From QUINTESSENTIAL JETS

PARIS — British Airways said Thursday that it was reinstating plans for a reduced flight schedule next week after an appellate court in London overturned an earlier ruling blocking a walkout by its cabin crews.

Unite, the union representing about 90 percent of the airline’s 13,400 flight attendants, said it was prepared to start an initial five-day strike as early as next Monday after the Court of Appeal upheld the union’s objection to an injunction granted hours before the walkout had originally been scheduled to begin on Tuesday.

“We are very disappointed for our customers that Unite’s appeal has been upheld and that the union intends to go ahead with its unjustified and pointless strikes,” British Airways said. The airline said it expected to cancel about one-third of its flights during the walkouts, with services to and from its hub at Heathrow Airport near London expected to be reduced by as much as 50 percent.

While the union has the right to call a strike immediately, its leadership said that it would take a three-day “pause for peace,” with an aim to resume talks with management.

“B.A. must now accept that negotiation, not litigation, is the only way to secure the settlement we all want,” said Tony Woodley, Unite joint general secretary. “However, further strikes will be unavoidable if the company does not immediately work with us to address the outstanding issues.”

Union members voted this month to stage 20 days of strikes in four waves to protest cost-cutting plans that included a wage freeze and a reduction of in-flight staff.

The union said Thursday that while the injunction had blocked the first wave this week, it was prepared to follow through with walkouts planned for May 24 through May 28, May 30 through June 3 and June 5 through June 9.

Unite reached an agreement in principle with airline management over the weekend that the union said would deliver the £60 million, or $86 million, in annual cost savings that British Airways has been seeking since late last year. The main sticking point, however, has been the restoration of discounted travel benefits that had been revoked for about 4,000 cabin crew members who took part in seven days of walkouts in March.

British Airways has offered to restore those perks once “all elements” of a deal had been put in place. But strikers’ access to discounted tickets would be on the same basis as newly hired staff, without regard to accrued seniority.

British Airways, which said it lost about £45 million during strikes in March, was expected on Friday to report a pretax loss of around £600 million for the year that ended March 31.

By NICOLA CLARK, The New York Times

AS soon as Continental  and United announced their proposed merger, news media outlets began reporting on how the union might affect travelers — less competition and higher fares being the primary concerns.

But some airline experts see those worries as overblown. First, the two airlines had effectively moved in together before deciding to get married, aligning their flights through a code-share partnership and linking their frequent-flier programs, so they were more partners than rivals even before the merger was announced. More important, most analysts believe that airfares are likely to increase regardless of whether these carriers tie the knot.

“The average person thinks that when you put a merger together it eliminates one competitor, but in this case it’s basically eliminating a brand name, not a competitor,” said Michael Boyd, an airline consultant with Boyd Group International. “For the consumer, it just means you’re going to be on an airplane with a different paint job.”

That may be the case, but lots of questions have been raised about this union. Here are some of the biggest issues being debated:

Is Bigger Bad?

Although the United-Continental merger still needs governmental approval, which may be months away, it is already clear that consolidation is happening in the airline industry, not only through mergers, but also through partnerships that link operations behind the scenes.

Besides the Delta-Northwest merger, which began in 2008, US Airways and America West joined forces in 2005. And last year a little-known regional airline company, Republic Airways based in Indianapolis, which flies under names like Delta Connection and United Express, bought Frontier and Midwest.

Global airline alliances, like the Star Alliance that United and Continental both belong to, have also become stronger, coordinating schedules to connect passengers between a domestic flight and a foreign partner headed overseas. Mr. Boyd predicted that these international identities would someday surpass national brands.

“You won’t be booking on United,” he said. “You’ll be booking on Star.”

In other words, “Too small to survive” seems to be the airline industry’s motto, and joining forces may be the lesser of two evils — going out of business being worse. What remains to be seen is whether there are ways to preserve competition — possibly through stronger government regulation — if consolidation is inevitable.

Will Prices Go Up?

As for whether fares and fees are likely to go up, Mr. Boyd said, “Plan on it, but not due to any merger.”

United States carriers lost $2.5 billion in 2009, primarily because of high fuel costs and fewer business travelers buying expensive tickets, so that fares have already been inching up, and most analysts expect that to continue. The same goes for fees for services like ticket changes (now $150 on many carriers).

