A Golf Blog

A Salute to Last Place Finishers

Back in August of 2004, Jonathan Crowe made a huge splash with his blog “Celebrating last-place finishes at the Olympics. Because they're there, and you're not.”

This year, he’s back and so is his commentary on the Torino games.

Moody’s Upgrades AMR Debt

Doesn’t seem like much but Moody’s announcement moving AMR debt from ‘negative’ to ‘stable’ prompted a 5 percent bump in shares of AMR stock. This is good news, not only does Moody’s think that revenue will rise, they also project that costs will remain under control.

Cost control is not going to be easy, especially when several competitors are leveraging advantages created by operating under chapter 11.

Love Field to get More Expensive

It looks as if the city of Dallas is tired of losing money on Love Field operations. To turn things around, the Dallas City Council has made the move to increase landing fees. They are going up a whopping twenty cents to $0.55 per 1000 pounds. The increase will boost annual revenue to more than $950,000.

Let’s see – Southwest accounts for more than 90% of the traffic at Love Field so they are looking at an increase in fees of somewhere north of $850,000. That sounds like a bargain to me – if the city council wanted to bring Love Field into line with what DFW charges Southwest would be facing an additional $23 million annually.

I don’t suppose there will be a knee jerk reaction to raise fares since its only pennies per passenger but I promise that American Airlines is watching what’s going on.

AA Bids MD-80s Food Galleys a Fond Farewell

Since American has stopped food service on most all of it's U.S. domestic routes they have decided that the food galley's on their fleet of MD80s (327 aircraft) will be removed and replaced with 4 seats. That represents additional capacity of 1308 seats, or roughly the equivalent of 10 airplanes.

With today's loads, AA estimates that this move represents $34 million a year in additional revenue.

Eliminating the coach cabin galley also means they will have to find alternate storage space for the beverage service carts. Unless of course, complimentary beverage service is next to go.

via Travel Weekly

TSA Goes Back to the Drawing Board

After four years and about $150 million, the TSA says their watch lists may not be secure from hackers. So, it's file 13 for Secure Flight as we know it. The GAO (Government Accountability Office) said that the "TSA may not have proper controls in place to protect sensitive information".

Perhaps the third try will be the charm? Or for that matter, one might question the effectiveness of such a program in view of the privacy hurdles that will have to be addressed.

Bowling at Sea

Travel Weekly reports that Norwegian Pearl sets sail in 2007 the ship will have a 4 lane regulation ten pin bowling alley.

I don't know about you but this strikes (sorry for the pun) me as odd - same as when the cruise lines iintroduced ice skating. Come on, for the uninitiated, ice skating is hard enough let alone trying it on a moving rink.

I'm sure bowling balls will roll on the alleys on the ship but will they roll where you want?