You have to love the fact that the GOP supports business, even if it is mostly the Fortune 100s.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune today reported that the Grand Old Party announced Northwest Airlines as their choice to be the official airline for this summer’s GOP convention in the Twin Cities.

There was a fact the Star Tribune missed though.

There is NO other airline with enough service in and out of the Twin Cities to act as the official airline this summer except Northwest. At last count, Northwest controls about 80 percent percent of the traffic at MSP.

Of course, maybe United might try out to become a sort of GOP runner-up airline … if they can find enough crews to staff their airplanes that is.

Did you see the note last week from the United branch of the Air Line Pilots Association? United pilots didn’t want to take the heat for the huge round of delays and flight cancellations that good old UAL dropped on passengers around the system when an ugly ice storm broke the back of the UAL schedule again.

Nor should the pilots have taken the blame.

United ran short of pilots simply because it was that time of the month … the end … when pilots can easily exceed their FAA allotted flight times. Airline pilots normally can fly no more than 100 hours in any given month. The total amount they fly is also related to their actual time on duty, such as sitting around at the gate when the flight can’t depart for some reason.

When you ask pilots to pick up as much extra flying as possible early in the month – as United and other carriers have – it leaves little extra time for them to fly near the end of the month. Mix in a little bad weather and it’s a recipe for delays and more delays.

United decide to go back to square one at some point and simply cancel many holiday flights in order to get crews to the right place for future trips, stranding thousands of passengers in the process.

Sure we can blame United management at United for hiring executives with little common sense when it comes to taking care of the people who provide their bread and butter … both employees and customers. These would be the same executives who voted shareholders a nice dividend last month knowing that any cough in the system from too few employees to carry out the work would easily give the airline another black eye.

We’ve heard that bad management argument before … many times.

We need to place part of the blame for the current airline system squarely where it belongs … on the customer.

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