A bigger factor affecting fares, analysts say, is whether competitors like Southwest, JetBlue or AirTran serve a particular route.

“These are the airlines that tend to set the pricing of the industry,” said Henry H. Harteveldt, a vice president and travel analyst with Forrester Research.

Low-fare carriers have been taking advantage of opportunities to expand when other airlines have given up slots and gates, but they tend to favor higher-traffic airports where they can consistently fill planes.

“It certainly is more difficult for secondary markets if they’re not a growing city or if they’re not an attractive leisure destination,” Mr. Harteveldt said, yet he added that carriers like JetBlue are increasingly taking a look at opportunities beyond big cities like New York and Boston.

“The low-cost carriers are all evolving their business models, and I think they realize there’s a business opportunity in some of these smaller communities if the network carriers either abandon these markets or charge too much.”

But most analysts don’t think a United-Continental merger is going to reduce service by much, if at all, because carriers have already cut back on flights so aggressively that planes are generally full and there are not many seats left to take away. Also, United and Continental overlap on only about a dozen routes, leaving few redundant flights to trim.

What Happens to Your Miles?

The biggest change likely to affect passengers will be the merging of the two carriers’ frequent-flier programs, but that was already in the works.

“United and Continental have worked really hard over the past year to get as close to a merger of frequent-flier programs as they could without an actual merger,” said Randy Petersen, the editor of Inside Flyer magazine, who has been tracking frequent-flier programs since 1986. “There are not a lot of differences between the two programs.”

Passengers can already earn Continental miles on United flights (and vice versa), and use their miles to redeem awards on either airline. Both carriers’ elite frequent fliers receive perks like upgrade privileges on either airline, and the companies even have the same credit card partner, Chase.

That means travelers who use Continental- or United-branded credit cards will not be wooed with the types of mileage bonuses travelers received when Northwest and Delta merged. In that case, the airlines’ respective credit card partners, U.S. Bank and American Express, showered bonus miles on customers to persuade them to stay or to switch banks.

One difference between the two programs is that United’s Mileage Plus miles expire after two years if a member hasn’t earned or used any miles during that time, whereas Continental’s OnePass program doesn’t have a strict expiration policy. Mr. Petersen predicted that the combined airline would adopt United’s approach, since that has become the industry standard.

Members of both programs will eventually be able to combine their Continental and United miles in one account, and though individual experiences vary, the scant data that exists suggest travelers have about the same luck actually using their miles to redeem awards in either program.

Delta, in contrast, is widely regarded as the worst frequent-flier program in terms of making seats available for award travel, especially at the lowest level, 25,000 miles for a domestic flight. So in the wake of that merger, many Northwest fliers ended up disgruntled.

The lesson from past mergers: if there is a policy difference between the two frequent-flier programs, the stingier one tends to survive.

Will Service Suffer?

The impact mergers have on customer service is another matter, and online forums are already full of discussions about which airline is better — United or Continental — and which airline’s standard of service will prevail when they are joined.

Continental generally ranks higher than United in the leading customer-service surveys, though airlines as an industry do not score high marks. As Mr. Boyd pointed out, this is yet another area where the merger is not going to change what was already happening system-wide.

“Consumers can rest assured that the air travel experience is going to get more hassle-laden than ever,” he said.

By SUSAN STELLIN, The New York Times

Sad news: Two small dogs belonging to actor John Travolta and his family were killed in an accident at Maine’s Bangor International Airport last week.

The Travoltas, dogs in tow, reportedly landed at the airport about 1 a.m. May 13. An unidentified person, described as “someone who is not a family member” in a statement released by the city confirming the accident, was walking the dogs from the tarmac to a nearby grassy area when they were struck by an airport service truck whose driver failed to see them. The dogs were both on leashes when they were hit, according to the Associated Press.

The airport is investigating the accident, the Bangor Daily News reported Tuesday. It’s unclear whether the driver, who has not been named, will face charges or disciplinary action. The person walking the dogs was not injured.

Airport mishaps involving dogs have been a hot topic in recent weeks; the Travolta incident was preceded by one in which a dog was lost while in the care of Delta Airlines staff members in the Mexico City airport.

