Allegiant. But Frontier and Allegiant can't service those routes: they don't have pilots, slots, planes or engines.

Spirit hasn't been profitable since 2019 and is sitting on $4b in debt. Jetblue was proposing to finance its acquisition with another $3.5b in debt. The resulting airline could only be profitable by sharply cutting routes and massively raising prices, cutting 6.1m seats/year. With a debt:capital ratio of 111%, the company would have no slack and would need a bailout any time anything went wrong. Not coincidentally, the Big Four airlines also have debt:capital ratios of about 100-120%, and they do get bailouts ever time anything goes wrong.

As William McGee reminds us, it's been 14 years since anyone's started a new US airline:

https://twitter.com/WilliamJMcGee/status/1747363491445375072

US aviation is deeply cursed. But Boeing's self-disassembling aircraft show us why we can't fix it by allowing mergers: private monopolies, shorn of the discipline of competition and regulation, are extraction machines that turn viable businesses into debt-wracked zombies.

This is a subject that's beautifully illustrated in Dayen's 2020 book Monopolized, in the chapter on health care:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

The US health care system has been in trouble for a long time, but the current nightmare starts with the deregulation of pharma. Pharma companies interbred with one another in a string of incestuous marriages that produced these dysfunctional behemoths that were far better at shifting research costs to governments and squeezing customers than they were at making drugs. The pharma giants gouged hospitals for their products, and in response, hospitals underwent their own cousin-fucking merger orgy, producing regional monopolies that were powerful enough to resist pharma's price-hikes. But in growing large enough to resist pharma profiteering, the hospitals also became powerful enough to screw over insurers. Insurers then drained their own gene pool by combining with one another until most of us have three or fewer insurers we can sign up with – companies that are both big enough to refuse hospital price-hikes, and to hike premiums on us.

Thus monopoly begets monopoly: with health sewn up by monopolies in medical tech, drugs, pharmacy benefit managers, insurance, and hospitals, the only easy targets for goosing profits are people:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/05/hillrom/#baxter-international

This is how you get a US medical system that costs more than any other rich nation's system to operate, delivers worse outcomes than those other systems, and treats medical workers worse than any other wealthy country.

Now, rich people can still buy their way out of this mess, but you have to be very rich indeed to buy your way out of the commercial aviation system. There's a lot of 1%ers who fly commercial, and they're feeling the squeeze – and there's no way they're leasing their own jets.

Stein's Law holds that "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." America's aviation mergers – in airlines, aircraft and engines – have hollowed out the system. The powerful, brittle companies that control aviation have so much power over their workforce that they've turned air traffic controller and pilot into jobs that no one wants – and they used their bailout money to buy out the most senior staff's contracts, sending them to early retirement.

Now, I'm with the people who say that most of US aviation should be replaced with high-speed rail, but that's not why our technocrats and finance barons have gutted aviation. They did it to make a quick buck. A lot of quick bucks. Now the system is literally falling to pieces in midair. Now the system is literally on fire:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/us/miami-boeing-plane-engine-fire.html

Which is how you get a Reagan appointed federal judge issuing an opinion that has me punching the air and shouting, "Yes, comrade! To the barricades!" Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. When the system is falling to pieces around you, ideology disintegrates like a 737 Max.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/21/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever/#will-eventually-stop

Image: Vitaly Druchenok (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ECAir_Boeing_737-306_at_Brazzaville_Airport_by_Vitaly_Druchenok.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

Joe Ravi (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panorama_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_Building_at_Dusk.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #aviation #antitrust #monopoly #boeing #jetblue #spirit airlines #oligopoly #air traffic controllers #airbus #steins law

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aviationgeek2024 · 1 month

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#aviacion #aviación #aircraft #airplane #planes #airport #flying #JFK #jetblue #aircraft damage #commercial aircraft #commercial aviation #aviation photography #airbus #airplanes #move team #agr

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nocternalrandomness · 2 months

