Frontier Airlines CEO Barry Biffle said Monday that the air traffic controller shortage could cause issues during the summer travel season if staffing issues aren’t addressed.

Biffle appeared on FOX Business Network’s “The Claman Countdown” and told guest host Ashley Webster that while technology can help address the issue while also promoting greater efficiencies in air travel over the longer term, the air traffic controller shortage contributes to delays and cancelations.

“There’s opportunities to improve the technology that is kind of the backbone of air traffic control,” Biffle said. “If you look to Europe, for example, there are some opportunities that we could adopt here that would be much more efficient — you’d burn a lot less fuel, get there faster and so forth. That is a big opportunity.

“At the same time, it doesn’t negate the issue that I think we’re 3,000 controllers short right now. And so that just causes, when you have a weather event, it just causes there to be more delays,” he explained. “And ultimately, like we’ve seen the last few days, those delays then turn into cancelations because crews time out and so forth. Would really like to see the staffing get fixed. The technology is probably a longer solution.”

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Biffle was also asked about the pilot shortage and said that it “appears to have stalled” and added, “In fact, now you’re seeing the complaints of folks that were becoming an airline pilot very quickly, and now they’re getting back up and having to go down the general aviation path for a while.”

He went on to describe it as a “normalization of pilot hiring” after the shortage had been “building up for decades” before the industry was disrupted by the COVID pandemic and there was a wave of early retirements among airline pilots.

“It would appear now we have largely gotten past that, and I think the best thing you can point to is the regional airlines are now getting staff back, which tells you all you need to know that the shortage is not there, and I think that’s great for consumers too,” Biffle said.

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Biffle also discussed Frontier’s move last week to drop its $99 fee for changing or canceling a flight, which he said will help the budget carrier offer the most competitive total price for consumers.

“We’ve been talking to our customers for a while, and we have always been trusted to have the lowest fare, but we weren’t always the lowest in total price when you looked at bags and seats and other options,” he said. 

“So we took the bold step to change our pricing model, and we’ve come up with four options to choose from: basic, economy, premium and our business options,” Biffle explained. “We believe that you’re going to find the lowest total price, not just the lowest fare, so customers are really going to like this, and we’re making some other changes too to not just win you with total price, but to win you with great service as well.”

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“We’re only a couple of days in, but customers are loving it. That’s why we called it ‘The New Frontier,’ and I think we had gone too far in what we charged for bags and seats, and I think this kind of opens us up to a new amount of clientele. But we’re seeing good results. It’s exceeding expectations for sure,” he added.

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Microsoft on Monday debuted a new category of personal computers with AI features as it rushes to build the emerging technology into products across its business and compete with Alphabet and Apple.

At an event on its campus in Redmond, Washington, Chief Executive Satya Nadella introduced what Microsoft calls “Copilot+” PCs, saying that it and a range of manufacturers would sell them, including Acer and Asustek Computer.

Microsoft launched the laptops as its shares trade near record highs following a Wall Street rally driven by expectations that AI will fuel strong profit growth for the company and its Big Tech rivals.

Able to handle more artificial-intelligence tasks without calling on cloud data centers, the new computers will start at $1,000 and begin shipping on June 18.

Microsoft showed a feature called “Recall,” which will help users find files and other data that they have seen on their PC, even if it was a tab opened in a Web browser. The company also demonstrated its Copilot voice assistant acting as a real-time virtual coach to a user playing the “Minecraft” video game.

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Yusuf Mehdi, who heads up consumer marketing for Microsoft, said the company expects that 50 million AI PCs will be purchased over the next year. At the press event, he said faster AI assistants that run directly on a PC will be “the most compelling reason to upgrade your PC in a long time.”

Global PC shipments dipped about 15% to 242 million last year, according to research firm Gartner, which suggests Microsoft expects the new category of computers to account for around one-fifth of all PCs sold.

“People just need to be convinced that the device experience alone justifies this entirely new category of Copilot+ machines,” said analyst Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies.

Microsoft’s new “Copilot+” computer marketing category that highlights AI features is reminiscent of the “Ultrabook” category of thin-form Windows laptops that Intel promoted with PC manufacturers in 2011 to compete against Apple’s MacBook Air.