That dog’s owner, Josiah Allen, recently told the website Consumerist that the animal was to travel to Ontario on a Delta flight, but he and his girlfriend “were told that it was never loaded on the plane in the first place, and that it was forgotten in Mexico City but would be cared for by Delta employees and walked, fed, watered, and would be sent on the next flight to Detroit, and then get delivered to my house in Ontario, Canada.”

When Allen called the airline the following day to inquire about the dog’s whereabouts, “no one seemed to have any answers or have any idea about the location of my dog,” he wrote. “I was shocked.” Eventually, a Delta employee reportedly said that the dog, a mixed breed named Paco whom the couple rescued from the streets of Puerto Vallarta, had escaped from his travel carrier and disappeared. Adding insult to injury, Allen said, was the fact that the airline responded by “offering their apology and refunding the cost for transporting a pet ($200USD) in a credit to be used with Delta Airlines. I think that this is completely absurd as there is no chance of me flying with Delta Airlines again.”

After the story broke, “Delta reached out to Josiah and said sorry, along with offering to reimburse him for all the costs he put into the dog and two additional $200 vouchers for future travel on their airline,” a later post on Consumerist explained.

Delta spokesperson Susan Chana Elliott told CNN in a statement that “staff have conducted exhaustive searches to locate the dog,” but Paco has yet to be located. Allen told Consumerist that he doubts the story that Paco escaped from his carrier, since it “was a very secure hard plastic pet carrier with two locks and a metal wire door, and there is no way a small dog (he looked like a mix of a wiener dog and a jack russell) could scratch or break his way out of it.”

Pet owners, what have your experiences been like while transporting pets by air? Let us know by leaving a comment — we’d love to hear from you.

By Associated Press

Air France SA, a unit of Air France- KLM Group, defended its safety record after French newspaper Liberation published a review of a book questioning the airline’s safety relative to other carriers.

“Air France’s safety standards meet the most stringent requirements in the international aviation industry,” the airline said in a statement published on its web site today.

The book, “The Hidden Face of Air France,” by an aviation reporter for France’s Le Figaro newspaper, says Air France might have avoided the June 1 crash of Flight AF447 into the Atlantic had it used available software that provides backup speed information, the book quotes an unnamed Airbus engineer as saying, according to Liberation.

“Air France is continuously working on improving flight safety which has always been one of its main priorities,” the airline said on the site.

By Andrea Rothman, Bloomberg

A captain returned to the cockpit after taking a bathroom break and found the first officer facing away from the instruments and talking to a flight attendant. Unnoticed was the fact that the autopilot had disconnected and the plane was in danger of stalling.

The incident is one of more than a dozen in an airline industry report in which the pilots failed to properly monitor the flight, the automation or even the location of their airplane. The report, which came out in 2008, is getting new attention in light of the most conspicuous recent example of pilots not paying attention: the Northwest Airlines flight that overshot its destination and traveled on for another 150 miles before turning back to the airport last October.

Whether these incidents are symptoms of a larger problem in the cockpit is the subject of a debate among aviation experts: are airliners so automated that pilots are becoming complacent?

The issue will be on the agenda at a three-day conference in Washington beginning on Tuesday, when the National Transportation Safety Board considers pilot and air traffic controller professionalism. “We at the N.T.S.B. are continuing to see accidents and incidents like the Northwest 188 event,” said a safety board member, Robert L. Sumwalt. “Here it shows we have proof that pilots are still not adequately monitoring the aircraft flight path.”

The problem of pilots losing track of some aspect of a flight is not new. It has been around, in fact, almost as long as the technology that allows computers to perform some pilot functions. In 2002, Mr. Sumwalt was one of three authors of a paper that claimed pilots failed to adequately monitor what the airplane was doing in one-half to three-quarters of the mishaps reviewed. That report was carried out after several incidents, including one in 1996 when the pilots of a Continental Airlines plane failed to make sure the landing gear had been properly lowered before landing.

“Humans are not good monitors over highly automated systems for extended periods of time,” said Mr. Sumwalt, who was a pilot for 24 years at Piedmont and then US Airways. “We want to acknowledge that you can’t expect someone to be extremely vigilant for five or seven or three hours.”

Not all experts agree. The Federal Aviation Administration said that neither the Northwest flight nor other incidents examined by the airline industry indicated a bigger problem.

