I will travel to South Africa this Monday to visit my family. I will travel on ‘Continental Airlines’ : really a combination of Lufthanza and South African Airways codeshare flights. I read the report about the efforts to complete the merger of Continental Airlines and United Airlines in a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek with interest (picture from this week’s issue). In a way it’s the work that I do on some of my projects : phase some systems out and implement new ones in their place. To create the world’s largest airline, the two carriers have to merge about 1,400 separate systems, programs and protocols. In the end United Continental will provide service to 373 airports in 63 countries. Its frequent flyer program will have more members than France has citizens (62 million).