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

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.

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 … “

Hey, been away for a while … here’s a roundup of some recent off-kilter airline news, enjoy.

• British teen launches cheap-flight airline from bedroom (thanks, Jon)
• Drunken airline pilots sentenced to prison (thanks, Christopher)
• 10 unforgettable in-flight fights
• USA Today analyzes wait times at major U.S. airports

Don’t sit in seat 29E. What kind of plane? Beats me. But it’s run by Continental, and one man put together an exquisite paper-napkin rant and actual filed complaint on the topic.

I am picturing a board room full of executives giving props to the young promising engineer that figured out how to squeeze an additional row of seats onto this plane by putting them next to the lav. I would like to flush his head in the toilet that I am close enough to touch from my seat.

Airlines should release more of these … and let the people know what happened in the end.

Update: Snopes.com investigates the lavatory complaint!

I love cake. So when a news article about airports and cake crosses my eyes I take notice. A protester successfully launched a carrot cake at some muckety-muck at Heathrow — where the cake hit they don’t share (why not?), but it did hit. Read the article here.

On a completely unrelated note, here’s an awesome story about a slovenia model they were going to do a “dumb bimbo” TV show about … until it turned out she was smarter than everyone else.

I promise more useful content coming soon — between training for work, a vaction in NYC, and a computer that is having problems it is hard to post.

-Joe

Okay, so the FAA just made it clear: they don’t want billboards in space. Like, low-level space, billboards hovering in the earth’s atmosphere, where millions of people will see it every 24 hours or so. Sure that makes sense, as cynical as it is.

But, once they have the power to enforce this notion, how are they going to do it? With missiles? Monkeys?

I also believe there would be a huge “acceptance curve” with any company that dared deploy billboards into the stratosphere. What human being would actually buy a product advertised so obnoxiously? (Let’s hope we never hear the answer to that question)

» Read the article

A German guy, Dirk Paessler, took this photo of the waterplane airport of the tiny town of Denali along Denali Highway, in central Alaska. This is his site (not photo related at all).

The FDA just “cracked down” on major airline food supplier Gate Gourmet’s Honolulu operations (read the article). In an inspection this year they found:

1. Live cockroaches
2. Dirty utensils
3. An oozing, pink slime (was it alive? they don’t say)
4. Trash cans near food

That reminded me of a tip one of my flight attendant friends gave me: don’t go into airplane bathrooms in bare feet. Or in only socks. Wear shoes. The floors of airplane bathrooms never get cleaned, and they’re home to more forms of life than your local zoo.

U.S. Airways’ accidental deal this morning was a windfall for those interested in visiting small- to medium-sized town America … with fees and all, customers bought roundtrip tickets (some even first class) for $40.