What a week.... Three Airlines, You're Out...

It all started with Aloha... Three days later, ATA was closing up shop.

ATA's failure was a little unexpected. For years, their bread and butter has been charter, specifically military charter. There was little question that they were about to close up their scheduled passenger operations -- ATA announced closing their MDW hub just a few weeks earlier, and it was widely speculated that they would be pulling their west coast to Hawaii routes up until the point Aloha collapsed. When that happened, some thought it would probably survive. Oops.

While many people saw ATA as a "new entrant" like Airtran, the fact is that they were around from 1973, which predated Southwest. In 1986, they dipped their toe into scheduled service from IND, and they expanded that to include a hub at MDW during the mid 1990's. They survived a bankruptcy filing in 2004, which lead to a bidding war between Southwest and Airtran (Southwest won), and were eventually taken private by an investment group in 2006. ATA Holdings was later renamed Global Aero Logistics, and bought World Airways in April 2007.

Ironically, the acquisition of World is what lead to ATA's demise. There are two major military charter teams with international airlift contracts from Air Mobility Command, one headed by FedEx, and the other anchored by North American/World. Prior to the World acquisition, ATA was participating on the FedEx team. After GAL acquired World & North American, it was pretty obvious they were getting the benefit of having ATA on one team, and World and North American anchoring the other team. FedEx decided to kicked ATA off their team at some point in early 2008, invoking a fail-to-perform clause. Rather than fold ATA into the World team, GAL decided to fold up the operation. Sad that 35 years of history had to end this way, but it did.

Sadly, when ATA closed up shop, another 150 employees from Aloha were laid off. Aloha held the ground handling contract for ATA's Hawaii operations...

On Friday, Skybus announced that it would be their last day of operations. In case you never heard of them, they were yet another attempt at hubbing an airline in Columbus, Ohio. Sounds like a great idea on a map, since hubs in Dayton, Pittsburgh, Cincinatti and Cleveland have worked at one point or another. Big difference with those examples is that they weren't the main hubs for Piedmont, US Air, Delta, or Continental.

Interestingly, Skybus didn't close due to bankruptcy. Instead, their investors decided it wasn't worth putting any more money into it.