It's 7:48 a.m., and ValuJet Airlines Flight 2003 to Atlanta from Chattanooga, Tenn., is ready for departure. Passengers are already leafing through ValuJet's in-flight magazine, Good Times. Excited children decorated with ValuJet wing pins have to be told to sit down. Welcoming voice comes over the speaker system: "Thank you for traveling with ValuJet."
With that, Flight 2003 pulls out of the Greyhound bus terminal and onto the highway.
The distinction between the plane and the bus has been blurring for years, as airlines shoehorned more people into cramped cabins and phased out meals in favor of peanuts. Now, it's official: Four airlines in five major airports -- Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Newark, N.J., and San Francisco -- have connecting "flights" that are, in fact, buses or vans.
Chalk it up to changing airline-industry economics. After deregulation in the mid-1980s, airlines expanded into new markets with short commuter flights. Today, the resulting congestion at major airports has convinced some carriers that buses and vans can serve those short hops just as well. Within a two-hour driving radius of a big airport, small planes don't offer much of a time advantage over buses.
UAL Corp.'s United Airlines found it was paying out a small fortune in cab fares to passengers who missed its connecting flights between San Jose, Calif. , and San Francisco because of airport congestion.
The result: In February 1996, United canceled its flights between those cities in favor of buses.
Airlines are working hard to convince passengers that the two modes of transport are interchangeable. Travelers who take off aboard a bus can now get frequent-flier miles, computer reservations through travel agents and ticket-and-luggage check-through to their destinations -- though not all services are offered by every airline. The buses and vans themselves are usually owned and operated by traditional ground carriers like Greyhound Lines Inc., but often sport the airline's name and logo.
Passengers "prefer traveling by jet," says DeeDee La Chance, a travel agent in San Jose, Calif. "If it involves a bus, they hesitate, they give me a funny look. But if it's the right price, they don't care."
Bus-plane combo tickets do offer passengers a big price break. Some testy travelers, however, point out that the reason they fly in the first place is so they won't have to drive. "It's utterly ridiculous," grouses Alesia Ajlouny of San Jose. "It isn't practical at all to take a bus from San Jose to San Francisco in order to take another plane."
Ms. Ajlouny finds bus travel with her two small children trying, and says she's willing to pay more to fly out of San Jose. Both Southwest Airlines Co. and Reno Air Inc. still operate air service from there to San Francisco.
Budget travelers, however, applaud buses. John Waters, a recent seminary graduate, says the lowest fare he could find for the 50-minute flight to Louisville, Ky., from Chattanooga was $245. But it costs only $42 to take ValuJet's bus to Atlanta, and then hop aboard its flight to Louisville. Total traveling time: three hours. The price, an introductory fare, rises to $62 on Aug. 21.
Not all trips are seamless. Standing on the curb in Chattanooga, passengers waiting to board a ValuJet bus to the Atlanta airport are given a security check: They must show photo identification and answer the usual airport questions about luggage-tampering and strangers bearing packages.
"We have to ask the same questions," explains the bus driver. "This is like a flying plane."
Once they reach the airport, however, Federal Aviation Administration regulations require the passengers to identify their luggage again before it's loaded aboard the plane. And they have to pass through airport security again.
The buses feeding ValuJet's Atlanta hub are helping the low-fare carrier extend its reach following a three-month shutdown last year by federal officials for safety reasons. (Last week parent ValuJet Inc. agreed to merge with AirWays Corp. and adopt the name AirTran Airlines, as part of an effort to shake off the stigma of its 1996 crash in Florida's Everglades).
Three years ago, only United in Chicago regularly moved passengers by road. Now AMR Corp.'s American Airlines has introduced bus service between Rockford, Ill., and Chicago's O'Hare airport to replace a commuter flight that was dropped last summer. (The American bus line is expected to carry 35,000 people this year.) Similarly, Continental Express, Continental Airlines' commuter carrier, has replaced air service with vans between Newark, N.J., and Allentown, Pa., to help alleviate chronic missed connections.
The merging of bus and air routes, according to transportation-industry executives, signals a new attitude. There's a growing conviction that in some markets, cooperation rather than competition among transit systems can benefit carriers and passengers alike.
"When you get right down to it, there are only a hundred points in the country that justify point-to-point [airline] service," says Darryl Jenkins, an airline economist at George Washington University. "You have to find some way to grow into the other areas." Both bus companies and airlines pick up extra passengers by joining forces to serve more remote locations.
The growth of plane-bus links in the U.S. is beginning to mirror Europe, where the car-and-highway culture is less important and where linked, "intermodal" public transportation has long been the norm.
Airports in Paris and Frankfurt, for example, are each connected to as many as six different urban, inter-city, and long-distance bus and rail lines.
Closer to home, Greyhound Canada Transportation Corp., a Calgary-based carrier unrelated to Dallas-based Greyhound Lines, recently joined with Kelowna Flightcraft Air Charter to launch Canada's first budget airline: Greyhound Air. The system links bus routes with a network of inexpensive flights.
Railroads, too, are joining the networks. Amtrak now has 50 bus routes served by Greyhound and other independent bus operators. Some bus routes replace rail lines that were shut down; others serve as local bridges between hubs or as extensions into rural areas.
Selling passengers remains the biggest challenge for bus boosters.Continental Express has tried to make riding vans more palatable by offering integrated baggage checks and ticketing; along with United and American, it also offers frequent-flier miles.
On Continental Express's Allentown-Newark line, passengers go through airport security checks before boarding their vans, and because they are dropped right at the airport gate, they bypass airport security. Says Continental Express spokeswoman Michele King: "It's just like if you were getting on one of our aircraft, except for that leg it's a van."