“If we had any suspicions or trend lines, we would be making efforts to bring some change about,” the agency administrator, J. Randolph Babbitt, said in a telephone interview. Mr. Babbitt said the F.A.A. was more concerned that pilots, confused by the complex automation, were losing track of what the airplane was doing.

But the Northwest pilots were on their laptops, Mr. Babbitt said, doing work unrelated to the flight, a prohibited activity. “It doesn’t have anything to do with automation,” he said. “Any opportunity for distraction doesn’t have any business in the cockpit. Your focus should be on flying the airplane.”

Automation is generally considered a positive development in aviation safety because it reduces pilot workload and eliminates errors in calculation and navigation. “The introduction of automation did good things,” said Key Dismukes, chief scientist for aerospace human factors at NASA. But it changed the essential nature of the pilot’s role in the cockpit. “Now the pilot is a manager, which is good, and a monitor, which is not so good.”

Hugh Schoelzel, the vice president of safety at Trans World Airlines — a carrier acquired by American Airlines in 2001 — said most pilots had at one time or another lost track of where they were in flight. “Anyone who says they haven’t is either being disingenuous, or hasn’t been paying attention,” he said.

The episode in which the returning captain had to act quickly to save the airliner from a near stall was discovered by the Commercial Aviation Safety Team, an airline industry group, as it reviewed thousands of reports filed by pilots to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System to see if automation caused pilots to mishandle problems or to become confused or distracted. The group’s study, which ran from 2005 to 2008, highlighted 50 events in the five years prior to 2005. In 16 of them, the pilots’ failure to monitor the automation or the location of the aircraft was cited.

“I’m inclined to say it’s the very reliability of something that takes us out of the loop,” said Mr. Dismukes, who has written about the effects of automation on safety. “You may know, ‘Never turn your back, always check,’ and people may have that intention. But it’s hard to maintain that in practice when you’re not physically controlling the aircraft.”

Finding the balance between too much technology and too little is crucial, according to William B. Rouse, an engineering and computing professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Complacency is an issue, but designing the interaction between human and technical so the human has the right level of judgment when you need them is a design task in itself,” Mr. Rouse said. “When the person has no role in the task, there’s a much greater risk of complacency.”

Some airline pilots confirm this. “We’ve all been there, not intentionally, but because you get distracted from the task at hand,” said a captain at Continental Airlines who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Complacency is very subtle, he said, “No light comes on to tell you that you’re being complacent.”

At its meeting this week, the transportation safety board will hold discussions of the actions of pilots and air traffic controllers in two accidents in 2009 — the crash of Colgan Air Flight 3407 in Buffalo and the midair collision between a general aviation airplane and a sightseeing helicopter over the Hudson River.

Those accidents along with the Northwest incident all occurred within seven months of each other and not long after the Hudson River landing of US Airways Flight 1549 that turned the pilots of that flight into icons of professional airmanship.

Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the captain of the US Airways plane, said in an interview that it would be wrong to use his success in safely bringing down that plane to criticize pilots who make mistakes like those on the Northwest plane.

“Something in the system allowed these well-trained, experienced, well-meaning, well-intentioned pilots not to notice where they were, and we need to find out what the root causes are,” he said. “Simply to blame individual practitioners is wrong and it doesn’t solve the underlying issues or prevent it from happening.”

By CHRISTINE NEGRONI, The New York Times

DALLAS — U.S. airlines are doing better a better job of staying on schedule, according to the government.

The Transportation Department said Tuesday that the airlines averaged an 80 percent on-time arrival rate in March, better than February this year and better than March 2009.

Hawaiian Airlines, Alaska Airlines and Pinnacle Airlines had the best on-time ratings. JetBlue, ExpressJet and American Airlines had the worst.

The Transportation Department said 25 flights in March were stuck on the tarmac for three hours or longer — and four were grounded at least four hours.

New rules that took effect in late April could subject airlines to big fines for holding passengers on a plane longer than three hours without giving them a chance to leave.

The biggest offender in March was SkyWest, with 10 delays of at least three hours. SkyWest operates regional flights for Delta and United. An American Airlines flight from San Diego to New York on March 13 was held on the tarmac for five hours.

The airlines reported that one in every 269 passengers had a bag lost, damaged, delayed or stolen in March. That was better than March 2009, when it happened to one in every 236 passengers.

