With the many airline deaths and impending deaths in the news, it was clear Flight Blog needed a new category of posts to address these casualties of the air business. Thus, you get the Airline Death Pool category on Flight Blog. Welcome, aloha, death pool — I know there’s not much that’s swimming in you […]
Some rich guy bought a super-mega-jumbo airbus plane to use as his personal jet, for him and his entourage. The article says it would take a year to make the jet suitable for private use … wonder what that entails?
The money shot is the third-to-last graf: “Environmental groups were annoyed by the news.”
Joss Garman, from […]
From Derek Willis’ excellent journalism blog,
Ronnie Greene of the Miami Herald used federal data and records obtained through FOIA for a three-part series on cargo plane crashes, finding that “from Texas to Alaska to Colorado and beyond, cargo pilots are dying in large numbers.
Read the blog post here, and read the Miami Herald’s report 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.
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.
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.
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.
From TechCrunch:
Purchasing flights purely based on price has been around for a while, but the consumer has never had the power to quickly and at a glance evaluate the cheapest days to fly nor the cheapest destinations to fly to. Flyspy reverse engineers some of the mystique associated with the airline industry and makes it extremely transparent.
The way it works is that I give it a departure city and a destination city and optionally a departure date and length of stay. The search result, which returns very quickly, will present me with a graph of flight prices over the next 30 days so that I can quickly look at which days are the cheapest to fly. To book a flight I just click on the point in the graph. Simple.
Looks awesome. Check out the alpha site here (only works for Minneapolis-bound flights to select destinations), and read TechCrunch’s breakdown of FlySpy here.
» ATA Airlines ditches SFO for Oakland
They also increase flights to LAX, plan a new route from Ontario and Hawaii.
» JetBlue launches more flights to heartland
JetBlue will also start non-stops to Richmond, Virginia, at the end of March.