Microsoft executives also said that GPT-4o, the latest technology from ChatGPT maker OpenAI, will “soon” be available as part of Microsoft Copilot.

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Microsoft also introduced a new generation of its own Surface Pro tablet and Surface Laptop that feature Qualcomm chips based on Arm Holdings’ architecture. The company also introduced a technology called Prism that will help software written for Intel and AMD chips run on chips made with Arm technology.

Microsoft showed its new devices in action against an Apple device, showing photo editing software from Adobe running faster on the Microsoft device. Apple earlier this month showed a new AI-focused chip that analysts expect to be used in future laptops.

After Intel’s processors dominated the PC market for decades, Qualcomm and other makers of lower-power Arm components have tried to compete in the Windows-PC market.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips include a so-called neural processing unit that is designed to accelerate AI-focused applications, such as Microsoft’s Copilot software.

Microsoft held the product event a day before the start of its annual developer conference.

Microsoft aims to extend its early advantage in the race to produce AI tools that consumers are willing to pay for. Its partnership with OpenAI allowed it to jump ahead of Alphabet as other Big Tech companies race to dominate the emerging field.

Last week, OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google showcased dueling AI technologies that can respond via voice in real time and be interrupted, both hallmarks of realistic voice conversations that AI voice assistants have found challenging. Google also announced it was rolling out several generative AI features to its lucrative search engine.

The PC industry has been under increasing pressure from Apple since the company launched its custom chips based on designs from Arm and ditched Intel’s processors. The Apple-designed processors have given Mac computers superior battery life and speedier performance than rivals’ chips that use more energy.

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Microsoft tapped Qualcomm to lead the effort to move the Windows operating system to Arm’s chip designs in 2016. Qualcomm has exclusivity on Microsoft Windows devices that expires this year. Other chip designers such as Nvidia have efforts under way to make their own Arm-based PC chips, Reuters has previously reported.

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Joe Biden is trying to buy the election by pumping green money that no one wants into the swing states. That’s the subject of tonight’s riff. 

Three Biden bills for a total of $15.4 billion in government spending, mostly for green energy, is being injected into Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere. The biggest chunk comes from the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which really should simply be called the Inflation Act, but a recently conducted nationwide Kudlow/TIPP poll of over 1,400 Americans shows that 54% oppose the EPA mandate for electric vehicles by 2032 that would effectively ban gasoline-powered cars. 

That’s 54% and, then, when consumers are asked about having a choice to drive gasoline-powered cars if they want to, the survey respondents overwhelmingly favored “consumer choice” by 83%. Interestingly, from the poll, 77% of Democrats, 89% of Republicans, and 83% of independents say they wanted to be able to decide for themselves. 

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Then, the Kudlow/TIPP poll asked whether Biden’s EV push is blind to a lack of consumer demand. A clear majority — 60% — said Biden’s EV push ignores consumer demand and then, on the subject of doling out government money to buy the election, 66% agreed that climate was often used as an excuse to favor certain industries or lobbies or interest groups. 

The poll also asks: “How concerned are you about the prospect of increased prices due to climate mandates affecting the manufacturing of electric vehicles, batteries, and chargers, and their potential contribution to inflation?” 

The answer to that one is a 74% majority worries that climate mandates will cause higher inflation, which brings me back to the point of Joe Biden doling out money to buy the election. 

He’s borrowing a page from Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, whose political strategy was spend and spend, tax and tax, elect and elect, but that was a long time ago and, by the way, it helped ruin the economy. 

Today, with Joe Biden, he’s trying to spend an amazing total of $1.6 trillion of moneys that were obligated by Congress but not yet spent. That’s a hell of a task in the six months remaining before the election, but the Bidens will try it anyway, including massive student loan cancellations, which, in total, would exceed $500 billion and of course have been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court. 

Joe Biden is the biggest spender of all time, and he’s generated the worst inflation in over 40 years, which in turn has made it unaffordable for working folks to live in the Biden economy. Real income after taxes — in other words, “take home pay” — has the worst performance under Joe Biden since World War II. 

So, Biden’s EV push is driving a square peg into a round hole. People are worried about the cost of living for energy, food, housing, and consumer goods. For Biden, a “spend and spend” strategy will spell “lose and lose” in November. 

This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow’s opening commentary on the May 20, 2024, edition of “Kudlow.”  

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