I have been itching to do something like this for a while.
I feel as if my desire to keep flying has been slowly re-awakened with the British Airways announcement this week that there would soon be a new “pilot experience” for London-bound passengers.
The policy is intended to make the flying experience more relaxing, fun and informative.
This kind of thing probably will have a marginal impact on fuel consumption but I’m actually more interested in the pros and cons.
There’s a sense in which the revamp sounds like a breakthrough, and that it seems, at first sight, to indicate the beginning of the next phase of travel technologies.
It is one thing to make the meals better, but quite another to think of improving the flight experience overall – to think, for example, of having instead of putting on reading material things that might help passengers with the trip.
The would-be guinea pigs of this new approach would likely be its passengers. It would be nice if it could also improve the performance of the airlines.
You can’t have everything but you can start to wonder how all this might play out. I’d like to keep going at it.
Incidentally, I now know that CAE is quite the Moneyball of airlines: value for money, long-term perspective and, also, mostly successful. It remains my favorite contractor – I know a lot of them.
There’s talk about CAE buying the AirCentre operations business from Sabre for US$392.5 million (very clean).
Sabre has been bought by US airline travel-planning company Sabre Holdings for US$1.25 billion.
AirCentre is a part of a division called Orbitz Expedia Holdings.
AirCentre provides reservation and aircraft crew monitoring services to airports, airlines and airlines’ transportation contractors.
The company generates annual revenues of approximately US$500 million and expects the acquisition to have a net impact on Sabre Holdings’ fourth quarter consolidated revenue of $33 million.
“We see continued strong demand for airline operations services as customers value our broad global reach and expertise,” said Paul McAleese, chief executive officer, Sabre Holdings.
“With this acquisition, we will become a stronger competitor in the air operations services marketplace,” he said.
CAE has a stated strategy of “discretionary health”.
I’m still full of enthusiasm for what other CAE aerospace and defence contracts might have in store.
Thanks for reading.
Image on the left is some office computer equipment from the office of a long-standing CAE client.