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A JetBlue Airbus A320 reflects the sunset as it taxis into Daughtery Field, Long Beach, CA

#JetBlue #Airbus #A320 #airliner #aircraft #commercial aircraft #passenger jet #plane #jetliner #airport #airplane #Civil aviation #transportation

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follow-up-news · 3 months

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A federal judge Tuesday blocked JetBlue Airways’ purchase of Spirit Airlines after the Justice Department sued to stop the merger, saying the deal would drive up fares for price-sensitive consumers by taking the discount carrier out of the market. JetBlue’s proposed $3.8 billion purchase of discounter Spirit would have produced the country’s fifth-largest airline, a deal the carriers had said would help them better grow and compete against larger rivals like Delta and United. “JetBlue plans to convert Spirit’s planes to the JetBlue layout and charge JetBlue’s higher average fares to its customers,” U.S. District Court Judge William Young wrote in his decision. “The elimination of Spirit would harm cost-conscious travelers who rely on Spirit’s low fares.” The decision, handed down Tuesday, marks a victory for a Justice Department that has aggressively sought to block deals it views as anti-competitive. “Today’s ruling is a victory for tens of millions of travelers who would have faced higher fares and fewer choices had the proposed merger between JetBlue and Spirit been allowed to move forward,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “The Justice Department will continue to vigorously enforce the nation’s antitrust laws to protect American consumers.”

#spirit airlines #jetblue #justice department

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nofatclips-home · 1 year

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They Flew Like Blackbirds, Dir. Shannon Sutherland

#movie #short #short movie #blackbirds #shannon sutherland #focus features #student short film showcase 2023 #the gotham #student short film showcase #student short film #jetblue

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high-quality-tiktoks · 1 year

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Spirit Airlines shareholders voted Tuesday on whether to approve a merger with JetBlue Airways. The company said results of the vote will be announced Wednesday.

#video #tiktok #tiktoks #funny #lmao #wtf #news #spirit airlines #jetblue #jetblue airways #airplane #airplanes #washingtonpost

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girlactionfigure · 1 year

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#Chanukah #JetBlue

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chibiskittles · 1 year

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The moon, over Los Angeles.

#photography #vacation #los angeles #amature photragphy #moon #night sly #jetblue #plane

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imalump · 4 months

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Link to article

I guess you can fly with Covid. 🙄

#jetblue #airlines #Covid19 #covid isn’t over #covid 19

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runwayrunway · 11 months

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No. 5 - jetBlue 2: Electric Bluegaloo

I am writing this post on the 15th of June, 2023.

I was going to publish one post tomorrow. It was going to be about a completely unrelated airline from a different country. I wrote it already. I have several other posts written already, because I like writing them, and they make me excited. I had a partially written post on jetBlue. It was going to be finished soon and uploaded after that. Just one in a sea of many things people have painted onto their airplanes.

I did not plan to discuss jetBlue tomorrow. I did not plan to finish my jetBlue post today. But they have forced my hand by announcing an overhaul of their 20-year-old livery at the most inconvenient possible time for me specifically, and I suppose I'm someone who reviews airline liveries now so I'm not just going to not talk about it.

Okay, let’s see. What they’ve been doing has worked for them for two decades, so I am very curious what they...

(image: jetblue)

Oh.

Huh. Not...sure what I expected. This is really taking a moment to sink in.

Well, okay. My immediate thought is ‘neat, they finally extended it past the tail’. My second thought is ‘thank goodness they're finally moving past their Eurowhite phase’. My third thought is...

Obviously they don’t have an exclusive right to this shade of blue, but does...does Southwest know about this? You two are probably the two biggest players in the low-cost market on the East Coast, should you be...being nearly the exact same shade of blue? Like, the rest of the liveries are obviously very different, you wouldn’t confuse them even from a distance, and I'm pretty sure jetBlue's is slightly lighter, but it just feels, viscerally, like someone’s nose gear is being run over a little bit.

