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Monday, April 07, 2008

Uh....about that Skybus post from the other day....
Posted by Jill | 6:27 AM
That's what I get for trying to save some money.

When I found that it would be about $300 to fly Continental or American to Raleigh-Durham out of Newark, and that renting an economy car was going to cost over $50/day out of that airport, I had decided to see what was going out of Stewart Airport in Newburgh, and that's how I found Skybus, flying into Greensboro, where rental cars were also less expensive. I'm a fearful flyer at best, so flying God-Knows-What Airlines was a real leap of faith, so that it got me there in one piece was cause for celebration, and then I was able to appreciate the overall zaniness of the concept.

I haven't yet totalled the additional costs I incurred getting home, from the $269 for a one-way fare from Raleigh-Durham to having Mr. Brilliant drive me up to Stewart Airport yesterday to pick up the car and the associated tolls and such, and the additional day of parking at Stewart. But I'd guess that I ended up spending more than I would have if I'd just taken the airport shuttle to Newark, flown American Airlines, and rented the car at RDU.

And I'm one of the lucky ones. Imagine the people stranded in Hawaii after Aloha Airlines went bust just a few days before Skybus did.

When I first wrote the post, I originally referred to Skybus as feeling like the Air America of airlines, in regard to that (pardon the expression) "flying by the seat of their pants" feeling, as if this were a giant experiement and let's see if it works. In retrospect, and especially after reading more about the airline's origins, there was definitely something dot-com-ish about the whole thing, from the T-shirt uniforms to the egalitarian first-name basis of the cockpit crew, to the airborne shopping mall, to the $10 ticket gimmick, to buying brand new planes for a startup, when most low-cost airline startups (such as the old People's Express) buy older planes from other airlines.

The only thing missing was the foosball table.

Skybus' CEO, Bill Diffenderfer, seemed to be the kind of Cool Guy who would run a company differently from the Jack Welches and the Bill Gateses and the other ruthless corporate titans we've come to associate with corporate America. Even Google, with its "Don't be evil" motto, is suspect now, given the bazillions of gigabytes of data on just about everyone housed on its servers. But Diffenderfer is a guy who wrote a book called The Samurai Leader: Winning Business Battles With the Wisdom, Honor and Courage of the Samurai Code as part of his OTHER career, to which he said he was returning when he "resigned" (=ahem=) on March 24.

Of course the samurai were also warriors who killed people, but that doesn't make as good copy as a corporate titan who believes in honor, courage, and the arts. It's no wonder that flight attendants were willing to work for $9.50/hour plus tips and commissions on what they sell.

But when your CEO is a guy who sees running an airline as a stepping stone but what he really wants to do is write books, and your business model is based on $62/barrel oil, was was that of Skybus, and oil goes to $104/barrel, it's difficult to make a go of things. How anyone could have not anticipated speculative increases in the price of oil, given the situation in the Middle East and profiteering by petroleum traders is another indication of the kind of pie-in-the-sky thinking that gave rise in the 1990's to companies like Kosmo.com. And when an already-caught-with-its-pants-down credit card industry that has parcelled out credit limits for just about anyone with a pulse, stops paying you until passengers have actually flown, it's hard to book your revenue to keep going.

I don't know if in an era of increasing fuel prices, it's possible for any startup airline, let alone one based on low ticket prices and scrambling for revenue via other means, from selling advertising blurbs on the safety lecture to selling chocolates and TSA-approved luggage locks on your planes. But when I think about the 450 Skybus employees who were unceremoniously dumped by their "code of honor" employer last weekend with no notice, and I think about how patient the flight attendants on my flight were with an elderly woman who needed practically a piggyback ride on an attendant half her size to get to her seat, who had obviously had a stroke and couldn't speak intelligibly and was deaf as a post; when I remember how they tried to give her the safety spiel in a way she could comprehend, and I think about them doing this for $9.50/hour, only to be left virtually on the tarmac with nothing but their Skybus T-shirts, my experience wasn't so bad.

I just hope that some other airline hires these people quickly. Because you don't do what these people did and take this kind of leap of faith unless you love what you do.

Especially now, when people hate airlines more than ever before.

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