Virgin America Has Turbulent First Flight
By Dan Reed and Ben Mutzabaugh
Virgin America got an early taste Wednesday of what it’s like operating out of New York’s delay-prone John F. Kennedy airport.
The much-anticipated start-up saw its ceremonial inaugural flight from New York to San Francisco delayed nearly an hour by horrendous weather. Torrential predawn rain flooded most of the city’s subway system and closed streets.
Founder Richard Branson and CEO Fred Reid were stuck in traffic and late to the preflight inaugural festivities. Both made the flight, which took off at 10:50 a.m. ET, 50 minutes late.
TV comic Stephen Colbert was to have kibitzed in-flight to highlight the fun-loving, irreverent corporate style Virgin America’s leaders want to establish. But after hours of trying to get to JFK, Colbert went home.
The plane arrived just 35 minutes late. It was one of three first-day flights for the new discounter.
The return flight to New York departed 30 minutes late. A Los Angeles-to-San Francisco flight was on time.
Spokesman Gareth Edmondson-Jones shrugged off the New York weather. “This is a once-in-10-years storm,” he says. “Brooklyn never gets tornadoes, but it did today.”
But the new airline’s smooth operation hinges on two of the USA’s most delay-prone airports: JFK and San Francisco.
In the first six months of this year, congested JFK ranked 31st among the USA’s 32 busiest airports in on-time departures, according to government data.
In July, one in five JFK flights were “excessively late,” or at least 45 minutes later than scheduled, according to data from performance tracker FlightStats.
San Francisco International, Virgin America’s home base, ranked 12th among the 32 busiest airports for on-time departures, an improvement from a year earlier, when it ranked No. 28.
Brett Snyder, a former airline marketing executive who writes The Cranky Flier blog, says Virgin America’s transcontinental route provides it a large market to grow but that “keeping their operation running on time will be a challenge, because those markets are choke points.”
Analyst Henry Harteveldt, who follows transportation companies for Forrester Research, says making San Francisco International and JFK its two most important airports is risky.
“All it takes is snow in New York or fog or rain in San Francisco, and their network is compromised,” he says. “And if that stuff happens in both cities on the same day, they’re really stuck.”
Dan Reed reported from Fort Worth; Ben Mutzabaugh from the inaugural flight. (c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.