Virgin America inaugurated service today, with a celebration at JFK’s Terminal 4. However, early this morning, a massive rain storm hit New York in a short period of time, flooding all of New York’s subway lines, clogging highways, and shutting down commuter rails. At the airport, there were, of course, multiple delays.
Stephen Colbert, of the Colbert Report on Comedy Central, was scheduled to appear at the event to christen the plane Air Colbert. However, he was in a car for 4.5 hours in traffic, and was unable to make it. Able to make it to the event, the rumors say by taking public transportation and the Airtrain, were Sir Richard Branson, and Chief Executive(scheduled to step down) Fred Reid.
The plane, which left 50 minutes late at 10:50AM, brings the Virgin brand to the United States market. The service will begin with the popular New York to San Francisco route, and expand in the coming weeks and months.
Jetblue is perhaps Virgin America’s biggest challenger. It inaugurated San Francisco service in advance of Virgin, knowing they were coming. Dave Barger, Jetblue’s CEO, commented that Virgin will overlap on ten percent of Jetblue’s routes, and the carrier is not taking it lightly.
Virgin America, like Jetblue, operates a fleet of Airbus 320 aircraft. Now that it is free to launch, we will be monitoring the new brand’s success. As Reuters reports, some industry experts believe Virgin America will capitalize on unprecedented customer dissatisfaction and trigger a service war, rather than a fare war.
We would hardly complain about a customer service war…an area that airlines are experiencing high complaints in.
USA Today’s Today in the Sky blogger Ben Mutzabaugh was on the inaugural flight and provided coverage. We were unable to attend(We have day jobs). As Ben reports, one of the big curiosities of those onboard is the new IFE. “Red”, as it is called, operates by touch screen. Many of the functions have yet to be activated and others crashed. But overall, bugs aside, people seemed pleased with the system. One of the most distinctive features is seat-to-seat chatting, using a touch-screen or built-in remote control. He’ll have more coverage tomorrow, and we will follow up.