Okay. No. We are forgetting about this. We literally just talked about not comparing beautiful blue girls to each other. They’re going to stall or soar on their own merits. Let’s take another look at N982JB “A Defining MoMint” (neé “One Mint, Two Mint, Blue Mint, You Mint”), who is patient zero for jetBlue’s new rebrand.

(image: jetblue)

There she is in all her eyestraining glory. I mean, there’s bright and then there’s hard to look at. jetBlue has, for some reason, decided to unleash a migraine machine onto airports across America and beyond.

jetBlue? I know you're reading this. Can we talk, jetBlue? There are a billion shades of blue you could have picked from for the main body.

(image: jetblue)

In fact, here are five of them from your own most recent tail design. And you chose the only one that is extremely painful to look at in large quantities. So, unfortunately, we’re taking off from the wrong runway. But let’s hear what you have to say for yourself, jetBlue.

I can only imagine how badly tumblr is going to crunch this, so here’s a direct link to the PDF jetBlue put out explaining their design choices.

Well, it’s definitely one of the bluest planes they’ve ever made. I think Blueprint might actually be bluer, but that’s a discussion for later. It’s a reasonably, maybe even unreasonably, blue plane, and I think we can all agree on that.

They’ve made a lot of changes that seem almost like direct responses to my earlier complaints. Robin N. Hayes, CEO of jetBlue Airlines, are you in my head reading my mind? If you are, I think I at least deserve a couple of scale models for all the advice I’ve given you. Come on. I’ll even proofread your website for you.

Sadly, I have yet to receive my rightly deserved 1:100 model of the jetBlue retrojet, but they’ve at least recognized that I’m correct about a lot of things. The all-white fuselage is boring and the tail designs need to be allowed to unfurl from their prison on the vertical stabilizer. I’m absolutely with them on that. I actually can’t say how I feel about this new ‘mint leaves’ tail pattern. I think that I don’t like it, but it’s very hard to tell because looking at this image for too long without my darkreader on genuinely hurts my eyes. I’m sure it’ll be fine in person, but I haven’t seen this livery in person. I’ve had all of a day to process this through my computer screen, and because of that I think I sort of really dislike it!

But I also can’t commit to that opinion because it’s been a day and a half and there’s so much we still don’t know. Well, I know that this is literally the worst shade of blue that there is, but my least favorite color is orange and I think there are plenty of decent looking orange planes out there. It’s not about the base color. It’s about what you do with it. And what will they do with it? It’s...not really clear.

The thing about this launch is that if Robin N. Hayes, CEO of jetBlue Airlines, can read my mind, I can’t read his. All I have is this PDF and a couple paragraphs of copy that really raise more questions than they answer. I'm just going to paste the important bit here.

Aptly named A Defining MoMint, the first plane to sport our new livery (our first-ever Mint pattern, coming soon to all Mint planes) is an Airbus A321 with Mint—which rolls into service on 6/15/23. Look for refreshed versions of our existing patterns to make their runway debuts as the rest of the fleet is repaint-ready.

This leaves so many questions unanswered. Is this for all Mint planes? That's not an insignificant portion of the fleet. Are all the planes currently wearing the ribbon and streamer tails going to wear this exact design, or will there be multiple Mint liveries? Will the ribbon and streamer tails be retired completely? They're pretty new, that seems a bit premature to me. What about the non-Mint planes? I assume the implication is that they're going to get patterns that extend onto their main fuselages as well, but are they going to also be repainted now or will there be a gradual rollout where it'll only be Mint planes for the time being? What is even going on? Seriously, does Southwest know? How did nobody notice the two massive typos on the liveries page of your website when you updated it with this new information? Ya blue it!

This is sending me into a bit of a tailspin. This redesign is everything I should want. It's spitting in the face of the design principles that I hate so much I started this blog. It's addressing some of my complaints. But I just don't...like to look at it?

