Following Alaska in the network rankings were Continental and Delta. Following JetBlue in the low-cost segment rankings were Southwest and WestJet.

On the other hand, the report found that “overall customer satisfaction with airlines in 2009 has declined for a third consecutive year … The decline is driven by decreased customer satisfaction with in-flight services, flight crew, and costs and fees, compared with 2008.”

Uh, wait a minute here. I do think I see a discrepancy. “Decreased customer satisfaction” with “costs?” Wot? Air fares this year have generally been at their lowest levels in memory, as airlines struggle to fill seats and gin up revenue any way they can. Airlines have not been able to cut capacity fast enough to keep pace with the plunge in demand.

Just goes to show you that these “surveys,” while generally useful in an anecdotal way, reflect the fact that some of the respondents don’t know what they’re talking about.

Some airline customers, it seems to me, persist in the absurd belief that they’re being shaken down every time they board a plane for that $180 round-trip flight between, say, Boston and Orlando. There’s a segment of the market, long conditioned by a variety of airline “consumer” writers, that basically believes they should fly somewhere close to free.

I pound on the airlines fairly regularly, but economics are very plain.

This is an industry in dire financial shape, and some deluded passengers are in for a very rude awakening once the surviving carriers manage to cut capacity even more — and raise fares to the point where they can make a profit.

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However, Continental says it plans to install DIRECTV seatback satellite TV systems on its newer 737s and on its 757-300s. Here’s the quiet Continental announcement.

So far, Continental has outfitted 10 of 23 737-900 ERs and expects to have all of those models completed by September. Its 108 737-800s will be done by August 2010, with other 737s and its 17 757-300s to follow (by January 2011).

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Such as those addressing concerns about personal data — that is, the iris scans, fingerprints and whatever other background information Clear gathered from its customers. That data — which strikes me as useless except for the basic list of names and contacts for people who were willing to pay $199 for a Clear card and thus might be willing to pay for something else — was gathered by Clear and one of its partners in technology development, Lockheed Martin.

I just read a story today saying that this “financial and personal information collected as part of the background check process” … “is held by Lockheed Martin Inc. and can be reclaimed by the Transportation Security Administration, according to Steve Brill, CLEAR’s founder.”

I don’t know if that’s what Brill actually said as regards the TSA because it’s that old journalistic devil paraphrase again.

But the TSA cannot “reclaim” this “information” (presumably the detailed background checks and the biometrics) that it never had. As Kip Hawley explained to me on several occasions, the TSA, as part of a process forced on it by Congress, only received from Clear enough basic personal information to check a prospective member’s name against the terrorist watch list. That’s no different than the “background” check any one of us gets when flying — our names are matched against the watch lists.

The TSA charged Clear a small fee for this service, which Clear added to its price. Last year, however, the TSA decided this was an unnecessary exercise that only propped up the false assumption that Clear and its two tiny competitors were offering a government-sanctioned “security” program. So Kip Hawley, then TSA director, simply bailed out on it and completely removed the TSA from an association with Clear and its registsred traveler competitors.

Whatever extensive “background” checks might have been performed were done by private enterprise, not by the government, and were performed through long-ago debunked notions of what a “registered traveler” (nee “trusted traveler”) program might be.

The registered traveler program crashed for a lot of reasons, but the basic reason Clear went out of business was that the TSA managed to get checkpoint waits under reasonable control in most airports, and spending $199 a year was no longer seen as much of a value, except by those who used the few airports (Orlando, San Jose, San Francisco, and some others) were line-waits were unpredictable.

The registered-traveler program’s underlying philosophy, which Brill himself was a leading proponent of, was that security in the post 9/11 era needed to be a system of risk assessment and risk management — and not just a vast $45 billion bureaucracy that spends $6 billion a year poking through people’s carry on bags looking for screw drivers and patting itself on the back publicly when it accidentally discovers a bag of cocaine (as if it were a police roadblock).

That assessment is still widely shared by security experts.

Clear’s biometric cards were extremely reliable forms of ID, also. “Government-issued photo ID cards” are not. Anyone with a good printer and a motive can counterfeit a New Jersey driver’s license.

Brill was right about that and other things. But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s out of business (and on to something else.)

Meanwhile, there is another issue of bad reporting that needs to be addressed here. Clear, at great expense, built lanes in 18 airports (in many cases multiple lanes in multiple terminals of an airport).

It was been posited that this is a boon for competitors. Clear’s tiny competitors, FLO and Vigilant, had facilities in a total of three airports. Congress insisted on “interoperability” when it constructed the four-headed, three-legged camel called the registered traveler program. This means that each private operator needed to make sure that its biometric cards were accepted by and compatible with its competitors. So the relative handful of FLO and Vigilant members all had access to the Clear lanes. Clear built all the facilities (and airports and the Clear parent company are now dismantling them.)

In the last year, as the TSA bailed out of the tiny role it once had in the program, Clear began marketing itself basically as a concierge service. FLO and Vigilant did the same.

Security, it turned out, never had anything to do with it.

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Actually, the dance now going on in the airline business is more like a form of musical chairs.

The big plan in the airline industry is to get capacity down below demand and then raise prices, except they have to be careful not to be seen actually colluding on this because 1. Someone could summon the anti-trust cops, assuming there still are any and 2. There’s always an airline that decides not to play along and instead lunge for market share while the others try to collectively boost prices.

That said, domestic airlines are now busily putting into effect the second across the board base fare hike in as many weeks, according to the ever-vigilant Rick Seaney at Farecompare.com

The fare fandango started yesterday when American raised prices between $10 and $20 roundtrip on “a significant number of U.S. routes,” Seaney said. United “began to significantly match” American — while at the same time sharply discounted fare sale — yes, sale — of $250 to $275 roundtrip to Honolulu from Dallas, Houston, Newark, Atlanta, Minneapolis and Salt Lake City. Hawaii air-travel capacity has been sharply reduced across the board in the last year or so, it should be noted. You want an amazing hotel deal? Hawaii has ‘em. Now United is offering amazing fares.

Anyway, back to the fare hikes, today Delta (including Northwest) “significantly matched” yesterday’s fare increases at American and United, and Continental is also adding similar fare increases on some routes, and Seaney expects Continental to catch up to the others today.

“US Airways is the only remaining legacy airline that has yet to significantly match,” Seaney said. “I would expect them to do so by the end of the day.”

All year, airlines have been trying to juice up plummeting demand with spot fare-sales, but those days are waning. “The pace of airfare sales has dried up recently,” Seaney said.

Except that crafty AirTran has gone and launched a whole bunch of fare sales offering “new market lows on hundreds of city pairs,” said Seaney.

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