Month: August 2022

In 2018, South American mega-airline LATAM announced it would spend $400 million updating the interiors of its fleet. To me the most exciting aspect of this was the introduction of a new business class product, given that the carrier’s offering has historically been pretty lackluster.

It has now been roughly four years since LATAM announced its cabin retrofit project, so I wanted to take an updated look at how the airline is doing with this, especially since a lot has changed since then — LATAM has gone through bankruptcy, LATAM has retired all of its Airbus A350s, etc.

LATAM’s new business class seats

LATAM’s new business class product consists of Vantage XL seats, similar to what you’ll find on RwandAir, Qantas, and SAS, among other airlines. These are fully flat staggered seats with direct aisle access and 18″ personal televisions, so it represents a huge improvement to the passenger experience.

Below is a video giving a tour of the cabin of these new jets.

When the project was first announced, LATAM did and amazing job with the pace at which it reconfigured planes. How’s that project looking at this point, given the

In the next couple of years, American Airlines is expected to debut two new kinds of business class seats. While there aren’t any new updates (at least not that I’ve heard), I thought it would be fun to take an updated look at what we should expect, and when we should expect it.

American’s new Boeing 787 business class (2023)

American Airlines plans to introduce a new Boeing 787 business class product as of 2023. American already has 48 Boeing 787s in its fleet, with a further 41 Boeing 787s on order. The airline is currently taking delivery of Boeing 787-8s, though starting in 2023, the airline should start taking delivery of its 30 remaining Boeing 787-9 orders.

We’re expecting American to debut a new business class product on these Boeing 787-9s. Some of these 787-9s are expected to be in an uber-premium configuration, featuring just 244 seats. This will include 51 business class seats, 32 premium economy seats, 18 Main Cabin Extra seats, and 143 economy class seats. As a point of comparison, American’s current Boeing 787-9s have 285 seats. Clearly these are intended for markets with lots of business class demand, like London.

What new business class seats

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Splunk

posted better-than-expected results for its fiscal second quarter ended July 31, while boosting its revenue outlook for the 2023 fiscal year ending in January.

But the stock was trading sharply lower in premarket trading Thursday on a slowdown in the company’s new business pipeline.

Where will President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats get the money to finance their large expansion of subsidies for green energy and extension of Obamacare subsidies for the upper middle class?

The simple answer is: “From hardworking taxpayers.”

Taxpayers across the income spectrum should expect they will ultimately pay for the left’s deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act.

But the new taxes would fall more heavily across specific industries and parts of the country. The largest tax in the bill, the new “book minimum tax,” accounts for $222 billion of the more than half a trillion dollars of expected new tax collections. The book minimum tax would hit manufacturing disproportionately.

According to recent government estimates by the Joint Committee on Taxation, manufacturing would bear 49.7% of the book minimum tax, despite accounting for only about 11% of the economy.

More specifically, the nonpartisan committee estimated that 16.1% of the tax would fall on chemical manufacturers and 6.9% on transportation equipment (mostly automobile) manufacturers.

Since the committee released those estimates, the Senate amendments to the legislation likely have reduced manufacturing’s share of the tax somewhat. However, even using a conservative estimate, manufacturing likely would still bear at least 2.5 times as much