Comair

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the US airline. See Comair (South Africa) for the South African operator.

Comair

IATA OH	ICAO COM	Callsign Comair
Founded		1977
Hubs		Cincinnati-N. KY Int'l Airport John F. Kennedy Int'l Airport
Focus cities		Boston Logan Int'l Airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Int'l Airport
Frequent flyer program		SkyMiles
Member lounge		Crown Room Club
Alliance		SkyTeam
Fleet size		168
Destinations		110
Parent company		Delta Air Lines, Inc.
Headquarters		Erlanger, Kentucky
Key people		Don Bornhorst (President)
Website: http://www.comair.com/

Comair is a wholly owned subsidiary of Delta Air Lines based in Erlanger, Kentucky, USA, a city near the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport, which serves Cincinnati, Ohio. Comair is one of the world's largest regional airlines, operating under the name Delta Connection to a large number of destinations in the USA, Canada, Mexico and the Bahamas.

It also operates some flights from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Recently Comair opened bases in Greensboro North Carolina, New York JFK and reopened its base in Orlando, Florida. Comair should not be confused with Con Air, which is the title of a movie that stars Nicholas Cage. In late 2006, Comair earned the disgraceful distinction of being at the bottom of the list for worst on time performance of all major U.S. carriers.^[1] This was the result of starting operations from JFK, a notoriously congested airport that severely dropped Comair's ratings in the FAA listings.

1 History
2 Destinations
- 2.1 Domestic Destinations
- 2.2 International Destinations
3 Fleet
4 Incidents and accidents
5 External links
6 References

The airline was established in March 1977 and started operations in April 1977. It was founded by Patrick J. Sowers, Robert T. Tranter, David Mueller and his father Raymond in Cincinnati and began scheduled services with two Piper Navajo aircraft. Under its parent Comair Holdings, it became a public company in July 1981 to support the growth and capital requirements to upgrade their fleet. It became a Delta Connection carrier in 1984. In July 1986 Delta Air Lines acquired 20% of Comair stock. Delta Air Lines acquired full ownership on 22 October 1999 at a cost of over 2 billion dollars.

A Delta Airlines Comair parked at Will Rogers World Airport (with the old Comair logo on tail)

On March 26, 2001, Comair's pilots went on strike. The strike cancelled the airlines flights and grounded its fleet. The strike ended after a new contract was agreed to 89 days later. Comair came to nationwide attention in the United States during Christmas 2004 when it cancelled all of its 1,160 flights for Saturday December 25 and Sunday December 26, stranding 30,000 people, many of them never reaching their destination for the holidays. The reason was a twofold combination of record snow and an unknown computer software flaw. On December 23 and 24, a record snowfall hit the Cincinnati area, forcing the airline to deplete its entire supply of deicing solution. With the area highways closed due to the blizzard, no additional deicing fluid could be delivered to the airport, and Comair was forced to cancel all flights beginning on Friday December 24. After receiving necessary supplies overnight, the airline began the process of startup when the computer system that handled flight crew assignments shut down. It had been designed with a hard coded limit of changes for a month, which were far exceeded due to the poor weather in the prior days. The software, ironically, had been in the process of being phased out at the airline in favor of a new system with more capabilities.

On September 14, 2005, Comair's parent company Delta Air Lines, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, forcing Comair into bankruptcy along with it. Comair announced that would cut costs by $70 million annually. These savings are to be achieved by aircraft, flight, and employee reductions.