Flying Into The Past

Delta has announced that they will test an "innovative One-class product in the Atlanta-Houston and Atlanta-Kansas City markets. Essentially, they are going to offer a flight in which all the seats are their business class seats: leather with a 36" (almost usable) seat pitch.

Let's see...An all "first class" flight...Where I have seen that before?

Well, Midwest Express has been doing it for years on their flights, but it actually is not a new concept for the airline industry. Used to be that every flight was all first class.

Unfortunately, I don't foresee Delta (or any airline other than Midwest Express) expanding this program. It may be wildly popular and even successful, but it introduces a number of operational issues to an already complex daily flight plan.

The aircraft being used are all of a different configuration than every other airplane in the fleet. In order to maintain the schedules, they're going to have to keep at least one, possibly two planes in reserve. Those aircraft will pretty much be unusable on any other route.

If this is successful, Delta is going to face a difficult decision: they can either expand the experiment and move more aircraft out of the mainline fleet or they can cut short the experiment and reintegrate the dedicated aircraft into the mainline fleet after scrapping the program.

Given the additional layer of complexity that this adds to fleet planning, fleet scheduling, and dealing with the various weather events that face airlines every day, I would say that the smart plan would be to either significantly expand the program in very short order or get rid of it altogether.

But Delta doesn't do it like that. They'll probably go at it half-heartedly hampering the effectiveness of the program and adding to the potential disruptions to service for the rest of us when we fly.

This sounds like a great idea - a response to a perceived need - but the implementation I think is going to be more of a problem than Delta is anticipating. But remember, none of the major's low cost division have been very successful and this is just a variation on the theme, going after service instead of price.