Your chances increased, however, for getting kicked off a flight even though you held a confirmed reservation because the airline sold too many tickets. For the first three months of this year, the airlines bumped 23,380 passengers, or 1.73 for every 10,000 travelers. That rate is more than one-fourth higher than it was in the first quarter of 2009.

Southwest carries the most U.S. passengers and bumped the highest number of passengers, although four airlines had higher rates: ExpressJet, Continental, US Airways and — last by a wide margin — American Eagle, the regional affiliate of American Airlines.

The industry’s on-time rate for March beat February’s mark of 74.6 percent and the 78.4 percent rating in March 2009.

The seven most frequently delayed flights were all operated by Southwest Airlines, according to the Transportation Department. One flight from Baltimore to New York’s LaGuardia Airport was late every time.

Southwest did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Transportation Department said the leading causes of delays were aircraft arriving late from their last flight, system delays — including weather, heavy traffic and air traffic control issues — and factors within the airline’s control such as maintenance and crew schedules.

Over the past two years, airlines eliminated hundreds of flights as fuel costs soared and fewer people traveled. That’s made the skies less crowded, helping planes stay on schedule.

In addition, airlines have stretched the scheduled length of many flights, making it easier to arrive on time even if the plane takes off late. The Transportation Department counts a flight as on-time if it’s within 15 minutes of the airline’s schedule.

But the airlines also face new obstacles. One of the four runways at New York’s JFK International Airport will be closed for reconstruction at least through June, and the Transportation Department noted that the work could make flight delays worse for all carriers operating at JFK and other airports.

By DAVID KOENIG,  The Associated Press

LONDON

The bitter battle between British Airways and its cabin crew has switched gears from an industrial dispute to a struggle for power with hapless passengers as hostages.

The risk, for both sides, is that there’s no winner.

BA boss Willie Walsh is gambling that his decision to tough out a 20-day strike beginning next week, dealing yet another hit to the loss-making airline’s finances, will defeat the Unite union’s job action.

Cabin crew are likely to bear the brunt of customer anger as they protest what they call management intimidation and seek to win back travel perks.

Neither side looks ready to compromise in a months-long dispute that started over changes to pay and working conditions for cabin crew, leaving thousands of passengers scrambling to change their travel plans for the series of five-day walkouts starting Tuesday. The dates are May 18-22, May 24-28, May 30-June 3 and June 5-9.

The stakes ratcheted higher after cabin crew cost BA at least 45 million pounds ($65.8 million) by walking out for a total of seven days in March and the airline retaliated by taking disciplinary action against strikers.

Analysts say that BA has enough money in the piggy bank to survive this walkout — and perhaps more — but its emergency fund is by no means bottomless. The airline is expected to reveal a third record annual loss when it posts its earnings May 21″Letting it get to this stage is a bit silly from both sides,” said James Halstead, an analyst at London’s Aviation Financial Consulting. “The danger is that there isn’t any resolution at all.”

BA and union leaders have found themselves at an impasse as the dispute has transformed into an ideological conflict.

Unite, which represents around 90 percent of BA’s 12,000 cabin crew, pushed ahead with the damaging March strike despite progress in talks on a deal. BA, meanwhile, sacked a senior union official on the final day of the ballot of workers for the current strike and has taken disciplinary action against some 50 others.

Walsh, a former pilot and union leader who was nicknamed “Slasher” by Irish unions for the sweeping job cuts he made as CEO at Irish carrier Aer Lingus, has long had a reputation as uncompromising and aggressive.

The customary hardline stance adopted by Walsh, who as a union representative claimed that “a reasonable man gets nowhere in negotiations,” helped him engineer a huge turnaround at Aer Lingus when it was left vulnerable in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

But the latest BA walkout is as much about principle and the survival of union power as it is about pay and conditions.

Walsh said Thursday that the airline was “absolutely determined to resolve the dispute and our door remains open to Unite, day or night,” but that overture was partly undercut by his following warning that wasn’t “too late for Unite to call off this action and protect its members’ job security.”

That fed into union worries that the BA boss plans to sack all striking crew, replacing them with less expensive staff, achieving significant cost savings for the cash-strapped airline.

Unite joint general secretary Tony Woodley warned this week that there would “no industrial peace without meaningful negotiations and while management victimizes trade unionists and uses disciplinary procedures in a witch-hunt.”

