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

This is a tip for the business and regular travellers out there who don’t want to buy toothpaste every time you fly somewhere: Put the stuff in your pockets. Yes, this won’t work if you don’t wear pants, if you have a metal container, and this won’t work if you get searched in the gate (which they hardly ever do anyway), but this will work most of the time.

Also, if you’re a smoker, go on and put your lighter in your pocket. Unless it’s a zippo it doesn’t have enough metal in it to trigger the metal detectors.

For those of you who don’t know, Flight Club helps you meet other people — business travellers, college travellers, or just ordinary travellers — on airplanes and on airports. It’s a quick way to make travel less boring, it’s free, and our community is growing faster than ever. You can sign up here, or find out more information about us here.

Via the excellent journalism blog, The Scoop (blog post link):

Paula Lavigne of the Dallas Morning News used federal data to show that “despite previous estimates from animal rights groups that thousands of animals were killed, injured or lost on commercial airlines each year, only 56 incidents were reported nationwide in the past year, the first that official statistics were kept.” Most of the incidents involved dogs, with cats, birds and a rat making up the rest. A 2003 article by the Humane Society estimated that up to 5,000 pets a year were lost, injured or killed during air travel.

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Read the Dallas Morning News’ article: Airline statistics show less risk to animals than groups estimated

The digital age continues: Wired passports started rolling out across the U.S. this month. This means passport data will be stored electronically, which the State Department says will speed up customs and bolster security.

Citizens who get new passports can expect to pay a lot more. New ones issued under this program will cost $97, which includes a $12 security surcharge added last year. Not all new passports will contain the technology until it’s fully rolled out — a process expected to take a year. Existing passports without the electronic chips will remain valid until their normal expiration date.

Read the full article at wired.com

Business traveler Brad DeLong sleuths out some sketchy business practices on JetBlue’s Boston to West Coast flights: The planes don’t have enough gas to make it when the headwinds are strong:

Thus a six hour flight that would be turned into a six and a half hour flight by strong headwinds is instead turned into an eight hour flight by an involuntary refueling stop in Salt Lake City.

Read the entire blog post here.

Avoid Delays takes flight arrival and departure information and turns it into something usable. It highlights information like the most-delayed flights, the airports with the longest delays, delays by date, month, just a heck of a lot of information.

They also have a place for you to file a complaint about your air travel experience, and they have some pretty generic advice about steps you can take to avoid delays.

Check out this wealth of information at http://www.avoiddelays.com/

This is cool: The Airline and Airport Duty Free Price Guide. Comparison shopping for duty-free goods.

Wired Magazine takes a look at some new ideas for getting people on to planes. Take a look at the online presentation on boarding airplanes they put together here.

What do uncertain business times do? Stimulate new ideas. And this is definitely a new idea — Ryanair is giving away tickets on a regular basis.

Michael O’Leary, Chief Executive of Ireland’s Ryanair (Research), Europe’s most profitable airline, wants to make air travel free. Not free as in free from regulation, but free as in zero cost. By the end of the decade, he promises, “more than half of our passengers will fly free.”

The remarkable thing is, few analysts think his prediction is far-fetched: Ryanair already offers free fares to a quarter of its customers.

Read the article: A radical fix for airlines: Make flying free

According to this year’s Airline Quality Rating study, that is.

Among the study’s conclusions:

• Southwest Airlines had the lowest rate of complaints, 0.18 per 100,000 passengers, while US Airways had the highest, 1.86.

• ATA had the highest rate of denied boardings, 2.75 per 10,000 passengers; JetBlue had the lowest at 0.

• AirTran had the best baggage handling rate, mishandling 3.43 bags per 1,000 passengers; and Atlantic Southeast had the worst, (mishandling 17.41 bags per 1,000 passengers.

Read the article summarizing the report: Report: Airline delays, complaints on the upswing.

Read the report itself