Long-haul sally
More carriers try to go the distance with no frills
Perhaps jetblue believes that the sky is darkest before dawn. On August 11th America’s sixthbiggest airline, known for its nofrills domestic services, launched its first transatlantic flights, between New York and London. The timing seems plucky. America has yet to follow European countries in lifting tough pandemicera crossborder travel restrictions. Industry insiders think that longhaul travel will be the last sort to rebound. And lowcost intercontinental travel has historically been a tough business. Can JetBlue crack it?
The flight path of failure can be tracked from Freddie Laker’s Skytrain in the 1970s, via People Express, Tower Air and Air Berlin, to the more recent hard landings for Denmark’s Primera Air in 2018 and Iceland’s wow in 2019. Norwegian Air Shuttle, which had captured a third of the worldwide lowcostlonghaul market, gave up on it in January, a victim of reckless expansion as much as of covid19. Even survivors have little to shout about. Malaysia’s AirAsia x has made an annual pretax profit only twice since it went public in 2013.
Budget airlines have transformed shorthaul flying by running simple pointtopoint operations that eschew the hassle of connecting passengers across a complex network. They keep aeroplanes in the air for longer each day than fullservice rivals do, fly from less popular airports at ungodly hours when charges are lower, cram punters into minimal legroom, charge extra for every tiny comfort and keep labour costs down by employing fewer and cheaper staff.
These tricks do not translate well to longhaul travel. Sweating costly assets is harder on a tenhour journey crossing several time zones than when darting around a region with fast turnaround times. That makes it difficult to schedule flights to take off and land at those odder, cheaper times. And exhausted crew must be accommodated in hotels rather than being immediately rostered back to their own beds at the end of the day.