Delta Airlines, the world’s largest carrier, was granted permission yesterday by the Federal Aviation Administration to operate the two carriers – Delta Airlines and acquired Northwest Airlines – as one, single airline.  This involved the FAA granting Delta Airlines a single operating certificate to use for both carriers. 

Delta plans to make some of the internal [...]

Delta Airlines and it’s global airline alliance SkyTeam have offered an aid package of $1 billion to struggling Japan Airlines, JAL.  Immediately, though, current OneWorld partner with JAL, American Airlines, said that together with other OneWorld partners British Airways and Iberia, they would top that offer of aid hoping to convince JAL to stick with [...]

Although airline mergers are always percolating in the industry rumor mill, there has been a noticeable uptick in recent weeks as analysts talk about possible tie-ups. With the acquisition last year of Northwest Airlines by Delta Airlines looking like it should be a success, creating the world’s largest airline, and capacity still over-pacing demand, the [...]

September 2009 proved to be a good month for the nation’s airlines posting the best on-time rate in six years.  Combined, the airlines achieved a 86.2 percent on-time rate with that percentage of flight arriving at their destination within 15 minutes of their scheduled time.  The ratings and airline rankings are provided by the United [...]

Delta Airlines has suspended a group of Pilots for two incidents in two days that occurred near the end of their respective flights. 

The first incident was with a Delta Airlines Boeing 767 arriving in Atlanta from Rio de Janeiro in the pre-dawn hours.  The pilots were cleared for a normal landing on the usual 27R [...]

Delta Airlines has announced schedule changes for next summer that will increase cooperation with Air France/KLM, Alaska Airlines and capitalize on additional synergies with former Northwest Airlines that it acquired last fall. 

This summer schedule and changes is the first fully combined schedule since merging with Northwest Airlines.  The new routes will be trans-Pacific, trans-Atlantic & Africa.  [...]

The Depart of Transportation has released the August 2009 on-time report for U.S. airlines.   The rankings are as follows:

Hawaiian – 94.7%
Alaska – 85.8%
SkyWest – 84.4%
Frontier – 83.8%
ExpressJet – 83.4%
Southwest – 82.8%
Continental – 82.4%
US Airways 81.4%
United – 80.1%
American Eagle – 79.6%
Mesa – 79.2%
Pinnacle – 79.2%
Delta – 78.6%
American – 77.2%
JetBlue – 76.0%
Northwest – 74.4%
AirTran – 74.2%
Atlantic Southeast [...]

Now that the U.S. SkyTeam partner has changed with the Delta Airlines acquisition of Northwest Airlines last year, we thought it would be good to take a look at the current make-up of the SkyTeam airline alliance.  No longer a Northwest/KLM venture, SkyTeam has been changing as the face of the global airline industry has [...]

Delta Airlines no longer expects to profit in 2009 as they posted a $257 million loss for the second quarter.  The loss was comprised of a net income of $191 million minus $58 million in merger related expenses and $390 million in fuel hedge losses.  Delta ended the quarter with more than $5.4 billion in [...]

The Department of Transportation (DOT) today approved Continental Airlines request to be excused from antitrust laws paving the way for its inception into the Star Alliance.  Not many details were provided yet, and there were only a few small restrictions on certain routes. 

This will give Continental the ability to dump Sky Team and join Star [...]

Lufthansa, Germany’s airline, announced that it will cancel non-stop flights between Portland and Frankfurt, Germany this September.  The airline has flown the route for six years, recently finding it suffering under greater losses due to the pervasive economic troubles worldwide.  This is a huge loss for Portland which has seen a dramatic 30 percent drop [...]

Delta has announced further flight cuts at their Cincinatti hub beginning in September.  They initially announced the cancellation of London and Frankfurt non-stops much to the dismay of the Cincinatti government and business associations.  Additionally, they have reduced about 50 daily flights out of Cincinnati starting in the September schedule. 

This brings the Cincinnati hub flights [...]

Since the Air France crash of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic earlier this month that killed all 228 passengers and crew on board, there have been two incidents of failing altitude and airspeed indicators on A330’s. 

One incident was on a flight between the U.S. and Brazil on a TAM Airlines A330 from Miami to [...]