I think what's bothering me here, when my eyes adjust somewhat to the sheer piercing brightness of it, is the overwhelming amount of stuff happening. When I do focus in I can see things that I like. For example, the tail pattern seems to be almost spreading onto the main fuselage rather than being isolated on a tail with its own background color. Some things I just can't entirely process. Like the PDF says they're using a new font but I can't really tell the difference between it and the old one. I guess it doesn't matter that much.

Anyway, I'm not done complaining. On the old livery, the engines were a dark color which contrasted with the light fuselage. This is pretty common. That's for a good reason. It creates such a weird visual effect when the engines and the fuselage are the same color. When you look at them from the side they look like they're merging. Also, despite them mentioning that they made the text in the front bigger to make the livery look less rear-heavy, and the fact that it's worked to some extent, it hasn't worked nearly enough. It would really behoove them to add something else to the front.

(I'm just saying, jetBlue...if you want to be America's Fun Airline, I don't think any defunct airlines have a trademark on painting cute little faces on your airplanes. Just keep that in the back of your mind.)

I ultimately just can't reconcile my thoughts on this. I keep repeating myself and I can't seem to convince myself to like this even though I really, really want to find some way to decide that yes, this is good, actually. This is an improvement. I can't. I can't convince myself. Maybe if I chew on it a bit longer. Maybe when they show off new tail patterns they'll all look better than this. Maybe it's just the mint green that's throwing me off and it'll all be okay. Maybe I'll wake up and a perfectly designed new jetBlue livery will be standing by the side of my bed, and I won't even mind that geometry forbids every part of that scenario, and she'll be beautiful and I will remember what it felt like to first learn that jetBlue has a plane named Blue's On First. Maybe. But right now it's the 15th of June and I'm feeling an emotion I can only imagine myself sharing with cosmic horror protagonists who have stumbled on some horrible secret that destroys the foundation which until mere moments ago undergirded their entire concept of reality. I don't know how to reconcile any of this.

jetBlue...how could you blue this to me?

Provisional* Grade: D(on't Blue That)+

(provisional because I'm being very dramatic but as I've said this is brand new fresh off the livery printer, Mint condition if you will, and I've barely had any time to process it so I'll definitely revisit it at some point. But probably not soon. I'm just about jetBlued out at the moMint.)

#tarmac fashion week #runwayrunway blueses it #grade: d+#region: north america #region: united states #era: 2020s #jetblue #low cost carriers #neelemanverse #southwest airlines

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Spirit warned investors that merging with Jetblue would be illegal

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Jetblue is trying to buy Spirit Airlines. It’s a terrible idea. Consolidation in the US aviation industry has resulted in higher fares, less reliable planes, spiraling junk-fees, and brutal conditions for flight- and ground-crews. The four remaining US major airlines, who gobbled their rivals, are three times more profitable than their European counterparts:

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/04/22/a-lack-of-competition-explains-the-flaws-in-american-aviation

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/12/they-put-it-in-writing/#that-was-then

That’s great news if you’re an airline shareholder. It’s terrible news if you’re hunting for your lost bags, or if you’re a flight attendant or pilot being squeezed, or if you’re being hit for billions in covid bailouts — or if you’re one of one million Americans who were stranded during Christmas week by the failure of Southwest Airlines’ IT systems, which use duct-tape and wishful thinking to hold together the IT systems of all the airlines SWA bought:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/16/for-petes-sake/#unfair-and-deceptive

The collapse of competition in the US airline industry is the result of a deliberate policy, the “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust, which says that monopolies are “efficient” and good for the public. It’s a theory that took root under Reagan, and was reaffirmed and expanded by every president, R or D, since.

