LiveTV to wire Italian airline

Melbourne-based LiveTV LLC announced Tuesday it has entered into an agreement with Italian airline Air One to provide in-seat audio/video systems on the carrier’s fleet of new Airbus A320 planes.

This is the first time the LiveTV system will be available in Europe. It also is the first installation of its type, according to LiveTV President Glenn Latta, as Air One passengers will be offered a choice of “stored programming,” rather than the live television feeds the LiveTV system supplies to its other airline customers.

“Strategically, it’s very significant,” Latta said. “Winning a new customer in the current industry environment is a tribute to the positive performance on all of our programs.”

The service will offer multichannel audio and video programs from on-board digital servers displayed on individual seatback screens. Latta said Air One selected the option for four channels of video and 20 channels of audio programming.

Under the terms of the agreement, LiveTV, a wholly owned subsidiary of JetBlue Airways Corp., will provide the system equipment, as well as support and content management services. Financial terms were not disclosed.

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Flight 93 Pilot’s Wife Concerned With Airline Security

The widow of the pilot of United Flight 93 says she’s very troubled by the state of airline security. Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania after it was hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

Pilot Jason Dahl died in the crash. His wife Sandy Dahl is scheduled to watch the film “Flight 93″ Tuesday evening at the White House with President and Mrs. Bush along with other families of those killed on Flight 93.

“I’m very excited and honored President Bush thinks enough of the families of United Flight 93 to invite us,” Dahl said.

The 40 people on board, including her husband, fought back furiously against hijackers on that flight. Dahl said the film accurately portrays “all the chaos, how we were so unprepared.” She says security is still not prepared the way it should be for another airline attack.

She said Tuesday she plans to bring up her concerns about airline security with the president.

“I can just tell you from being a flight attendant that things aren’t the way they need them to be after 9-11,” Dahl said.

Dahl questions the decision to allow small knives and scissors back on airplanes. She believes that the take-charge attitude captured in the movie “Flight 93″ has not been matched by those in charged of airline security in Washington.

“There are incompetent screeners at the airport,” she said. “These are my friends that work on these airplanes. Yes, it concerns me very much.”

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Astute handling Irish airline’s customer service

Astute Inc. will provide Ireland’s national airline with customer service operations.

The Columbus-based company’s ePowerCenter product will handle Aer Lingus Group Plc.’s consumer services in New York and at its Dublin Airport headquarters in Ireland.

The product is designed to serve call centers, providing advanced capabilities for communication and troubleshooting.

Astute is a customer service management company that focuses on sales, marketing and service operations. It posted an estimated $3.7 million in revenue last year.

Aer Lingus serves about 7 million passengers a year. The government-owned airline posted about $1.3 billion in revenue in 2005.

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Online turbulence for merged airline

As senior citizen pop star Neil Sedaka reminds us, breaking up is hard to do.

But when it comes to an airline, calling it quits is a breeze compared to merging two carriers into one.

The new U.S. Airways last week took its first major step: combining the old U.S. Airways and America West Web sites and frequent flier programs.

Customers immediately encountered bumps online. The site didn’t recognize city names or codes, responding that US Airways did not fly to its major hubs such as Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C.

Online check-in didn’t work. Dividend Miles members had trouble accessing accounts, and when they did, thousands of recently earned miles were missing. The miles would show up by June 9, customer service agents assured them.

Art Pushkin spent a half-hour last week trying without success to book a flight to California. He still can’t get past his Dividend Miles log-in page to see account details.

“They should have waited to until they got the site right,” says Pushkin, a top-level elite flier with US Airways from Dix Hills, N.Y. “What was the big pressure?”

Most glitches were fixed in a couple of days, the airline says. Considering the complexity of merging millions of computer records, the launch “went as expected and actually quite well,” said Travis Christ, vice president of marketing.

Frequent fliers on the popular on-line chat site FlyerTalk.com debated whether the airline blundered by springing an inadequately tested site on the public.

In fact, US Airways knew about the delay in posting Dividend Miles and anticipated other, unforeseen problems. But officials switched to the new site May 21 without telling customers to avoid overloading the system, Christ said.

“You would have launched a run on the bank,” he said. “Any bumps we did have affected a small number of passengers.”

Technicians tested components of the new software. Unlike one built from the ground up, however, this system had to start working in real time once US Airways records were shipped into the America West computers, Christ said.

Airline reservation systems are among the most complicated in the world of retailing. Just this year, Frontier Airlines and AirTran Airways had to pull the plug on balky new Web sites.

US Airways faces particularly knotty problems. The old US Airways contracted out management of its Web site and frequent flier program, while America West did the work in-house.

The airlines also use different reservations systems. That’s why you still see separate ticket counters at the same airport for US Airways and America West.

Combining reservations is the next big hurdle in the merger, scheduled for the first quarter of 2007. But it’s not the last. The airlines still fly separate routes with their own planes, pilots and flight attendants.

US Airways must combine employee seniority lists before operating as a single carrier. That’s a volatile issue for workers whose pay and work shifts are determined by their position on the seniority ladder.

The airline has been on roll lately, reporting a rare profit of $64-million this month for the first quarter of 2006. Its stock price has more than doubled to $44.61 per share since the merger last fall.

This is the first airline merger since online bookings became a major part of ticket sales, said Joe Brancatelli, an airline reporter and editor of JoeSentMe.com, a business travel Web site.

But he wonders what last week’s stumble signals for how US Airways will handle the other big merger questions.

“They’re getting to the hard stuff,” says Brancatelli. “And it’s not easy.”

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