Flight Blog
News and Tips about Air Travel, Business / Industry, Flying, Airplanes, and other fun

What’s going on? (link to CNN article)

If you want all the plane crash information you can handle, head on over to Plane Crash Info and they will hook you up real nice.

Hey, in case you didn’t know, Flight Club is an online community for air travelers. Flight Club (the parent of this blog) has online tools that help members meet other members on airplanes and in airports — basically, we’re fun people that make travel more exciting. Business travelers, recreational travelers, if you fly for fun or for work, if you fly just once a year, Flight Club has a spot for you.

Membership is booming, so if you haven’t thought about joining before, then now is a good time. Registration takes about a minute and you can do it at this page. It’s free, it’s a fun site, uh huh oh yeah.

Virgin Atlantic Airways , yes, they have a sense of humor. It’s good to see large corporations with a sense of humor, so I can give them a pass on their latest promo: Who’s the top Jetrosexual. You read that right.

They just coined the worst coined phrase.

But, like we know, they have a sense of humor. They came up with the eleven commandments of Jetrosexuals. Here they are (written in regular english, not that “thou shalt” speech they have on their site):

1. You will have your passport ready to go at moment’s notice.
2. You will have a favorite airport and a good explanation about why it’s your favorite.
3. You will not talk your seatmate’s ear off.
4. You will never hold up the security line.
5. You will be able to order beer in at least six different languages.
6. You will spend no more than five minutes in the airplane bathroom.
7. You can pack a week’s worth of clothes in one carry-on bag.
8. You don’t own an inflatable neck-pillow.
9. You have at least one passport stamp from a country that now goes by a different name.
10. You travel Economy sometimes, just to stay humble.
11. You fly to move business and culture forward.

I was thinking of putting together an online poll that allows you to rate how many of these you match up with. Stay tuned.

Travel journalist and blog entrepreneur George Hobica bumps his cheap flight report up a notch. A new domain, improved interface, and easier way to find discount air fares going where you want to go. This guy and the people helping him scour the web each day looking for fares the airlines don’t advertise. It’s great stuff.

On the new site he adds features like “Today’s Top 30 fares” — which is cool, but is it worth the effort? Most people looking for fares will search by destination, and then look for deals there.

Not to knock the man or anything … part of the reason I like what he does so much is his attitude behind it. Check out the last paragraph of his recent blog post about a newsletter he’s writing for Frommers. He says, “We often refer you to links and airlines that make absolutely zero for us (because we don’t have a financial relationship with that airline) simply because that’s the best value on a given route. We’d much rather gain your trust than [your money].” That’s awesome — and a definite contrast to someone like Tom Parsons.

A deep dark cloud rained bad news on the airline industry this week. Note: I link to CNN stories here because they don’t go into archive and don’t get deleted after two weeks. To recap:

• More than a hundred thousand passengers get stranded at Heathrow after a British Airways strike (article)
• The New York Times reports that airport delays are at the worst since 2000 (article)
• Airplane fuel is now an issue, prompting the majors to raise fares and raising the possibility of big problems on the tarmac (article, article)
• Delta and Independence Air share more bad news about potential bankruptcy (article, article)
• CNN investigates U.S. airport security for three months and finds lots of problems, then decides to pile on and release the news this week (swell move, guys) (article)

Hope this week is better, people.

Sunday Update: Plane crashes in Greece, killing all 128 on board (article). Not a good start for the week.

Virgin Galactic launches space tourism: Commercial flights into outer space start in 2008. It will cost $200,000 for the trip, which includes five minutes of weightlessness (that’s $40,000 per minute). Lots of people are interested in going up (no joke). Interesting bits in the article on the topic:

• Only 450 humans have been in outer space
• 4000 pilots applied for the 75 jobs available to steer the space craft. Oh man would that not be the sweetest job on the planet? “By day, I pilot space craft. By night … “

The future will be here before we know it. Yeah scratch that, it already is. Lufthansa is trying out biometrics — fingerprint scanning — for check-in on their flights. Read about it here. They say it makes the process faster … but at the airlines where you swipe your credit card to get started (like United’s Chicago terminal), isn’t just about the same?

Yeah, but fingerprinting is wayyyy cooler.