Until now. For the first time in two generations, the Biden administration has taken up the neglected, noble art of trustbusting, blocking mergers and promising to break up the mergers we’ve already seen, through enforcers like Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division and Lina Khan at the FTC:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Which is bad news for the proposed Jetblue/Spirit merger. Last week, the DoJ filed suit to block the merger, joined by the AGs from NY, MA and DC.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.254267/gov.uscourts.mad.254267.1.0.pdf

Notably, Pete Buttigieg — who has been historically shy of using his prodigious powers as the boss of a large agency — will also block the merger:

https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/usdot-statement-justice-departments-lawsuit-block-proposed-jetblue-spirit-merger

Spirit’s shares are in the toilet. Writing in his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller explains why shareholders are bolting for the doors: the case against the Jetblue/Spirit merger is incredibly strong. A slam-dunk, even:

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/an-end-to-airline-consolidation

Spirit, after all, is America’s most famous budget airline. That means that it attracts fliers by undercutting the Big Four. That puts downward pressure on the Big Four, who are faced with the choice of taking lower profits to retain fliers’ business, or losing all the profit when those fliers take Spirit. Remove Spirit from play and that downward pressure on fares disappears. You don’t need newfangled “neo-Brandeisian” antitrust to see why this is bad — even under “consumer welfare” antitrust, anything that will obviously make prices go up is prohibited (indeed, this is the only thing consumer welfare antitrust cares about).

How do we know that a Jetblue/Spirit merger is a price-increasing, illegal antitrust violation? Spirit says so.

[Image ID: A slide prepared for Spirit Airlines’ board, titled ‘Shareholders should think about the conversation with regulators,’ and laying out the case that a Jetblue/Spirit merger is illegal.]

This is truly delicious! You see, last year, there was a bidding war for Spirit and Jetblue was the outside bidder. Spirit’s board wanted to convince their shareholders to reject Jetblue’s bid, so they commissioned some aviation economists to do a study on the matter, which Spirit then circulated to its investors.

That report is unequivocal: it estimates that a Jetblue/Spirit merger will be a disaster. Spirit’s participation in a route lowers fares by 17%. When Spirit stops competing on a route, fares go up by 30%. Spirit CEO Ted Christie called the proposed merger “unlawful” and “unethical”:

https://simpleflying.com/spirit-ceo-shareholder-rejection-jetblue-cynical-disruptive-offer/

Spirit is a major competitor to Jetblue. As Stoller notes, they compete on hundreds of routes, and are adding more all the time. Jetblue clearly understands that removing Spirit as a competitor would let it raise fares. As one Jetblue manager — quoted by the DoJ — explained: “I don’t think we should be selling the [Spirit] fare if [Spirit] is not serving the market.” Jetblue’s internal memos on the merger include an executive stating that the merger will allow the airline to realize “efficiencies” by reducing service and increasing fares. This isn’t the kind of “efficiency” we want.

Stoller notes that even with this damning evidence, there are still some spoilers. Florida governor Ron DeSantis has cut a deal to back the merger, even though Florida stands to suffer the most of any state from this merger due to the number of Spirit flights taking off from its airports. And, Stoller notes, the judge presiding over the case is an 82 year old Reagan appointee — a ideology-addled dotard named William Young.

But, Stoller notes, with Buttigieg and the DOT on the case, it’s hard to see how this merger can go through — the DOT has very broad powers to block mergers that reduce routes and don’t have to meet the same evidentiary standards as the DoJ would in court.

Stoller thinks Buttigieg has had a “moment of truth” — that outside pressure from activists and critics convinced the secretary that his future political fortunes would be better served, on balance, by boldly using his powers (and pleasing the public), rather than sitting on his hands (and pleasing future industry donors):

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/pete-buttigiegs-moment-of-truth

If that’s so, it’s welcome news. While I would prefer that our political leaders acted boldly in the public interest out of a sense of duty, I will happily settle for bold action motivated by fear of the voters’ wrath.

[Image ID: A crashed WWI biplane, redecorated in Spirit airlines livery. The scene is decorated with text-snippets cut out of a Spirit Airlines internal investor presentation slide advising that merging with Jetblue is ill-advised and possibly illegal.]

#pluralistic #matt stoller #spirit airlines #jetblue #aviation #monopoly #mergers #petard #antitrust #southwest #swords

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