On this episode of Ab Talk, C. NBC Airline Reporter Leslie Joseph joins us to discuss JetBlue's surprise bid for Spirit Airlines. Plus, we pull up a beach towel and take a good long look at Condor's new livery. Hello and welcome to episode 158 of Avtoc. I am Ian Petchenik here as always with...

Jason Ebeno, it's hello Ian, how's it going?

Hello Jason, it's going well, how are you sir? Oh good, it's good to hear that it's going well how are you sir? Oh good it's good to hear that it's going well for you. It's the week before spring break and so things are

wet and blustery but we're trending in the right direction and I'm about to send the kids off to camp Grammy and Grandpa for a week so I'm I'm feeling great. That's great good to hear. Yeah and I've got travel coming up at the end of the month and I'm starting to book travel throughout the summer looking into the fall. Though I am, I don't want to say sticker shock isn't the right word because I'm not shocked by it.

I still don't like it though.

No, no, I just went through the same thing where I had a trip to Japan booked. I booked it sometime last year and of course you still

can't travel to Japan so I had to do something with the $225. Yes, it was a very, very, very unreasonably cheap fare to Tokyo.

225 and I had to do something with that credit before it expired and I settled on Toronto and

actually had to pay an extra $65 to go to Toronto instead of Tokyo.

So yeah, fares are trending up these days. That's that's one word for it, but it's good to be getting back on the road.

We start the show with an update on the

investigation into the crash of China Eastern 5735, some major updates really.

Last week we discussed the NTSB's participation in the investigation and our conversation seven days ago was really limited to

they were waiting for their visas to process and to get on a plane and go.

As it turns out, the CVR, as we mentioned previously,

we believe it's been damaged.

And so the Chinese investigators

sent the cockpit voice recorder to the NTSB's Washington

lab for either repair or reconstruction and then a download of the data.

So the NTSB is not necessarily taking the lead on the CVR, but taking the lead on making sure that the data comes off the actual memory.

Yeah, so we had mentioned that the Chinese authorities had dispatched an Air China A332 dollars.

We had suspected that was to bring NTSB investigators back to China, but it turns out that aircraft was almost certainly bringing the two

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