Virgin America launches

So in the week that Hong Kong wins best airport for what I believe is the sixth year out of seven, Virgin launches "Virgin America" their new airline, funnily enough flying within the US.

Working for an American company, I have to travel over to the US on occasion and this normally means flying with an airline that is US based. American airlines has been amongst the worst for many years, in fact I would question if they were every good. Formed out the second world war with about the same sort of customer desire to see them as the people of Berlin or Dresden at the time, the airline has been given government protectionism for many years. This has had the effect of simply creating one of the worst industries in every possible way. Protecting these airlines from competition, upgrading their fleets and generally anything to do with customersatisfaction has funnily enough not worked very well.

The only airlines that are worse than American and North West (to name but 2 offenders) would be Air France and Korea Air. Air France because they are French and probably taught the American Airline industry everything they know about customer service (or more importantly what they don't know) and Korea Air who manage to break two records by having the oldest fleet in the world and one of the worst Air safety records, which I am going to guess has something to do with having the oldest fleet. Having flown Air Korea once and having smelt the Kim Chi that my fellow passenger was eating, I started to will the plane to crash so that the misery of the flight would end.

And this comes from someone who loves to travel and fly. But back to American Airlines. You know its bad when someone like Air Kenya has a better set up and flight crew than AA. I would rather scoop out my own eyeballs while listening to every Celine Dion record ever created in the depths of hell (even the crap she sings in French - I'm sensing a theme here) than fly on the above mentioned airlines, especially AA and Air France.

Of course there are some good airlines. I am a big fan of Virgin, simply because they are really are one of the best both in economy and Upper Class. Cathay always tops my poll, again a very good airline and comparable to Virgin. following these two are the always solid BA and Emirates who are pretty much up there.

So the launch of Virgin America is a solid boost. Will my company let me fly on them? Hopefully the corporate policy will allow mercy and so I grip to this chance of a better flight.

In summary and for what it is worth, I say good luck Virgin, fed up, tired and pissed off consumers that have been forced to fly the crap called American Airlines await you with open arms.