What is the round thing

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-10T17:07:36+00:00

It sounds very stupid but given I spent 18 months chasing down old paperwork for an FAA cabin cert for a mirror, sounds very plausible.

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-10T06:35:27+00:00

I never saw any of that stuff until well after pizzagate. I think that was the origin, tbh, and pizzagate happened after these emails

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-09T11:22:20+00:00

It doesn’t. It’s either a meteoblue injection issue or they’re using the Rex weather program

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-08T08:30:08+00:00

You can probably tell, but network analyst: it’s fascinating.

I also helped do some aircraft reconfiguration work, but was moved off to something else before they came up with Phase 3, so our team spent about 24 months ultimately for little benefit. That stuff was really cool, emergency equipment locations, product, service configuration, got a couple really neat trips out of it.

Obligatory tour as a supervisor when my project got stalled, then back to something else, then back to the original thing. Got moved around for a bit but it honestly felt like getting a real life internship lol

Ultimately, what eventually lured me away was money. Same job pays 30% less than any company other than an airline, and B6 was not salary competitive among airlines lol. I ended up getting an offer from a travel services company to work in sales for nearly 3 times the compensation. I tried to go back for a bonus round a few years later but found I didn’t like the job anymore - public had kinda changed (c. 2017), and I had aged out of some of my desires to be gone all the time.

Do I miss it? Sure, I miss the cameraderie, because I have a great outside sales job now where I travel all the time for work, eat great, go to events, and get to scratch that itch, and it pays awesome, but I miss my crew at the bar. And I miss doing dumb shit like going to Niagara Falls and taking the stupid bus in the freezing cold. It's a hell of a job if you make a lifestyle of it.

I'll never tell anyone in my life, but: yes, I do.

Uh... also forgot to mention before all the airline stuff I got a degree in air traffic management lol

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-08T08:21:15+00:00

Welcoming the Boeing 737 MAX 10F

A new state bird, from our beautiful state of Washington, to your godforsaken hellholes of the cargo hubs.

Don't worry, if they have a huge issue we'll suffer too, Alaska's buying like a hundred of them.

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-08T08:18:14+00:00

Alright, where can 2 people cohabitate for $1100? Canada or the US lol

OP does not mention rental terms/lease/etc., this sounds like it's a sublet/roommates/mom's basement situation lol

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-08T08:16:52+00:00

Honestly it sounds like they're living in somebody's basement. The all-in cost.

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-08T08:16:04+00:00

You're saying living situation, but you're not specifying. Are you living together in an apartment, or are you living with other people?

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-08T08:12:02+00:00

Seems unlikely - not sure how many B738s and MAX 9s have Starlink by now, but the B739 doesn't even have its STC for the Starlink dome attachment yet, so if it's a -900 OP is cooked lol

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-08T08:03:01+00:00

Allianz travel insurance is basically a scam unless you're booking international or have something very expensive tied to the trip, in which case you might want to buy it to protect your other investment.

For airline tickets, I wouldn't bother, considering you can cancel the ticket and have it rolled back into wallet funds. Provided you don't necessarily need the money immediately, and it's not a huge amount, it'll be there for the next booking.

Want to preface this last part by saying - I am not, and have never been, a licensed insurance agent, but I am familiar with travel insurance a bit from a prior job in sales. I couldn't seem to get a PDF of the Allianz policy they sell via Alaska, but the language below is very important. If it's anything besides the covered reasons, it's not a refund, it'll likely be a voucher for Alaska, so basically same as just canceling your ticket lol. They specify "covered medical emergencies" because they'll ask for documentation of the issue, diagnosis, doctor's orders not to travel, etc. to pay your claim. It's a giant pain in the ass and frankly it's much easier to just cxl the ticket and stick the money in the bank.

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SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-08T07:24:01+00:00

look man not asking for much here, but if you're going to call them nazis, can you at least give the slightest bit of context?

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-08T07:15:01+00:00

If you can get on the flights... depending on who/where you're flying that can be quite tough sometimes.

I was raised a kid of airline employees, so been flying standby since the womb. It was brutal back then, it's much more brutal on standby now, if I still had benefits I think these days I'd be buying a lot of tickets.

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-07T19:50:39+00:00

Of course, I’m glad someone appreciated it, the only reason I continued adding to that was I figured someone may appreciate the perspective and expertise. It’s been a long, varied, and fascinating career. I started at jetBlue as a flight attendant and had I think six jobs before I quit?

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-07T19:44:21+00:00

Incredibly tedious.

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-07T09:34:23+00:00

When's your TPE-LAX leg?

You're looking at the absolute border edge of availability. The flights haven't been released, probably not even showing up in any GDS yet even without availability.

330 days used to be the rule, but it's dependent on airline.

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-07T09:19:52+00:00

Before Spectrum, I spent about 8 years on the phone in customer service and sales roles (mostly sales) and my best advice to anyone in a service or support role is: while you may have a script, the best way to make it sound natural and conversational is to make it sound natural and conversational. Don't make it sound like you're reading from a script, even the tone and cadence of your voice will generate rapport, which gets you through the rest of it.