“Is he so determined to punish loyal and decent employees for supporting their union that he is prepared to push BA into the immense losses that will follow?” Woodley added.

That’s a question that investors are also asking, but they are so far supporting the BA boss as he gambles against the likelihood that workers have the stamina for more walkouts.

The company has been hit hard by the global economic downturn because of its heavy reliance on premium fare passengers on the trans-Atlantic route. As many leisure and business travelers seek lower cost options, there are fears that its core business will never fully recover.

Along with other airlines, it also booked big losses last month when an Icelandic volcano eruption caught the industry unawares, closing down European airspace for days as an ash cloud drifted across the region.

Walsh has repeatedly warned that the disputed changes to work practices, including fewer staff on long haul flights and a yearlong pay freeze, are necessary for the company to survive in a changed world.

Jo Valentine, chief executive of business group London First, said the strikes are “insular thinking divorced from economic reality.”

“This unnecessary escalation sends a worrying message to the world at the very moment UK PLC should be open for business and fighting its way out of recession, not locked in a morbid dance with the dogma and ideologies of the past,” she said.

The strikes, this time falling over a British school summer vacation period, a long weekend and the run-up to the football World Cup in South Africa, have also met with little sympathy from Britons whose own pay packets have shrunk during the country’s recent recession.

The airline said Thursday that it plans to fly more than 70 percent of its customers over the strike period, using leased planes and crew as well as BA cabin crew who decide not to take part in the walkout and staff seconded from other jobs at the carrier.

BA’s pilots will not be striking, having already sorted out a separate pay dispute with the airline.

By JANE WARDELL, The Associated Press

Emirates Airlines picked a dandy day to announce it would start flying superjumbo jets to John F. Kennedy Airport.

While the feds were raiding suspected terror nests in Long Island, New Jersey and Massachusetts, the airline on which accused Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad tried to make his getaway said Thursday its A380 jet “will make a much anticipated return to New York” this October.

“We promised to return the A380 to New York as soon as demand recovered, and we have been true to our word,” Tim Clark, president of the Dubai-based airline, said in a statement.

Emirates was criticized for allowing Shahzad to buy a ticket to Dubai in cash and board one of its planes – even though he was on a no-fly list maintained by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center.

By Corky Siemaszko, DAILY NEWS

This story is just heartbreaking. This Canadian couple went to Mexico for a vacation. While there they adopted an adorable dog that they named Paco. They took him to the vet and got him all the shots and cleaned him up. Then they paid $200 pet fee to put Paco on the plane back home with them. That’s where the story gets crazy. Delta lost their pet. At first Delta said that they knew where the pet was and that it was being taken care of by Delta staff and would be put on the next flight. Paco didn’t arrive on the next flight either and when the couple called Delta they were told that the dog escaped and offered $200 credit in return. Yes, that’s right. They didn’t even offer to give them a full refund for the pet fee, only credit to be used on future flights.

After some more back and forth, Delta spokesperson Susan Elliott says, “This is extremely rare for a situation like this to happen.” and that they would be offering “additional compensation as well as our sincere apology.” According to Consumerism, the latest on the story is that Delta has offered $380 plus two more $200 Vouchers.

This is messed up. To many people, their pets are part of the family. Priceless! Money won’t make the person feel better about the Airline losing their precious companion. If airlines are going to charge hundreds of dollars to transport pets, they should at least make sure the pets arrive safely.

By Gather

Frontier Airlines says it will let customers carry small pets on board, but it will cost more than some of the fares that Frontier charges its two-legged passengers.

The airline said Wednesday it would let passengers bring along their small dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters or small birds for $75 each way.

That matches the price charged by another low-fare carrier, Southwest Airlines, which began allowing customers to bring small pets on board last year.

According to its Web site, Frontier charges less for some tickets for people, including travel between Denver and Albuquerque, N.M., or between Milwaukee and Indianapolis or Kansas City.

The pets must fit in a carrier that goes under an airplane seat and must have proper health documentation.

The airline lets bigger pets fly as checked baggage for a $150 fee.

Frontier is a unit of Republic Airways Holdings Inc. Republic’s shares rose 6 cents to $6.21 in afternoon trading.

By The Associated Press