OK, so I’m a procrastinator. Thus these photos are about a month old. But… I went nuts with the camera as usual; here are some photos from my BUR-LAS trip last month.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44041168@N05/sets/72157629447589331/with/6927169723/

As usual I was waaaay more excited about going to the airport than I was about Las Vegas. I swear there’s something wrong with me. Oh, and I wish I could have gotten a picture of a particular flight crew member on the way home, but that’s a completely different story that I’ll keep to myself. ;)

This has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the content of my blog. But it’s just freaking hilarious :)

Super Fun Happy Slide FTW!

I don’t have cable right now. Or broadcast TV for that matter (I live in an area that if you don’t have cable you can’t even get a signal, digital converter box or not.) So I watch airline commercials online every once in a while.

I did notice though, that every time I do watch TV, I don’t see a lot of them anymore, except for during football games. Which is cool, because they’re mostly for Southwest. That rocks. But… I’m not that big a fan of Southwest’s current commercials, the ones with the referee. They’re…just not that funny. (But I still love Southwest, don’t get me wrong.)

So I was trying to think about something to post about earlier and thought, why not airline commercials? Here’s a few that I came up with in no particular order.

First of all, OH GOD WHY IS THIS STILL STUCK IN MY HEAD:

After I first saw this I got the stupid jingle stuck in my head for like a week straight. I have no idea why. And obviously I can’t even appease the gods by flying AirCal, because it doesn’t exist. Frustrating.

No, I do not remember what it was like before Southwest Airlines, and I don’t really want to either.

I swear if I ever make it into another Southwest interview, I’m finding one of those uniforms or making one and wearing it. I would probably need to lose some weight though, haha.

Heh. The lady in that commercial was pretty cute…

…um… what? Ahem. Moving on…

Boy, the 70’s and 80’s loved putting jingles in the commercials, didn’t they? I can’t complain though, simply on the grounds that PSA was pretty cool.

…And just to be stupid, I’d like to end with a cheesy commercial from Alaska, just to prove that not all airline commercials are good. Alaska did have a few good commercials, but damned if I could find any of them.

I think I set out to make a point, but I did not. Random indeed. Have a good night.

I keep forgetting to blog for some reason. I don’t know how people come up with stuff to post about multiple times a day.

I’m seriously trying to think of something worthy of blogging about. I mean, I can’t just sit here and type gibberish, can I?

So here’s a random picture anyways. And of course, it’s my favorite place on the planet. (Aside from Vegas.)

Drool.

I first watched this video when I was taking a private pilot ground school class at a local community college. Sadly, I didn’t get to finish the class, but I still love this thing. The video’s basically centered around a local airport, VNY (Van Nuys airport, pretty close to where I live now… oh, did I mention I moved back to Los Angeles?) VNY serves smaller planes and jets for rich people, but it’s still cool. There’s just something about how the video portrays how awesome flying is that still gets me.

Anyways… enjoy before I keep rambling.

First off, I do apologize for the horribly long time with no posts. It does appear though that I’m finally at a point where I can start making regular entries again. Now if I can just come up with something to post about…

Oh, and thanks to my new followers for… uh… following me, even though I haven’t updated in forever.

I’ll find something to say later today. Promise.

-amanda

Kind of weird how this ties in with the weather around where I live lately…

I know I don’t post a lot, and this blog is fairly new, but I’m gonna have to take a short hiatus… no internet where I’ll be, at least for the next three to six months. Hang in there, I’ll be back… eventually. :) 

Don’t get me wrong, I still love Southwest’s commercials. But this has my vote for Coolest Airline Commercial Ever (at least that I’ve seen). ‘Cause Muse rocks. And VS’s F/A’s have cool accents. And they’re attractive to boot. :)

Hmm.. maybe I’ll make a post later about airline commercials. But meanwhile, enjoy.

Let’s try this again, even though I’m still not quite sure how to put it to words.