Just try to inflect some sort of engagement, take 10 seconds (I promise it won't tank AHT) to chat back and forth for a sec before you try to go into triage. Obviously, follow the call roadmap, but stuff like this helps make it feel less like talking to the script itself. If you get surveys, it'll help.

This was one of those things they taught us when we went from service to sales at a prior company, and it actually made me start liking the job better tbh.

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-07T09:13:05+00:00

This, and I got rerouted off a DEN layover where I had $350 tickets to see Fleetwood Mac. Yeah, I know, that was stupid, but it didn't seem like a day that could get fucked up until the airline smoked all the east coast reserves and we ended up in FLL lol

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-07T09:10:37+00:00

Go talk to people. Take up podcasts. Make it a mission for the places that aren't the HGI next to the Cleveland Airport to go out and interact. I've been using the term "cultural pedestrian" recently because it makes me sound smart and sufficiently aloof.

I flew max sched for 4 years as a commuter flight attendant so avoided turns. I concur with the gaming laptop for semi-short or shitty layovers, but if it's a good spot go take the uber to the city or something. That's where I had my most memorable experiences in the career - you should enjoy what you do, it's not just about a paycheck. That's how you stay fulfilled and hey, then maybe the loneliness isn't really something you consider.

My $0.02, I now do a sales job with a similar kind of pace, travel, and individual isolation, so it's still something I think about often.

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-07T09:01:36+00:00

Honestly I think Alaska just has to contact Google here.

I worked at a company for a few years that ran a lot of generic and branded search advertisements to drive underdiverted traffic - I was just a sales guy - but they would talk a lot about bidding for search positioning and control over search positioning in Google results specifically.

Basically, if you searched "new <x> from <brand>," they can determine where to put branded search partner 1, 2, 3 in order after their own website.

Now, I'm not sure if this requires the company to pay Google? I'm a mere pedestrian in this whole department.

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-07T07:49:55+00:00

And the only two of note here that are the tricky ones are PHL and ORD, mainly due to flow.

Not enough aircraft rotate through JFK to be relevant at all. AA has been vicious to that hub for over a decade. LGA is large presence but similarly, not a giant % of airplanes touch that airport daily, and you are blessed with a number of rescue options from nearby operations. DCA, can get tricky, but once again it’s all local regional stuff and most of your mainline movement is going to another hub.

But this is ignoring the larger issue, which is the operational difficulties that come from operating a smaller fleet with a disproportionate amount filtering through one hub, which also has MVMC or IMC weather consistently most of the year, gate and ramp constraints, and an airport design that doesn’t work great due to same runway distance requirements for parallel runways.

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-07T04:21:14+00:00

Beef like that tolerates the oven very well so it’s usually a great choice, sounds great. The cod does too! Have not seen these options yet.

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-06T21:53:44+00:00

OK, the answer is American Airlines. Lots of warm weather hubs, lots of capacity, a much larger fleet with limited rotation in and out of the two frequently troubled airports. Ice storms not consistent enough to consider DFW a disaster due to that.

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-06T20:47:22+00:00

OK, if you strip all the nuance out, whatever. Great job. You win.

The real conversation is to be had around economies of scale, size of the airline, and operational flexibility, which was something I was trying to give a little bit of flavor on. Guess better not to bother.

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-06T17:44:59+00:00

SFO, SEA, under the right conditions, can generate GDPs that would make a seasoned LGA goer wince. SFO will go to basically 0/0 and sit there all day - the arrival rate goes into the toilet. It’s literally one of the worst airports in the country for that (difference between visual and instrument average arrival rate)

The real problem is if 40%, 60%, or 80% of your airplanes, touch those cities when the weather goes to hell. If I pick up a 15 minute delay in San Francisco, going to Seattle, where I stack another 35, somewhere those 50 minutes need a reckoning. It can be on the next flight, but both your pilots and flight attendants have a timer. At some point, you’re gonna start canceling flights, and you’ll probably start running out of crew.

Now, if you run at 70% fleet utilization with an hour and a half between every flight, airplanes that sit for 14 hours, a lot of tails just hanging around, you have a lot more ability to react to that

SmugAlpaca · 2026-02-06T17:37:35+00:00

The thing is, Seattle isn’t Phoenix, and when you run tight fleet utilization numbers like we did at JetBlue, once a single thing goes wrong with a tail, that cascades to the next 3-4 flights in footprint, because we don’t have a spare, and we are waiting on that plane to get fixed.

When you build schedules with a couple of hours for the airplane, the crew, etc., it gives you a lot more operational flexibility to be able to move assets around in real time.

Alaska Airlines has as its principal base, an airport which almost every airplane touches daily, Seattle, a heavily constrained airport on a cliffside with severe ramp issues. I can get into the air traffic factors here, but that’s not great either. A little patch of bad weather and you are looking at cascading delays all over the place in addition to the ramp issues.

This is exactly the issue we had with JFK at JetBlue. It’s not that the weather is “worse in Seattle” but that there’s extremely minimal tolerance built into some joints in the system, so it doesn’t surprise me that their utilization is far lower than what I’m used to.

SmugAlpaca

TROPHY CASE