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

If the answer to the above three questions is “yes, yes,” and “yes,” here’s a tip for you. When leaving your car in the parking lot, make sure your headlights are all the way off. According to the long-term parking-lot attendant who jump-started my car yesterday, almost all of the people who kill their battery had early-morning flights (in the Charlotte airport, that works out to 20 jumpstarts a day).

There are several ways you could remind yourself to turn off the lights: tie some string around your finger, tie a bow around your steering wheel, tape a post-it to your windshield.

I have never seen a flight-fare search program do this before: List the cheapest fares for one route for an entire month. This one does that, and it does more. Here’s a screenshot of the best deals when flying from Chicago to Denver in December:

You have to register before you can use it, and it’s free to use, and it’s well worth it. Check it out at http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/

Check out TravelPost’s list of wifi access locations and cost — it covers 218 U.S. airports. Useful information … if you’re looking for internet, that is. It was updated two days ago, which means this is something they keep an eye on. It looks like he information is pulled from TravelPost editors and readers…

Check out the list here, and view the full list here.

I’m not making fun of airline safety or anything, but I’m intensely curious why the U.S. Transportation Security Administration felt the need to single out “Toy Transformer Robots” on their list of what you can and can’t bring in your checked luggage and in your carry-on.

Also, and this is something I didn’t know: It’s okay to bring saline or eyedrops with you, as long as the container is four ounces or less. Mascara and toothpaste are still no-nos, that is, unless you feel like putting them in your pocket.

» View the TSA’s full list of banned stuff here.

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.

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

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/

The folks at Airport Public Transit Directory put together a list of public transit options for major and medium cities across the U.S. Take a look at the list here.

They also have a list of airports that don’t have public transit options:

• Bismarck
• Charleston, WV
• Colorado Springs
• Dayton
• Fargo
• Jacksonville
• Lexington
• Rapid City
• Toledo

They don’t have any information for the Greensboro, North Carolina, or Spokane Washington airports yet. I’m sure there are other cities missing too. Still, three cheers for people putting together useful information on the web.

A quick look through Fuck Continental Airlines gives the impression that maybe this site needed a marketing budget. There aren’t any stories on it, and heck, you figure it could at least link to the infamous Seat 29E complaint. Was the domain registered in a moment of anger? Did the anger then subside?

It’s too bad, because niche sites like FCA have massive usefulness potential. Think if there were similar sites created for every airline. One could then measure airlines by how many complaints-per-day they were averaging on their particular Fuck site. Oh well