Whether talking about the Golden Triangle of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco or slightly less glamorous coast-to-coast routes like Seattle-Boston or Washington-Long Beach, transcontinental flying remains the place where the airlines try to make their bones.

With all due respect to hardworking business travelers in fly-over parts of the country, it`s all about the transcons.

It`s about the power. (Or so they say.) The privilege. (Or so they claim.) The perks. (At least what`s left of them.) The prestige. (Whatever that means in the airline business.) And, for the last couple of years, the utter madness of it all.

Whether driven by market share or macho silliness, airlines can`t resist the siren`s song of the transcons. Which explains why they are the bloodiest financial killing fields in the domestic marketplace. Fares have plummeted: Walk-up flights that once commanded $1,200 one-way sell for less than $200 now. Almost no one is making money.

All the carriers flying transcons —and every airline except Northwest and Spirit have tried them in the past year — have been bruised and battered. Some have pulled out. Others are maniacally fiddling with pricing, products, fleets and capacity. Business travelers don`t know from one day to the next who flies what routes at what prices.

Last year at this time, for example, the astonishing fare war slashed some advance-purchase transcon prices to $79 one-way. Also astonishing was the traveling public`s response: Even at 80 bucks a pop, transcontinental seats were going empty.

Now it`s all about the frenzy. Who`s coming, who`s going and who seems to be coming and going at the same time.

Here are a few highlights from the past month:

•America West said it would all but abandon its 18-month quest to crack the transcon market. It is dropping non-stops from San Francisco to Boston and New York/Kennedy and scuttling its Washington/Dulles-LAX non-stops. For the moment, at least, it will continue the Kennedy-LAX and Boston-LAX routes.

•Delta Air Lines announced it is pulling its traditional two-class service off four JFK transcon routes: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and San Diego. Three routes — Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle — will get all-coach Delta Song service beginning May 1. The Kennedy-San Diego route, launched only last year, is being dropped altogether.

•United Airlines is nearing completion of its risky effort to slash capacity by 35% on its JFK-SFO and JFK-LAX routes. The 168-passenger Boeing 767s are replaced with 110-seat Boeing 757s configured with United`s unique p.s. service.

•Jet Blue Airways will launch two transcon routes on May 3: Boston-San Jose and Dulles-San Diego. Existing transcon routes from Dulles and Boston will get more flights, too. JetBlue also will add still more service between its Kennedy hub and five California cities this spring.

That`s just a few days worth of transcon news. Want some other recent tidbits?

•American Airlines surrendered to JetBlue by dropping its JFK-Long Beach service in October

•ATA Airlines dumped its short-lived San Francisco-Newark flights.

•Newark-based Continental \ added a $499 one-way, advance-purchase first-class fare on its transcons to Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego.

•Frontier abandons its Los Angeles-Philadelphia route next month

That`s an immense amount of information to process, and I haven`t even mentioned Alaska Airlines` coast-to-coast growth from its Seattle hub, United`s battle with JetBlue at Dulles and even smaller markets such as Sacramento getting the non-stop transcon treatment.

Fares? No one seems to know transcon costs anymore. If you approached JetBlue`s ticket counter at JFK`s Terminal 6 on Friday, you would have paid $164 for a non-stop to Long Beach. You would have shelled out $209 one-way from Philadelphia to Los Angeles on US Airways; $357 one-way from Boston to San Francisco on American; $446 one-way in coach on Alaska Airlines for a Seattle-Newark flight, with $99 getting you a first-class upgrade.

For the privilege of getting 34 inches of seat pitch in coach on United`s newly configured p.s. flights between JFK and LAX, you`d pay $507. That`s ludicrous, of course, especially when just $50 more buys you a seat in the new p.s. business class, where the reclining chairs have 54 inches of legroom and the in-flight service includes meals, nice wines and personal DVD players.

I bring up p.s because United deserves some credit for trying something new on the transcon. While American and Delta tie themselves in knots trying to compete with JetBlue, United has gone upscale.

Make no mistake about it: p.s. is as much about slashing United`s unprofitable transcon capacity as it is about delivering an upmarket service. But at least United legitimately can claim some product differentiation. First-class p.s. cabins have been outfitted with the airline`s lie-flat beds. The business-class cabin on the p.s. transcons resembles the airline`s international business-class product. Even coach got an upgrade to the United Economy Plus-seat configuration. There are at-seat power outlets everywhere and lots of other little perks.

The idea, one United insider tells me, is to give the premium-class cabins a more exclusive atmosphere. ``We`re going for a private-jet ambiance,`` the insider said. ``Or at least as close to that intimacy as is reasonably possible.``

I flew p.s. on a round trip late last month between Kennedy and Los Angeles and found the business-class service a gigantic improvement over anything that United offers in first class on its other domestic flights. It`s also better than anything American, Alaska, Delta or Continental offers up front domestically.

The p.s. product is hardly perfect, of course. Flight attendants handing out amenities—eyemasks, earplugs, socks and some odd dental-care product—must dole the stuff out one by one from a cart, which makes for an unwieldy, uncomfortable in-flight dance. The cabin crew also has to distribute converter kits for the AC power ports because some design genius didn`t realize that many laptops use polarized plugs. I can`t figure out why a mid-morning flight from JFK needs both a breakfast and a lunch presentation, yet a red-eye flight back features a deli platter at bedtime—not a single person in the 26-seat cabin wanted one—but no breakfast on arrival. Flight attendants don`t even offer coffee in the morning. You have to make your way to the galley if you want a cup of joe before disembarking into the frigid New York morning.

From what I saw of the p.s. Economy Plus cabin, I`ll stick with JetBlue when I fly coach. Why? Because JetBlue`s flights are substantially cheaper, its chairs are leather, most seats offer the same 34 inches of legroom as United, and JetBlue has the advantage of the live, at-your-seat television programming.

Nit-picking United`s in-flight service isn`t necessarily relevant because I`m not sure that p.s. has a fighting shot no matter how good it could be. The unique three-class transcon configuration just adds another level of complexity to United`s already-inexplicable network. On United these days, you never know if you`re booking Ted, or a traditional two-class first/coach flight, or a two-class flight with Economy Plus and coach, or a regional jet with one class or one of United Express` new two-class regionals. P.S. is a great idea, but it gets lost in the operational hash that is United Airlines.

With all the chaos on the transcons just now, it`s hard to see how United can get any traction with p.s. It`s nearly impossible to focus on a premium-priced in-flight service on two routes when most of us can`t even tell the airlines flying the transcon without a scorecard.

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/columnist/brancatelli/2005-02-04-brancatelli_x.htm