Another mini-obsession of mine involves defunct airlines, especially from the 1980’s. If you asked why I’d probably give a variety of reasons, including the cheesy commercials, the fact that you could run up to the gate at the last second and actually get on the plane (and don’t even mention the free food once you boarded)… and don’t even get me started on the uniforms. Seriously. Why the defunct ones, I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with my other non-airline interests in abandoned buildings and malls, that whole “hey, that used to be there” thing.

Anyways…. Once upon a time in California, there was pretty much one airline that got you around the southwest US often and for cheap. That airline was Pacific Southwest Airlines, otherwise known as PSA, and that’s who I’m talking about today.

Note: PSA has absolutely no relation to Southwest Airlines. Although that would be pretty cool. :)

PSA started out in 1949 with one plane, headquartered and flying out of SAN with runs to OAK via BUR once a week. To make things short and sweet (thanks, Wikipedia), by 1980 they had a hub at LAX and service had expanded to SMF, SJC, LGB, and ONT. Now go learn your airport codes. :)

Then deregulation happened. From what I remember out of the paper I had to write, basically what that means is in the past airfares were controlled by the government, as were routes. There was actually an agency that an airline had to go through to get a new route approved, which was lengthy and expensive as heck. This would probably explain why TWA and Pan Am were so popular, because they had the bucks and the connections to get it done. (If I’m wrong, please correct me).

If I stray off topic one more time, I’m gonna cry. It took a few years; basically after deregulation in 1978, after much court fighting and such, eventually airlines were allowed to control their own fares and routes. This created a huge wave of what I like to call flash-in-the pan airlines, who tried to profit from the new freedom and just didn’t make it. The other problem, which I set out to talk about 5 minutes ago, was a LOT of fare wars. Of course PSA got caught up in this.

PSA continued to expand their route network, and meanwhile due to the fare wars the more powerful airlines were starting to gobble up the others. A lot of the flash-in-the-pan airlines, like I said before, just couldn’t handle the fare competition and either died flat out or were acquired by legacy carriers like Delta and American. However, PSA managed to hang on for a few more years while former California competitors Western and AirCal were merged with… hey, you guessed it, Delta and American. 

Eventually in 1988 PSA finally gave up to a “hostile takeover” by my least favorite airline on the planet, USAir. I’m not going to get into the details because a) it’s already on other sites and b) you really don’t want to hear me complain for pages. The last actual PSA flight was April 8, 1988, IIRC between LAS and SAN.

US slowly ditched or integrated with PSA’s route network and by 1994 it was completely gone. There was, however, some good out of this: pretty much every gate and route that PSA left behind on the West Coast, Southwest Airlines picked up and ran with. So really I should be grateful that PSA got eaten, because otherwise it would have been really hard for Southwest to have gotten into the California market.

….Am I even making any sense? Please tell me I am.

I really just like PSA because they shared a lot of the same qualities as Southwest: low fares, awesome customer service, convenient flights, a sense of humor that involved hiding flight attendants in overhead bins, you know. And when I was living in Los Angeles, a lot of people reminisced about PSA like it was the best thing since sliced bread. Oh, and if anyone’s ever seen the movie Zodiac, I actually screamed in the theater at that part where they fly PSA back up to the Bay Area.

Yeah. I think that’s about it. If I’ve confused the heck out of you, here’s some links about PSA to help you out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines

http://www.psa-history.org/

http://www.catchoursmile.com/

…Meanwhile, can I have a time machine, please?

 I know, I said before that I was going to talk about PSA next. But I’m going through some serious writer’s block. I tried. Seriously. And PSA deserves more than the 2 or 3 half-ass sentences that I just deleted. So here’s a link instead.

Southwest Airlines has a blog:

http://www.blogsouthwest.com

It’s actually pretty cool and has won some awards. They talk about a lot of topics, everything from what it’s like to work at Southwest to cool historical posts about what some of the airports they serve were like in the past. Check it out when you get a chance.