I don't think Hooters Air attracted anything other than folks looking for a dirt cheap ride to Myrtle Beach.
Whenever I passed by a Hooters Air gate, there was a bored Hooters girl standing by the podium twirling her hair and about thirty or forty senior citizens quietly waiting.
Kind of like the Hooters Casino in Vegas. Just imagine a low-rent dank casino with wooden siding, kitschy sayings on plaques and the stench of old canola oil.
Song airlines.. That was strange and a terrible idea.
"the airline engaged in a long-term branding strategy that identified a particular strata of hip, style-conscious professional women as their target market"
Ah yes, the 75K...Song, as in this Song?
You do know that wasn't really a real standalone airline, but Delta in disguise. It was just an iteration of this:
I very nearly wound up "working for" Pet Airways back when I was at Subair. Reports from the pilots were, uh, "less than complimentary" about the smell.
First time I've heard someone call Song a "terrible idea". It was the test bed for the current IFE and everyone I knew who flew Song raved about it.Song airlines.. That was strange and a terrible idea.
"the airline engaged in a long-term branding strategy that identified a particular strata of hip, style-conscious professional women as their target market"
I liked Vanguard, their first two schemes were simple but looked great on the 737s. The last scheme they had with the different colors gave the mad dogs new life. Aside from the MCI hub, they tried point-point flying from MDW, DEN and a few other cities for a while. They were doing MSP-MDW for about $20 each way when the first started it in the 90s. I remember one summer in MSP seeing that ad, calling their reservations at age 7 or 8, and trying to book a ticket to go spotting in Midway with the money my grandparents gave me that summer. Didn't know about the whole UM policy thing back then, that was a short phone call. They had a decent route map for an airline their size when they shut down in July 2001. If not for 9/11, they probably would have still been around or ended up merging.There was a time when I had to go from DFW to MCI a lot.
And there was Vanguard Airlines. And I was happy.
Alas.....
Yep. All first class service between LAX and JFK on 727s and DC-8s, leaving from the Imperial Terminal at LAX with little or no security and hassle, amazing catering onboard, telephones, flowing drinks, and limo transfers to your final destination. For a short time, they had a Twin Otter painted up doing SNA-LAX trying to attract pax who didn't want to drive(or be driven) to LAX. Brochure here and here.Does anybody remember MGM Grand Airlines?
What was cool about Song is that it was a Delta jet, Delta pilots but the cabin crew had to 'audition' and were a completely separate list so none of the "OMG I can't believe 15E wants a coffee, ungh, what am I a stewardess?" types were filtered out.
Minus the fact all routes started and ended in CMH with no connectivity. Besides that, they rarely flew to the cities they marketed. SWF was marketed as NYC and BLI marketed as YVR. CMH-secondary cities wasn't a great plan. Pretty much any LCC that made it big had a strong local market or a big city on one end of any given route.Did Skybus somehow miss it's calling? Perhaps just mismanagement but nowadays I think they could do well. Do everything on the cheap (wasn't that their thing?)...Let's face it there's a huge segment of the population that will endure anything to pay $2 less on a ticket.