Eastern Airlines to return - possibly
 

Interesting news:

http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/30/news...html?hpt=hp_t3

Eastern Airlines Coming Back
 

I read that a new investor group is trying to restart Eastern Airlines this fall. Airline to be based out of Miami using Airbus aircraft. We need to bring back more old airlines with all the mergers and less airlines to fly.

Eastern is gone so there is nothing to 'bring back'. Its going to a new airline but just using the Eastern name.

What's the advantage of "bringing back old airlines" versus starting new ones, and how do you propose any new entrant in the US market can survive long enough to cross into profit (cf. Virgin America)? We've allowed an oligopoly to take hold where it's virtually impossible to start a serious new airline. If it ever threatens the big boys, they'll crush it like a bug. We (meaning regulators) have ruined everything. I give "New Eastern" as much of a shot as Hooters Air.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BB10; Touch) AppleWebKit/537.35+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.2.1.1055 Mobile Safari/537.35+)

I'd give Hooters air a better shot, actually :D

Not to mention that by the time they called it quits Eastern did not exactly have a stellar reputation. Perhaps people have forgotten, but for all the other reasons alone this is another dodo.

I'm old enough to recall that decades before Internet communities, long before airline affinity programs, there was a club called WHEAL -- We Hate Eastern Air Lines. You could apply for membership and get a wallet card and everything. To say people had a love-hate relationship with EA would be charitable.

I still have my old Eastern Airlines employee badge - i wonder if I will have flight benefits on the new version? :D

Usually when people resurrect a defunct brand, it's because there was *some* positive brand equity associated with it. (Hey, let's resurrect all of those 1960's beers! @:-))

I don't know anyone who has such a warm and fuzzy reaction to Eastern Airlines. My last memory of them is all of the stranded passengers when they abruptly shut down, hours after reassuring the world that they weren't shutting down. Before that, I just thought of them as an airline that nobody had a good experience with.

I'm sure buying the brand assets now was pretty cheap. Why this little Miami charter outfit wants them, I have no idea. Seeing an A319 painted with that livery is a sure-fire way to make me run in the opposite direction.

I get why people have had this idea before with Pan Am. But I really don't get Eastern.

Eastern Airlines is back? You think enough time has passed?
 

Just read this:

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/art...0-737s-399328/

Wow. If you think your current airline is bad, you never flew Eastern Airlines back in the day. The last few of EAL were really bad.

I hope for them that enough time has passed that people don't remember the original EAL.

Let's be clear that this is nothing to do with Eastern Airways who run a really good operation out of Aberdeen and other UK cities to Norway and elsewhere.

No. You are correct. I believe its the Eastern Airlines that ran itself into the ground with really bad maintenance practices in the late 80s.

I believe that remembering that anything about flying in the past was bad and especially implying that it was worse than the terribleness of the present is a violation of FlyerTalk rules. Please re-remember EAL as a wonderful airline.

I wasn't aware that I was violating any FT rules by talking about Eastern Airlines. My apologies if I am. Please enlighten me as to these rules so I may avoid any serious repercussions for stating these facts.

Even if that is a violation of FT rules, i don't think you can force somebody to remember something that was clearly bad as something good...

Eastern Airlines is back? You think enough time has passed?
 

Sarcasm missed...

WOOSH!

------

I remember that. I also remember incident rates 10 times above the average and many FAA safety violations. Bogus parts, maintenance issues, etc. Having flown them a few times near the end, I remember is wasn't pretty.

OK it seems like I'm a minority of one here but I do have fond memories of Eastern. In the mid-1980s when I was very much a newbie to long haul flying I got messed about by Pan Am on a transatlantic trip. After many long and stressful hours of Pam Am's failure to get me from my origin to my destination, I eventually did the last leg with Eastern and arrived at my destination 18 hours later than planned with no luggage. I found all of the Eastern staff I had contact with on the ground and in the air were helpful and willing to go out of there way to try to resolve my problems and make what had turned into a difficult journey less stressful.

:D

Funniest post of the week :D

Bump

The first new EAL 737 landed in MIA

http://www.local10.com/news/eastern-...years/30323482

Now where is my Executive Traveler card?

What good is it to bring back a brand that nobody except old-timers remember?

Lovely. Very open-minded of you. :confused:

Well, I'm almost 50 and the brand is meaningless to me other than from being an airline geek. Do you really think there's a huge market of fliers over 50 that care about the brand?

It was certainly operating in your time and you were old enough to remember. It stopped operating in the 90's.

Is there a chance that someone would bring back the PanAm brand?

Two attempts at doing so in the 1996-2008 timeframes didn't really amount to a whole lot, though the Guilford operated carrier did last 10 years albeit the service was rather limited.

The brand does live on in transportation, though, as Pan Am Railways

http://newenglanddepot.homestead.com...anAmAyer04.jpg

I'm sure the warm and fuzzy nostalgia is an important part of buying rail shipment services for industrial chemicals these days.

Whoever bought the logo for consumer merch is probably doing pretty well though. Love my blue leather PanAm messenger bag.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_leoGYAeiH4...vator+bag.jpeg

This remembers me the only Eastern airlines flight I ever had.

I usually flew BRU-ATL direct on Saturday with SABENA's B747 but once had to travel with a colleague who insisted we fly out on Sunday (he could not miss his lovely wife an extra day) to JFK and fly Eastern JFK-ATL. We still would have time at the bar of the hotel for a drink Sunday night though.

Unfortunately the law of Murphy had to hit us with this idea.
At JFK it took ground handling one hour to open the frozen belly doors to unload the luggage. By the time we reached the Eastern airline terminal our connecting flight was gone and the next flight cancelled. Thus we had to wait some hours more to get the last Eastern flight out of JFK.
When we boarded Eastern made the following announcement: Easter airlines welcomes you on board our direct flight to Norfolk West Virginia....I did not much like the kitchen apron's uniforms from the FA, but we finally made it very late into ATL and when we checked in at our hotel on Lenox square the bar was closed.

But wasn't there a luxury type of airline flying ATL-JFK business class only at cattle class prices?
They did not last long if I remember.

Yup
 

Someone thinks it's been long enough...

http://airwaysnews.com/blog/2015/05/...1-certificate/

My best memory of Eastern is when Continental picked them up, and I flew my first Eastern flight on a Continental aircraft. Oh, what a relief. Back in the day when Continental taking over was a good thing. And why the FlyerTalk straw vote was so overwhelmingly in favor of Continental taking over United vs. USAirways getting it. Never was the saying, "That was then..." more true, twice. I digress. This post is really to relay the news above.